The CHILD Cohort Study (CHILD) is pleased to announce the 2024 recipient the Sears Undergraduate Summer Studentship: Anglin Dent, a medical student at the University of Toronto.
Anglin’s proposed research on longitudinal phenotypes of asthma-related risk factors in CHILD aims to examine the impact of integrating cough duration, timing, and severity on the CHILD predictive performance of the CHILDhood Asthma Risk Tool (CHART).
The Studentship is a unique training award for an undergraduate university student working with a CHILD research team for 12 weeks.
Anglin will work with CHILD investigator Dr. Padmaja Subbarao at The Hospital for Sick Children from May through September 2024, examining how the area under the receiving operator curve (AUROC), sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) of CHART are impacted when cough data are included as predictive variables.
CHART is a simple symptom-based screening tool developed by Dr. Subbarao and colleagues that detects asthma risk in children as young as two years of age. It was originally detailed in a study published in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2022.
“Anglin’s strong proposal was considered by the review committee to have very high translational value,” comments CHILD Scientific Officer Dr. Kozeta Miliku. “Her project will potentially further advance the innovative CHILD tool CHART and will likely produce new publications. The committee was also confident in Anglin’s ability to execute this project based on her well-documented leadership skills. We congratulate her on receiving this year’s award!”
“Anglin is a very talented, self-driven individual who has previous research experience using machine learning and AI,” adds Dr. Subbarao. “I’m excited to see what she will accomplish in this project.”
“I am so excited to be named the recipient of the 2024 Sears Summer Studentship,” says Anglin. “This project will allow me to expand my research skillset, while contributing to the development of a precision medicine tool for childhood asthma from one of the largest, most comprehensive birth cohorts.”
All six 2024 submissions to the Sears Studentship were considered meritorious, but the review committee wished especially to single out two other candidates for honourable mention: Sofia Hempelmann Perez (University of College Dublin) and Sara Mousavi (University of Toronto), both of whose submissions scored very highly.
The Sears Studentship was established in honour of Dr. Malcolm Sears, Director of the CHILD Cohort Study until 2017, and illustrates CHILD’s commitment to developing an interest among undergraduate students in the fields of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and in allergic and related immune diseases research.