Not your average road trip

By Alisa Kim

For some students, reading week is a time for vacationing down south; for others, it means getting caught up on school work and sleep. This fall, a group of undergraduate students in biomedical engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal used their reading week to tour Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) as part of a trip to Toronto to explore career options.

"It's rare to have a group [of undergraduates] that gets organized to tour SRI," says Merle Casci, coordinator of SRI's Trainee Centre. Casci, who hosted the students and organized the tour, says that she would like to see more undergraduates coming through SRI's doors.

The group of 15 students were in Toronto from October 11 to 13. The tour of SRI was the last stop on their itinerary, which included visits to the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, and some biomedical companies in the city's west end.

"Since the biomedical engineering bachelor program is relatively new in Quebec [it began in 2008], we didn't know much about the opportunities available after the degree, and that's why we visited," says Elise Tremblay, a third-year student who helped organize the trip. "We wanted to see what engineers can do not only in biomedical companies, but also in research."

To kick off the tour, the students donned hard hats and safety boots to see the newly constructed facilities on the sixth and seventh floors of M wing that are part of the Centre for Research in Image-Guided Therapeutics. There, they were treated to a sneak peek of the current good manufacturing practice lab, device development lab, the McLaughlin Centre wet labs and the image-processing lab.

The group then headed to U wing to see the Advanced Regenerative Tissue Engineering Centre. They also received a personal tour of the orthopaedic biomechanics lab by Dr. Cari Whyne, director of the Holland Musculoskeletal Research Program at SRI.

Casci then led the students to the sixth floor of S wing to the lab of Dr. Peter Burns, a senior scientist in physical sciences at SRI. Here, Dr. John Hudson and Charles Tremblay-Darveau, trainees in the Burns lab, described their respective research projects on the use of ultrasound imaging to monitor tumour growth and blood pressure.

The last stop of the tour was the expanded biomedical imaging research suite on the ground floor of S wing, where Dr. Kullervo Hynynen, director of physical sciences at SRI, described his research and showed the students state-of-the-art equipment, including magnetic resonance imaging systems, a computed tomography scanner and focused ultrasound devices.

"I had not seen this [type of] equipment before. It was pretty cool," says Emre Aslan, a third-year student in the biomedical engineering program. Aslan says he was struck by the size of SRI-"in one word: huge," he says of his impression of the institute-and the translational nature of the research. "[Dr. Hynynen's] research looks really interesting and looked like real clinical applications can come from his studies."

Casci wrapped up the visit by serving the students some refreshments, fuel for the six-hour trip home.