Emily Carter

Graduate Student, Dalhousie University

Emily Carter (she/her) is currently a second year Microbiology and Immunology MSc student, transferring to a PhD, in Dr. Jeanette Boudreau’s laboratory at Dalhousie University. She is investigating the anti-cancer capabilities of natural killer (NK) cells against leukemia, to inform precision NK cell-based immunotherapy. Emily is currently funded by a Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship, Scotia Scholars Masters scholarship, and I a Beatrice Hunter Cancer Research Foundation Cancer Research Training Program award recipient, previously supported by the Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation’s Crease endowment. Emily completed her BSc in Microbiology and Immunology at Dalhousie in 2021, with first- class honours completed with Dr. Boudreau. She worked as a summer student in the Boudreau lab in 2019, 2020, and 2021, and received a BioCanRx Summer Studentship in 2020 to support this work. Outside of the lab, Emily enjoys volunteering and spending time outdoors.

Lauren Daniel

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Sherbrooke

I am currently a post-doc fellow in Dre Lee-Hwa Tai’s lab, in Sherbrooke, QC. During my PhD in France, I studied innate CD8 T-cells phenotype and function ex vivo in long-term kidney transplant patients treated with cyclosporin A and in vitro with cyclosporin A treatment, in order to identify new T-cell subtypes implicated in tolerance for graft and in tolerance for cancer cells. Now, I am working with oncolytic virus to induce an immune reaction against triple-negative breast cancer and bladder cancer in vitro and in vivo in mice. I am interested in exploring the role of unconventional T-cells in these contexts as well as conventional innate and adaptive immune cells.

Charu Sankaran

Graduate Student, BC Cancer Research Institute

Charu Sankaran is a Graduate Student in Dr. Kevin Hay's lab at the Terry Fox Labs (BC Cancer Research Institute). Since joining the lab as a Co-op in 2019, Charu has been passionate about improving CAR-T cell therapies. Her work focuses on understanding how mechanisms of T cell dysfunctional are involved in CAR-T cell persistence, to identify targetable pathways.

Alex Shepherd

PhD candidate, National Research Council of Canada

Alex Shepherd is 2nd year PhD candidate in Microbiology and Immunology working in Dr. Scott McCombs lab with the Human Health Therapeutics group at the National Research Council of Canada. His current research centres around improving existing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies, as well exploring CAR-T biology and internal cell signaling. In addition to his work in the lab, Alex is a former academic scholar with the BioCanRx learning institute and previously has work extensively with Candlelighters, which is now a part of CHEO. When he has time he enjoys singing in a choir, musical theatre and tabletop roleplaying games such as dungeons and dragons.

Hyojin Song

Postdoctoral Associate, University of Calgary

Hyojin is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Calgary (Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) under the supervision of Dr. Sorana Morrissy. Through her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology and first career experience at a hospital, she has become interested in investigating cancer patient-derived multi-omics datasets to explore expression patterns and mutational profiles that can stratify patients and further be applied to suggest better treatment strategies toward precision medicine. Currently, she is working on discovering optimal candidates for immunotherapeutic targets in fusion-driven sarcomas by analyzing diverse single-cell and bulk RNA sequencing datasets.

Zaid Taha

PhD Student, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute

Zaid completed his BScH at Queen’s University in Life Sciences (Drug Development and Human Toxicology). He next completed his MSc in Cancer Biology in the lab of Dr. Leda Raptis. Zaid is currently pursuing his PhD in the lab of Dr. Jean-Simon Diallo, at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. The primary focus of Zaid’s PhD work is combining targeted therapies with oncolytic viruses to create strong anti-cancer therapeutic combinations while prioritizing safety and tolerability. When Zaid is not doing cool science in the lab, he volunteers with Let’s Talk Science and the Canadian Cancer Society, because knowledge dissemination is key to our science community! Outside of the lab and volunteering, Zaid enjoys cooking, sports, and p-values less than 0.05.