On November 16, UHN will celebrate its first annual Pride in STEM event in honour of the International Day of LGBTQIA+ People in STEM.  

Dr. Brian Hodges, EVP Education at UHN and President of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, will moderate a panel discussion on the life and sciences of 2SLGTBQIA+ STEM scientists. This event honours 2SLGTBQIA+ people in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine. 

• Ms. Sydney O-Brien is a research technician in the Glass lab at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Sydney currently researches gene expression and transcriptional mechanisms that regulate the immune cells of the brain in the context of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, MPSIIIA, HIV-associated neurodegeneration, and Multiple System Atrophy. During her undergraduate degree, she was social media coordinator and eventually president of the student organization Out in STEM (oSTEM), and an Academic Mentor at the SDSU Pride Centre. 
•  Dr. Gerd Prehna is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. His lab studies how bacteria communicate with their hosts, each other, and other micro-organisms using a combination of structural biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology 
•  Dr. Dylan Siriwardena is a developmental biologist at the University of Toronto. Fascinated by how stem cells ‘choose’ to differentiate, he subsequently completed his PhD from the University of Cambridge, studying how a single cell divides and forms the many different cell types that make up the human body, with a particular focus on how the placenta forms. Dylan is currently pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in Dr. Aaron Wheeler’s laboratory, where he is developing prenatal genetic tests for early pregnancy.