Convocation Awards
Governor General's Gold Medal and Gordon A. Maclachlan Prize
Dr. Mark Sorin Sorin is an MD-PhD student at McGill University who completed his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Spicer and Dr. Logan Walsh at the Goodman Cancer Institute. His doctoral work focused on analyzing the tumor immune microenvironment of lung cancer using imaging mass cytometry. One of the studies that he co-led was published in Nature and used artificial intelligence to predict post-surgical progression for lung cancer patients. These findings can help guide clinical management after surgery by predicting which early-stage lung cancer patients would benefit, and which patients would be harmed by chemotherapy. The importance of his PhD work has been recognized with a top 10 science discovery prize in Quebec. His doctoral work was supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, an FRQS Doctoral Award and the Hilton J. McKeown Scholarship.
During his PhD, Mark was selected as one of four Canadians to represent Canada at the 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, a conference dedicated to biomedical research that brought together 40 Nobel laureates and over 600 young scientists from around the world to discuss the increasingly important role of science in our society.
During his time as a student, Mark noticed the lack of representation for MD-PhD students and the limited mentorship and support for junior students. As a result, Mark helped rally other students in co-founding the McGill MD-PhD Society, where he served as the inaugural President for two years. As a representative on the Program Advisory Committee, he engaged with Faculty leadership to defend and advocate for student interests.
Mark’s career goals are to become a principal investigator and medical oncologist, leading a laboratory focused on immuno-oncology and treating patients with cancer.
Governor General's Gold Medal and McGill Alumni Association Graduate Award
Dr. Clara Freeman completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Anna Weinberg. Her doctoral research was supported by a Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship and by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé. She completed her predoctoral clinical internship at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System.
Clara’s dissertation research used EEG (electroencephalography) to study the brain’s sensitivity to rewards based on evidence that low neural reward sensitivity may confer risk for depression. A particular focus of her work was understanding associations between stress, family history of depression, and reward processing. For example, she found that neural responses to rewards decreased significantly during the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to a pre-pandemic baseline, suggesting that real-world stress can hamper our ability to respond to rewards and potentially put us at greater risk of future depression. Her work provided some of the first evidence that adolescent girls with a family history of depression had significantly attenuated neural responses to social reward feedback, even before showing any signs of depression themselves. Ultimately, her research advanced our understanding of how neural reward sensitivity could be used to detect those at greatest risk for depression and intervene early.
Clara is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University where she is studying how stress influences risk for and recovery from alcohol use disorder. Her postdoctoral fellowship is supported through the Neuroimaging Sciences Training Program, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
D.W Ambridge Prize
Dr. Hannah Fronenberg completed her Ph.D. in physics at McGill University as a member of the Trottier Space Institute under the supervision of Prof. Adrian Liu. Her work in the field of cosmology aims to uncover the early epochs of our Universe’s evolution by harnessing faint signals from multiple cosmological probes such as line intensity maps, gravitational lensing, and the cosmic microwave background. Her thesis focused on developing cross-correlation techniques which combine these various datasets into unified observables, enabling precision cosmology from data that are typically heavily contaminated.
The statistical tools developed in her thesis solve key analysis challenges in the field of cosmology and unlock new observational windows to never-before-seen cosmic structures. For her contributions, she has been recognized as a Canadian innovator in receiving the Mitacs Award for Outstanding Innovation. Her work has been supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologie (FRQNT), by Mitacs, and by the Trottier Space Institute.
Outside of her research, Hannah is a dedicated mentor and science communicator. She served as the Outreach Coordinator for the Trottier Space Institute and led major public engagement initiatives, including McGill’s 2024 eclipse fair that welcomed over 20,000 visitors. She has also worked with Indigenous communities in Quebec to deliver astronomy programming, and regularly participates in classroom visits, kids’ science fairs, and public lectures. She also co-founded Ideas in Practice, an interdisciplinary philosophy outreach group that fosters dialogue between science and the humanities.
Hannah will soon begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, where she plans to continue advancing multi-probe cosmology and develop new tools to analyze and interpret data from both current and next-generation large-scale structure surveys.
D.W Ambridge Prize - Dr. Durbis Castillo-Pazos
K.B. Jenckes Prize
Dr. Julia Petrovic completed her PhD in Educational Psychology (Human Development concentration) at McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Nancy Heath, Distinguished James McGill Professor. Her PhD was supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral (CGS-D) as well as a Fonds de recherche du Québec en société et culture (FRQSC) Doctoral Scholarship. Alongside numerous other accolades, Dr. Petrovic was also the recipient of the 2023-2024 Herschel and Christine Victor Fellowship in Education, awarded annually to an outstanding graduate student in the Faculty of Education on the basis of academic merit.
Dr. Petrovic’s dissertation comprises four studies that integrate multiple methodological approaches (i.e., cross-sectional/survey-based, qualitative, and two randomized controlled trials) to explore the impacts of dispositional mindfulness, as well as formal versus informal mindfulness instruction, among university students with and without a history of self-injury. Her dissertation offers novel insights into mental health intervention practices in higher education. As mindfulness-based programming and resources are increasingly implemented within university settings to support students’ mental health and resilience to stress, Dr. Petrovic’s dissertation is a significant contribution to our understanding of effective and acceptable approaches to mindfulness instruction in this context – particularly among students with a history of self-injury (who comprise 20% of the university student body and report unique challenges in response to traditional i.e., formal mindfulness practice).
Dr. Petrovic recently joined Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry as a postdoctoral fellow, supported through a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. She will be conducting research at the Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) Center for Mindfulness and Compassion (CMC) under the supervision of Dr. Zev Schuman-Olivier, wherein she will explore effective and accessible approaches to mindful self-compassion-based interventions in the high school context.
Travel Awards
Delta Upsilon Memorial Scholarship
Connor Prosty, Experimental Medicine
Shuo Wen, Computer Science
Lucy Sylvia Cheffins, Mathematics and Economics
John Williamson Frederick Peacock Memorial Scholarship
Caroline Hunziker, Human Nutrition
Philip F. Vineberg Travelling Fellowship
Eileen Grant, English
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