Exploring Innovations in Medicine

The Raising Hopes Student Initiative aims to support health care workers in our community through small acts of kindness, which in the past has included self-care baskets for staff and ER essential bags for patients. We also strive to increase awareness at the UAlberta campus about the issues and developments in our Canadian healthcare system.

Raising Hopes is hosting a collaborative event focused on research and innovations in the healthcare and medical field. We will start off with presentations from three guest speakers - Dr. Suresh, Dr. Hareendranathan, and Dr. Adesida to highlight translatibility of clinical research, artificial intelligence in medicine and orthopaedic tissue engineering. We will also have a mixer after the presentations to connect with and ask questions with our speakers. Snacks and beverages will be provided.

Stay tuned to our social media (@raisinghopes.uofa on instagram!)

*Disclaimer* There is capacity of 70 seats in-person. Once we've reached this limit presentations will be live-streamed. If you registered and know you will not be able to attend, please let us know at rhsi@ualberta.ca so we can make that seat available for someone else. Thank you!

Our Speakers:

Dr. Sneha Suresh (BSc, MD) is a pediatric immunologist, researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta. She completed her pediatric residency and Pediatric Infectious Disease fellowship at the University of Alberta, and received a Stollery Children’s Foundation Fellowship to complete a fellowship in Clinical Immunology and Transplantation at the Hospital for Sick Children at the University of Toronto. Currently, she works at the Stollery Children’s Hospital as the clinical lead for the Pediatric Immune Deficiency Clinic, and educates medical students and residents in Clinical Immunology.

Dr. Abhilash (Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Assistant Professor) is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Radiology, University of Alberta (UofA). He co-founded the Collaborative on Ultrasound in Deep Learning (CUDL) and has been working on various research projects in medical robotics, medical image analysis, ultrasound, and artificial intelligence(AI).  He completed his Ph.D. in Medical Robotics from NTU Singapore in 2012 and has worked with R&D teams in Singapore (Panasonic R&D Center) and Germany (Curefab). He was the R&D Lead at MEDO.ai Inc, a Singapore-Edmonton-based startup company that aims to develop AI-augmented could-based solutions for ultrasound image analysis. At UofA, he has been working on applications of medical image analysis and AI in radiology.

Dr. Adetola Adesida (Professor and Divisional Director of Orthopaedic Basic Science Research) leads biologists, clinicians, and engineers interested in musculoskeletal and maxillofacial cartilage tissue engineering and regenerative medicine research. His research is supported by major competitive awards. He completed his doctoral studies at the School of Pharmacy, University of Manchester (UK), and post-doctoral training at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell-Matrix Research in the University of Manchester and Harvard Medical School. He is a recipient of fellowship awards from Harvard Medical School and the Marie Curie fellowship program of the European Commission, which he exercised at the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland. He is a recipient of the Collaborative Exchange Prize of the Orthopaedic Research Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a member of the College of Reviewers of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He serves on the editorial board of Nature Scientific Reports. He holds several patents and has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers in cartilage tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.