It is my distinct pleasure to share the 2025 Dean’s Report for the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. This year’s report celebrates the fifth anniversary of the historic $250-million gift to our faculty from James and Louise Temerty and the Temerty Foundation — and explores how this record-setting philanthropic investment has strengthened, and continues to galvanize, Temerty Medicine.
Over the past five years, the Temertys’ generosity has been felt throughout our faculty, as well as across the Toronto Academic Health Science Network and beyond. Inspired by the ambitious goals of our community-informed 2018-2023 Academic Strategic Plan, their gift is empowering health discovery, collaboration, innovation, equity and learner well-being on an unprecedented scale.
In fact, before the gift even was announced, it was making an impact. In the spring of 2020, the Temerty Foundation advanced $10 million of the donation to help us during the pandemic — funds that were crucial to isolating and studying SARS-CoV-2, supporting clinical trainees, and to limiting the impact of COVID-19 in Canada.
Notably, the Temerty gift has also deepened our relationships with partner hospitals across the GTA. We have worked together to retain and recruit faculty in clinical departments, embarked on new research collaborations and set up a city-wide knowledge translation funding program to speed the application of new discoveries.
In just five years, the Temertys’ gift has made a profound difference, with benefits that will continue to transform our faculty and the future of health and health care for generations to come.
I am especially looking forward to construction of the new Temerty Building — a major redevelopment project that will replace the very old west wing of the Medical Sciences Building with a leading-edge facility for education and research. The new building will be an open and inviting place for all members of the university community to gather and work.
Of course, while the Temerty gift has been transformative for our faculty, none of what we do would be possible without the extraordinary effort and talent of our people. To our faculty members, learners and staff: thank you for your tremendous dedication over the last five years. To our broader community of alumni, donors and volunteers: thank you for your generosity and support.
As we begin a new academic year, and embark on a new academic planning process, I very much look forward to working with you all to ensure that Temerty Medicine further solidifies our place among the world’s top leaders in health education and research.
Lisa Robinson, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS Dean, Temerty Faculty of Medicine Vice Provost, Relations with Health-Care Institutions University of Toronto
Jessica Lam (left) and Natasha Christie-Holmes (right)
‘It was a massive relief…’
By Betty Zou
In December 2019, just days before the university shut down for winter break, Natasha Christie-Holmes met with colleagues to discuss news from China about a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases.
“Everybody’s concerned it might be an emerging coronavirus, so let’s start thinking about how the lab can handle this,” she recalls.
‘The lab’ was not just any lab, but the Toronto High Containment Facility, a specially equipped space at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine that allows researchers from the university and across partner hospitals to study high-risk pathogens safely and securely.
Christie-Holmes soon found herself on the front lines of Canada’s research response to what became the COVID-19 pandemic. As the facility manager, she quickly obtained regulatory approval for the lab to study the new coronavirus, helped re-evaluate safety protocols and assessed needs for supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE).
By March 2020, researchers working at the facility were among the first in the world to isolate the new virus. And just weeks later, the facility received $1.2 million from the Dean’s COVID-19 Priority Fund.
It was a massive relief to not worry about whether we had enough funds to hire more staff or buy disinfectants and PPE. We could just focus on doing the research.
— Natasha Christie-Holmes
“The Temerty gift was a huge morale boost because it acknowledged the value of the Toronto High Containment Facility and our ability to respond to the pandemic,” says Christie-Holmes, who is now director of strategy and partnerships at the Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium.
“It was a massive relief to not worry about whether we had enough funds to hire more staff or buy disinfectants and PPE. We could just focus on doing the research.”
By summer, the facility was running seven days a week, with researchers working in shifts from early morning to well past midnight. It was also the only academic high containment facility operating in the country.
Working together with researchers, industry partners and policy makers from across Canada, Temerty Medicine research teams validated methods for safely storing breastmilk, and for sanitizing masks and ventilators for reuse; tested new diagnostics, vaccines and treatments; uncovered how new viral variants differed in their transmission and disease-causing ability; and deepened our understanding of the immune response to COVID vaccination and infection.
The facility also enabled sharing of viral samples with other high containment facilities across the country, kick-starting national research efforts to fight the pandemic.
Later, as Canada moved out of the pandemic’s early phase, new research questions emerged — particularly on patient recovery and rehabilitation.
“This was a time in the pandemic when people were experiencing severe acute infections, so there was a need to address subsequent disability associated with infection,” says Kelly O’Brien, a professor of physical therapy at Temerty Medicine.
The network — established in 2022 with funding from the Temerty gift — has helped bridge a gap in COVID knowledge and care. It brings together researchers and clinicians from across rehabilitation fields, and people with lived experience of COVID-related illness, to generate and share evidence.
The network has since expanded to include international partners and evolved to address the needs of people experiencing Long COVID.
Cameron notes that some of the network’s biggest impacts have been building capacity in COVID-19 rehabilitation research and creating opportunities for rehabilitation researchers, clinicians, and people with lived experiences to share their findings and insights globally.
By fostering knowledge exchange and working with community groups, O’Brien hopes the network will help more people gain timely access to evidence-informed rehabilitation services.
Looking ahead, the network’s activities will be guided by its Framework of Research Priorities in COVID Rehabilitation, published in 2024, and will include understanding experiences of episodic disability and identifying safe approaches to rehabilitation.
While the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer officially a global health emergency, research efforts enabled by the Temerty gift are leaving a lasting impact at U of T and around the world.
