PRiME Fellowship Awards: The Inaugural 2019 Cohort

The 2019 PRiME Fellowship Awards were announced to provide financial support for ten outstanding trainees from the labs of PRiME faculty members at the University of Toronto. Selected by PRiME's Fellowship Committee, these researchers bring diverse projects addressing PRiME's mandate of identifying new disease targets, discovering novel targeted therapeutics, and developing next-generation diagnostics.

Launched in spring 2019, PRiME is a multi-faculty initiative leveraging U of T's excellence in pharmaceutical sciences, medicine, physical sciences, and engineering, bridging Pharmacy, Medicine, Arts & Science, and Applied Science & Engineering. Led by Shana Kelley, then University Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, the fellows' projects combine expertise from at least two faculty members.

The ten inaugural Fellows: Noor Al-saden (Reilly & Winnik), Rony Chidiac (Angers & Sidhu), Angela Duong (Andreazza, Attisano & Beaulieu), Margot Karlikow (Pardee & Walker), Anastasia Korolj (Radisic, Guenther & Konvalinka), Jiabao Liu (Krause & Cummins), Mark Mabanglo (Houry & Batey), Jiaxi Peng (Wheeler & Peng), Yu-xi Xiao (Moffat & Kelley), and Fei Xu (Kumacheva & Aspuru-Guzik) — spanning radiation nanomedicine, antibody agonists, cerebral organoids, CRISPR sensors, organ-on-chip diagnostics, nuclear-receptor modulators, antibiotic development, single-cell proteomics, CRISPR screening, and AI-driven drug discovery.