At the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University,
our mission is to advance health care by
promoting biomedical and clinical research and offering
excellent training opportunities.
Nous aspirons à aider les gens d’ici et d’ailleurs à vivre en meilleure santé.
The School of Biomedical Sciences groups all our basic
science departments and is really a point of pride for our university.
One of its first initiatives is to establish
the McGill Biomedical Research Accelerator -
l’accélérateur de recherche biomédicale de McGill.
I'm from Montreal,
so I was quite familiar with McGill University already.
I applied to the program because I had a desire to see how
some of the skills that I'd learned in my home institution
might translate to a new environment.
And I started to realize an opportunity to see
how well I could adapt to it, how well I could learn new skills,
and also get a chance to study something new, to do some
research and something I wouldn't necessarily have gotten
the chance to do at my home institution and really just
learn a lot about the whole research process.
The School of Biomedical Sciences and the scope of research
that we have in our labs provided us with an opportunity to
bring these students into our lab and expose them to a very
interdisciplinary research approach.
This is how we created the McGill Biomedical Research Accelerator Program.
This program is a 15 week internship.
It happens through the summer.
We bring the students here and we place them in a research lab.
They are exposed to the research ongoing in different
departments of the school.
They work on a specific question.
They learn cutting-edge techniques and they see how we
do research at the School of Biomedical Sciences.
This allows them to think about what do they want to do for
graduate school, but also prepares them for their next
career move, whether that is graduate school or any other
career in industry or professional schools.
The way that the research that I have been doing has changed
my view of biomedical engineering is I realized how
interconnected research can be, that you can have so many
different avenues of research that you might not think
could be related to whatever it is that you're doing in research,
But there's a lot of connections that you can
make within your own research and its applicability as well
to the real world.
Le programme d’accélération de la recherche biomédicale à McGill
permet au Directeur de laboratoire de recruté parmi les meilleurs étudiants
qui sont intéressé par la recherche.
Pour les étudiants, c’est une opportunité extraordinaire
de découvrir le monde de la recherche à McGill, vivre dans un labo,
échanger des idées, interagir avec les étudiants gradués, les post-docs, les professeurs.
Il y a juste un risque,
une fois qu’on a goûté à la recherche, ont risque de rester accroché.
I really learned quite a lot during the tenure of this program.
In particular, one thing that sticks out is laboratory techniques
that may not have been completely relevant all the time to my
project specifically, but just using technology that I may
not have even been aware of until this program.
And seeing all of that and learning how a lot of
these techniques and tools worked was quite fascinating.
In addition, I learned really quite a lot about McGill's
biomedical research output.
There's so many professors, different labs that I didn't
even know existed, studying things that I didn't know were
being studied, many of which I was actually quite interested in.
I got to see a lot of this at the the weekly
seminars throughout the program, which was just, to me,
very, very fascinating to see just how many things I was
unaware of are being researched here.
The MBRA program is really an excellent opportunity for young
scientists to immerse themselves in a stimulating research environment.
And so not only do they get to experience
cutting-edge scientific techniques, but they get to work
alongside our graduate trainees.
And so in essence, they are doing graduate level research.
I feel that this helps with my career path so much because
I'm interested in going to graduate school.
I'm very interested in biomedical engineering, but
specifically applying it to human health and disease.
So I believe that this is a very good opportunity for me to
connect my interests and my passions and
biomedical engineering research all together.