A rare honour

By Alisa Kim

In any research lab, you can find them maintaining equipment, setting up experiments and recording results. Here for the summer or a semester, undergraduate students are a mainstay at Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI). To acknowledge the hard work done by these investigators-in-training, SRI’s physical sciences researchers have established the Sunnybrook Prize, an award saluting outstanding undergraduate research.

“Undergraduates do important work, but sometimes it doesn’t link to a paper. Often they are not recognized, and maybe some get discouraged from going into research. So, we wanted to make a prize that would recognize their contribution,” says Dr. Kullervo Hynynen, director of the physical sciences platform at SRI.

The idea of an undergraduate research prize was conceived last year by SRI’s physical sciences faculty who were keen on supporting undergraduate students and honouring their work. After much discussion on the finer points of the award, the Sunnybrook Prize was created.

Physical sciences and engineering students in their final year at a Canadian university who have completed a research project can apply for the award, which comes with a $10,000 cash prize. Ten finalists will be chosen to present their research; the first award will be handed out in January 2012.

The aim of the award is to laud superb undergraduate students in the physical sciences and encourage them to pursue a career in biomedical research. “What’s unique about imaging is that we don’t have an undergraduate program in medical physics. We don’t have a natural stream of students,” says Dr. Rajiv Chopra, a scientist in physical sciences at SRI. “We want students who may be in the physical sciences who’ve done a project, but maybe haven’t thought of medical imaging as a graduate area to pursue, to give it a second thought."

Amy Qu is a second-year physics student at the University of Toronto who has worked as a summer student in Hynynen’s focused ultrasound lab. As the winner in imaging at last summer’s research project poster competition at SRI, Qu says she looks forward to applying for the Sunnybrook prize in two years and thinks it could help steer her peers toward a research career.

“I think that to intelligent and hard-working undergraduates, an award like this would mean a great boost in confidence about their capabilities in research, hopefully attracting more students towards it as a career,” she says.

Hynynen, who is also a professor in the department of medical biophysics at U of T and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Imaging Systems and Image-Guided Therapy, says he anticipates the award will be a “huge motivator” for undergraduates interested in research. For him, mentoring the next generation of medical scientists is not a duty, but a pleasure. “I enjoy working with really smart people, and the students are great because they are enthusiastic. It’s fun.”

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