GCI Research Day Recap: Reflections from a Trainee

Hi, I’m Anne, a trainee at the GCI, and I want to share with you my thoughts about this year’s GCI Research Day!

December 4th was one of my favourite scientific days of the year: GCI Research Day. It is a day for all Rosalind and Morris Cancer Institute (GCI) trainees to come together and discuss our ongoing research, share tips and enjoy a free lunch! It is a true opportunity for the Montreal cancer research community to meet and celebrate our research progress.

The day started off strong with a welcoming word from Professor Peter Siegel, followed by 3-minute-thesis talks. Ten students attempted to present their research thesis to a lay audience, all of that under 3 minutes. Sophie Courville, student in Professor Heather Melichar’s laboratory, won the award for best presentation for her talk on regulatory T cells, congratulations Sophie!

After the talks, everyone moved to the Bellini atrium for the first of two poster sessions. Everyone has such interesting projects! Clarisse Echavez and Yu Gu, both graduate students in Professor William Muller’s laboratory, were awarded best junior and senior poster presentations respectively. Even if I was not presenting a poster this year, the session turned out quite successful: I obtained a new cell culture protocol and the new mouse line that I was looking for. These will for sure help push my research forward in the coming months and show, once again, why I enjoy Research Day so much.

Eight graduate students delivered short-talks and had the opportunity to present their research in a 10-minute presentation format. The judges awarded the best short talk prize to Mohammed Faiz Hussain from Professor Lawrence Kazak’s laboratory for his talk Activating mechanism of futile creatine cycling.

The day ended with a keynote address by Professor Nikhil Joshi, Associate Professor at the Yale School of Medicine and co-leader of Cancer Immunology at the Yale Cancer Center. He went into details about the NINJA mouse model, a model that he developed and that is now widely used for its precise and tunable antigen expression in vivo. He discussed his studies on the role of the immune system, specifically T cells and their subtypes, in tumour initiation and progression.

Research Day is a massive organization that would not have been possible without the trainees who were dedicated to turning it into a success: Ève Mallet Gauthier, Ryan LaFrancois, Amelia Martinez Villarreal and Deepashika Senaratne. They were also supported by GCI student affairs officer Leigh Dickson and GCSS co-presidents Paulina Varelo and Philippe Hutton.

Thank you to the sponsors who made this year’s Research Day possible: Cole Foundation, Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Santé, Miltenyi Biotec, MedChemExpress and Moderna. Thanks also to our supporters, Wisent Bioproducts, GCI core facilities and the McGill Technology Transfer Office, McGill Innovation & Partnerships.

This year’s event reminds me of how much I value the GCI’s collaborative environment and dedication to scientific excellence—and I cannot wait until next year!

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