The Office of the Vice Dean, Research and Health Science Education (RHSE) in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine is committed to organizing activities to help you discern your future career paths. RHSE’s annual Research Shadowing Program aims to expose students to the innovative research conducted within Temerty Medicine as well as its partner Institutes. In addition, we hope to encourage you to consider graduate studies in Temerty Medicine following completion of your undergraduate program. With these goals in mind, this program pairs undergraduate students with graduate student or postdoc mentors from across Temerty Medicine’s 14 different graduate programs. The Research Shadowing Program aims to give you a glimpse into the research environment and the opportunity to ask questions about the graduate student experience. Program mentors will give an overview of the nature of their research and how it aligns with concepts you have learned in your courses. Additionally, you will have an opportunity to shadow your mentor as they perform their experiments and daily tasks. The program will take place between February 3 – 28, 2025. The length of the shadowing experience can range from 1 to 3 days and must be mutually agreed upon by the undergraduate student and their mentor. The specific schedule and shadowing activities (which may take place in-person and/or online via Zoom, MS Teams, Facetime, etc.) will be at the discretion of the mentor. All U of T Life Science undergraduate students are welcome to apply, regardless of year or program of study.
Note: The number of applicants typically far exceeds the availability of mentors, thus, we encourage you to apply early. Students will be paired with available mentors on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to those students who have no prior research experience. For any questions regarding this program, please email medicine.hse@utoronto.ca.
APPLICATION DEADLINE: January 13, 2025 (end of day)
"The Temerty Faculty of Medicine RHSE Research Shadowing Program is an invaluable opportunity to expose undergraduate life science students to research. As a program participant, this experience fuelled a passion for medical research that I plan to embark on as I pursue my career in healthcare. Guided by my mentor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, my exposure to the wet laboratory setting at the Krembil Research Institute was enlightening. Through our group shadowing experience, I gained insight from her day-to-day tasks as a postdoctoral fellow and navigated various laboratory techniques, including protein fluorescence, cell culturing, and microscopy in relation to her project—investigating the impacts of positive alpha-synuclein on neurodegenerative diseases. Not only did the experience provide a glimpse of the research environment, but offered valuable mentorship for my professional development and an opportunity to network with other life science undergraduate students. As I pursue future endeavours in research, I am sincerely grateful for the exposure to scientific inquiry that the the RHSE program provided me with at the University of Toronto."
-- Lauren, D., 2024 participant
