Five students awarded the 2024 Leong Centre Studentship Award
The Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children is proud to announce the recipients of the 2024 Leong Centre Studentship Award. This year’s awardees come from the fields of family medicine, paediatrics, and public health, with research focusing on areas such as population health, social epidemiology, health policy, and social and behavioral sciences.
Please join us in congratulating these recipients on their remarkable achievement.
Fatemeh Khorramrouz
Fatemeh Khorramrouz is a Registered Dietitian and Ph.D. Candidate in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. She is supervised by Dr. Catherine Birken, Chair in Child Health Intervention at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children. Her work at TARGet Kids!, Canada’s largest primary care research network for children, centers on the critical role that parents play in shaping healthy eating behaviors in early childhood.
“Despite their crucial role in children's lives, fathers are often overlooked in studies on parenting and early childhood research, with mothers bearing most of the responsibility for healthcare. My research seeks to incorporate fathers' perspectives, enabling the design of interventions that engage fathers more effectively and promote a more balanced, equitable approach to family health care.”
Sarah Malecki
Sarah Malecki is a General Internal Medicine fellow at the University of Toronto and a PhD student in Clinical Epidemiology and Healthcare Research at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. She is supervised by Dr. Eyal Cohen, Co-Director of the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children. Her research focuses on characterizing and comparing the resource use and morbidity/mortality trajectories of adults with pediatric-onset complex diseases.
“My work will show the impact of an emerging population on the adult healthcare system, and explore the possibility of accelerated aging (i.e. accelerated accrual of common adult-onset conditions) in these young adults. I expect this work will support development of new models of care to anticipate and manage evolving complexity from transition to adult care onwards, and I envision multi-disciplinary "adult complex care teams" that mirror models on the pediatric side.”
Fareha Nishat
Fareha Nishat is PhD Epidemiology Candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, with a Master's of Public Health in Epidemiology from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is supervised by Dr. Hilary Brown, Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Society and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Her project will use health administrative data in Ontario to examine the effect of disability on the accumulation of chronic diseases in adolescents and young adults with disabilities compared to those without disabilities using multistate models.
“Despite their known risk of chronic diseases broadly, there is a lack of research on the accumulation of chronic diseases among young people with disabilities. This project aims to quantify the relationship between disability and chronic disease accumulation using longitudinal health administrative data.”
Surabhi Sivaratnam
Surabhi Sivaratnam is a Pediatric Resident Physician at the University of Toronto. She completed her medical degree at McMaster University. She is supervised by Dr. Charlotte Moore Hepburn, Medical Director, Child Health Policy Accelerator and Staff Pediatrician, Division of Pediatric Medicine, The Hospital for Sick Children. Her project aims to investigate how the federal legislative loopholes regulating synthetic nicotine products expose youth to significant health risks. The goal is to inform future legislation and to advocate for stronger policies to protect children and adolescents in Canada and beyond.
“Our research addresses the issue of the increasing rates of nicotine usage amongst youth. This public health crisis is largely due to the regulatory loopholes surrounding synthetic nicotine products. This project aims to analyze the tobacco control legislations in other countries, to understand ways in which to close the loopholes that exist in Canadian legislation and correspondingly, to protect youth from the harmful effects of nicotine.”
Karen Zhang
Karen Zhang is a master’s student in nutrition at the University of Toronto. She is supervised by Dr. Catherine Birken, Chair in Child Health Intervention at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children. Her current project examines how zBMI, weight status, and self-perception, along with income levels, relate to academic achievement in reading, writing, and math for children in grades 3 and 6.
“There are significant gaps in understanding the mechanisms behind the associations between weight status, zBMI, and academic achievement. Our research hopes to examine closer the role of self-perception and income level in influencing these differences, with the goal of uncovering key insights that could inform targeted interventions to support both the physical health and academic success of children.”