Tony Yu is a 2022 Canada Student Merit Award winner. He achieved this award for obtaining the highest standing of his class in the fourth and final year of his degree. Here is a brief biography of the winner.
Tony Yu grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and moved to Toronto, Ontario in 2018 to study biochemistry and physiology at the University of Toronto. He maintained a strong GPA and received several scholarships, such as the Alfred and Isabel Bader Scholarship.
During his studies, Tony worked as an undergraduate summer research student in Dr. Michael Weinfeld’s lab at the University of Alberta. He received an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award in 2020 to work on an essay to detect the phosphatase activity of PNKP, and a Summer Studentship from the Alberta Cancer Foundation to investigate the mechanism of type I interferon activation following PNKP depletion in cancer cells. This sparked his interest in oncology and, for his fourth year thesis project, he worked in Dr. Shane Harding’s lab to investigate the effect of DNA mismatch repair defects on inflammatory signalling.
Tony is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the University of Toronto in the lab of Dr. Benjamin Lok. In his spare time, he enjoys soccer, playing piano, and writing music. Tony is honoured to be a recipient of the SCI Canada Student Merit Award 2022.
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