What does receiving a Banting Fellowship mean to you?

The Banting Fellowship represents an endorsement of my research, and its potential to improve the lives of people with respiratory disease. I have dedicated the past 7 years of my life to researching lung diseases both in adults and children, trying to push boundaries and show how MRI can help better understand chronic diseases. My field is small but growing, and this work shows the tremendous potential for imaging to improve lung disease management and treatment monitoring. It also validates the time and energy of the hundreds of patients I have had the privilege of working with over the years, who performed hours of lung testing and imaging in the hopes that it could help others with diseases such as asthma, long-COVID, and cystic fibrosis.

On a personal level, this fellowship supports my return to Canada after researching abroad for the past two years. Having been away, I am more acutely appreciative of Canada’s research environment, at a time when medical research is being defunded and attacked elsewhere.

Tell us about your Banting research.

My work focuses on using imaging, specifically magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography, to better understand chronic lung diseases. I use combinations of different imaging techniques to look at both lung structure (like the airways and blood vessels) and function (like ventilation and gas-exchange). My work seeks to better understand the fundamental connections between structure and function that drive disease, by using imaging to investigate it at its source, in living people. Finally, I am searching for connections between these imaging measurements and patient-reported outcomes, like symptoms and quality of life, to better ground the science I do in terms of what helps people feel healthy.

About postdoc life

What inspired you to pursue a postdoc at McMaster?

I came to McMaster for the opportunity to work with the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health, a world-leading research environment for chronic lung disease, and asthma specifically. Dr. Sarah Svenningsen has led pioneering research over the last decade into the role of eosinophilia in severe asthma using imaging, and I am excited to join her team and expand what we can achieve with imaging.

What aspect of your postdoc are you most excited about?

I am excited to be able to work in an environment where I have opportunities to develop new technological advances and have them translated to patient-facing research. With the multimodal data collected in the Svenningsen lab, there are real opportunities to improve how we analyze images and extract more relevant data using artificial intelligence techniques. And while technical development is engaging, it’s important to not develop these techniques in a vacuum and be able to ground them to patient outcomes.

When you’re not busy being a postdoctoral researcher, how do you like to spend your free time?

Outside of the lab I spend my time cooking, baking, and experimenting with new recipes.

Beyond your Banting postdoc

After your postdoc, what do you see as the next step in your life journey?

I hope that by the end of my postdoc I can set out as an independent researcher at a Canadian research institution. My research path has always included MRI, but I have also focused on gas-exchange, pediatric research, and now asthma. I hope that in future I can combine my experience from each of these focuses to establish a niche in imaging pediatric asthma and helping understand a disease that is pervasive but poorly understood in children.