Upskill: How to Gain Professional Experience by Getting Involved

The UHN Office of Research Trainees invites you to a panel Q&A and information sharing session on how to gain professional experience by getting involved.

In this session, UHN Graduate students and Postdocs will share how they have gained professional experience and developed their skills by getting involved with entrepreneurship, career development organizations, and volunteer opportunities. Attendees will learn about different ways to get involved, how to access different opportunities, and how to make the most of their time as a research trainee.

This session is free and open to everyone. The webinar recording will be sent to all registrants after the event. All event registrants are asked to read the ORT's Code of Conduct. By registering you are agreeing to abide by the code of conduct.

Speaker Bios:

Kyla Alsbury-Nealy is a PhD candidate in Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Toronto and a physical therapist from the Dovigi Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Clinic. Her research interests include knowledge translation and improving referrals from healthcare professionals to community exercise programs. Kyla is also a Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at SilicoLabs, a start-up that has developed a software that allows anyone to easily and quickly create interactive experiences for understanding human and artificial intelligence (AI) behaviour. These experiences can be delivered on desktop, mobile, virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, and can be integrated with mobile biosensor technology.

Sofia Melliou is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. In her research, she utilizes tridimensional artificial brains to study how proteins spatiotemporally change during early human brain development. As a graduate student, Sofia identified her passion for graduate professional development and the need to implement new initiatives in her department to help graduate students develop skills that will aid their successful transition from academia to industry. Currently, she is the Outreach Lead of the Life Sciences Career Development Syndicate (LSCDS), where she and the team aim to foster professional growth and promote resources available within the University of Toronto.

Dr. Suman Shrestha has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at UHN with a Princess Margaret Postdoctoral Fellowship since July 2021. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington, where his research focused on the evolution of protein folding. Currently, Suman is developing a methodology to study the protein-protein interactions (PPIs) of cancer-causing proteins in their diseased state. Suman has been involved with student associations in different capacities at his previous institutions, and at UHN, he is a professional development representative for the UHN Postdoc Association (UHNPA).