2019 PRiME Fellows Honoured with External Funding Awards

The PRiME Fellowships have consistently been awarded to talented young scientists working on bold interdisciplinary ideas since 2019. Two of these researchers, Anastasia Korolj and Rony Chidiac, have recently been honoured with additional accolades.

Anastasia Korolj, a PhD student in Prof. Milica Radisic's lab, was awarded one of the 2021 Schmidt Science Fellowships — delivered by Schmidt Futures with the Rhodes Trust to early-career scientists harnessing interdisciplinary science for impact. "The PRiME fellowship exposed me in an intimate way to the diverse research within U of T," she said. She joins a group of only 84 Fellows since 2017.

Dr. Rony Chidiac, a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Stephane Angers' lab, was awarded a 2021 BrightFocus Foundation Vision Grant ($200,000 USD) for his work on a novel antibody-based agonist for neovascular age-related macular degeneration. The selective Frizzled-4 antibody agonist developed by the Angers and Sidhu team shows high efficacy in normalizing defective retinal angiogenesis, and the work was published in EMBO Molecular Medicine.