by Alyona Ivanova

Graphic design by Emily Huang

The Annual Ori Rotstein Lecture in Translational Research took place on November 15, 2023. The Institute of Medical Science has held the event since 2011, with the aim of presenting current research being explored in translational medicine. This year’s lecture topic was “Innovation in Transplantation: Promoting Translation”.

The Lecture brings together students, faculty, and health professionals and requires a high level of planning. We spoke to the student leads of the planning committee, Crizza Ching and Anisa Nazir, who shared their experience organizing the lecture this year.

This wasn’t the first time Crizza and Anisa served on the planning committee for this lecture. Being IMS students, they were inspired to become the leads for this event because it is very much a student-led initiative: students get to decide on the main topic of the lecture, choose the keynote speaker, and directly communicate with the panelists. As a result, it is a great opportunity to network with established scientists—a crucial part of professional development. As student leads, Crizza and Anisa were in charge of coordination and management, advertising the event, moderating and facilitating on the day of, and collecting feedback afterwards. It takes an incredible amount of work, management, and pre-planning to host a successful event, and it really is a team effort. Anisa shared, “The teamwork is amazing! It’s the team that really pulls everything through and we get a lot of support from the faculty and staff leads.”

Event planning doesn’t come without obstacles. Anisa shared, “The biggest challenge has always been the timing: matching the availability of the keynote speaker, Dr. Rotstein, the panelists, the venue. Sometimes it’s hard to get a hold of certain people. You often have to compromise.”

Being the key figures shaping the event has provided Anisa and Crizza with lots of opportunities for learning transferable skills, leadership, and professional development, and they feel that they have gained a lot from this experience. It’s not only about organizational skills and time management, Anisa and Crizza explained, but also about taking initiative, delegating tasks to the team, networking, and public speaking. These are all skills that are fundamental to research when it comes to project management and teamwork, so Anisa and Crizza were able to translate their knowledge and prior experience into running a successful event.

The event itself featured Dr. Robert Montgomery, MD, PhD, Chair of the Department of Surgery, and Director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, as the keynote speaker. Dr. Montgomery played a pivotal role in the development of laparoscopic live kidney donation, a technique now widely adopted worldwide. In 2010, Dr. Montgomery was featured in the Guinness Book of World Records for performing the most kidney transplants in a single day. Dr. Montgomery gave an inspiring and fascinating talk about his own journey of receiving a heart transplant and his research into kidney transplantation. Students had a unique chance to hear about Dr. Montgomery’s current endeavours in the transplantation field and ask questions.

Another big part of the annual lecture is the panel discussion. This year’s panel featured Dr. Olivia Hough, clinical scientist at Traferox Technologies Inc., Dr. Mamatha Bhat, staff hepatologist and clinician-scientist at the UHN Ajmera Transplant Centre, Dr. Ana Konvalinka, senior scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, and Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, surgeon-in-chief of the Sprott Department of Surgery, Director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program and Latner Thoracic Research Laboratories at UHN, and Professor of Thoracic Surgery at the University of Toronto. The speakers represented a mixture of recent IMS alumni and early-, mid-, and late-career scientists with non-traditional and unique career paths to encourage students to consider diverse career options in the medical sciences and beyond.

Guided by the principles of EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion), Anisa and Crizza tried to bring diversity into the panel to showcase the diversity of IMS. “[Even though] only a portion of IMS students do research in the field of organ transplantation,” Crizza said, “there is so much overlap in terms of experiences. You can spend 24 hours with the panelists, and it still won’t be enough. There is just so much that we can get even from that one person.”

One of the concerns of the student leads when planning the event was that there wouldn’t be enough interaction between the audience and the speakers. Anisa mentioned that the students can be shy and hesitant to speak up at panel discussions. To their delight, however, the panel was a huge success. And because this represented the second time the event was in-person again following the pandemic, the panel was even more lively than before. Crizza shared, “The panel was very dynamic and there was lots of discussion. There was so little time, and it was so fun to see!”

The biggest piece of advice Crizza and Anisa could give to students attending the Ori Rotstein Lecture in future was: “Use that opportunity, ask those questions. These are the people you look up to and you don’t have that many opportunities to get career advice from people in the field. Now is a great chance!”

Overall, thanks to our student leads Crizza and Anisa the event was a huge success. We are hoping that IMS leadership will keep the tradition of hosting such a wonderful event for years to come!