Collaborations and processes forged during the pandemic positioned Toronto researchers to respond quickly to the 2022 global mpox outbreak, and more recently to highly pathogenic avian influenza — both pathogens can only be studied in a high containment lab.
Cameron and O’Brien are keen to continue building international partnerships and broaden the research network’s efforts to support people with other infection-associated chronic conditions, who experience similar challenges as those with Long COVID.
“Rehabilitation is well positioned to address the episodic disability experienced by people living with Long COVID and other infection-associated chronic conditions,” says O’Brien.
“By taking a collaborative, strength-in-numbers approach and learning from other fields, we can have a broader impact down the road.”
PhD student Sarah Jarvis (left) with Professor Vasanti Malik (right)
Pathway grants bring big returns for researchers
By Betty Zou
As federal research grants become much harder to get, a program offered by the Temerty Faculty of Medicine is helping researchers sustain their research programs and boost their odds of success in future competitions.
The pathway grants program — launched in January 2020 by the Office of the Vice-Dean, Research and Health Science Education — provides bridge funding to proposals that were highly ranked but unfunded in a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) project grant competition.
The program has received significant support from James and Louise Temerty and the Temerty Foundation’s $250-million gift to the University of Toronto.
“Bridge funds like these are the key to success,” says Landon Edgar, an assistant professor in the departments of pharmacology and toxicology, and immunology at Temerty Medicine. He received a pathway grant in 2022 to study how carbohydrate structures on immune cells regulate immune responses.
Although his grant scored in the top 25 per cent in the CIHR competition, it didn’t get funded — a disheartening situation familiar to many researchers.
Budgets at CIHR and other federal funding agencies have not kept pace with inflation, or with the growing number of grant proposals. This means more high-quality, potentially impactful research projects are unfunded.
In the last 25 years, the success rate at CIHR has been cut nearly in half — dropping from an average of 31 per cent in 2000 – 2003 to 17.5 per cent in the 2022 – 2025 competitions.
“The pathway grants program was launched to support highly ranked projects that did not receive CIHR funding by providing faculty with the means to continue their research and hopefully be successful in future competitions,” says Justin Nodwell, vice-dean, research and health science education at Temerty Medicine.
Since its launch, the program has awarded $2.75 million to 46 projects led by Temerty Medicine faculty. Fourteen of those projects were successful in the next CIHR project grants competition, bringing in nearly $11.5 million in direct research funding — a remarkable return on investment.
A key component of the program is a requirement that faculty members submit their applications for an internal peer review and volunteer in Temerty Medicine’s college of internal scientific reviewers. Through the college, they provide other grant applicants with feedback on proposal structure, experimental design and more. They are then eligible to submit their own proposals for internal review and apply for pathway grants.
“Going through the internal peer review process was really helpful as an early career investigator,” says Vasanti Malik, an assistant professor in the department of nutritional sciences who received a pathway grant in 2022.
“I got a chance to see how other grants are written and to receive feedback from senior faculty in our department.”
Both Malik and Edgar credit the bridge funding for enabling them to get preliminary data that strengthened their grant resubmissions — which led to multi-year CIHR grants for each of them.
“You can use the pathway grant to do things the CIHR reviewers asked for, and by including that data in the resubmission, it can push you over the edge into fundable territory,” says Edgar, who is also an assistant professor of chemistry in U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science.
Malik’s project aims to create a database of environmental impacts of foods consumed in Canada, to inform dietary recommendations and sustainability labelling. “The pathway grant allowed me to support a graduate student who was able to get the pilot data that demonstrated the feasibility of our project,” says Malik.
Nodwell, who is also a professor of biochemistry at Temerty Medicine, notes the pathway grants program — in conjunction with the internal peer review process — has raised the quality of proposals submitted to CIHR. The results include a higher success rate for Temerty Medicine faculty compared to the national average — between five and 12 per cent, depending on the competition.
“Supporting excellent projects in a challenging funding landscape is critical to increasing the amount of federal funding support we receive, which contributes to U of T’s national and global reputation and impact,” says Nodwell.
Professor Kelsey McLaughlin
Re-energizing collaboration, clinical research and care
By Erin Howe
James and Louise Temerty and the Temerty Foundation’s $250-million gift to the University of Toronto is having a ripple effect across the Greater Toronto Area, and beyond.
The gift provided new opportunities for U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine to deepen connections with the Toronto Academic Health Science Network (TAHSN). The university sits at the heart of this dynamic cluster of hospitals and research institutes, which lead cutting-edge clinical care, research and teaching across the city.
“The Temerty family’s gift to U of T has touched every part of our city,” says Andy Smith, president and CEO of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, who was chair of TAHSN from 2021 to 2023.
“Its impact is visible across our hospitals and clinical departments — in the creation of new joint chairs and professorships, new interdisciplinary grants, and new opportunities to collaborate on innovation,” adds Smith. “As well, it has strengthened links between our hospitals and the university, forging partnerships that are more ambitious than ever.”
The Temerty gift has supported a wide range of new TAHSN-wide initiatives. These include support for clinician-scientist trainees, funding for the Black Health Education Collaborative, and creation of a TAHSN advisor for anti-racism.
The gift also played a key role in expanding the Toronto High Containment Facility. This lab is a central resource for researchers across the city; the Temertys’ support enabled it to scale up and lay the groundwork for heightened biosecurity and biocontainment in its new home — the future Temerty Building.
In addition, the gift established a knowledge translation program to help faculty members move research toward clinical application, which has awarded 14 grants since 2020.
We have research collaborators and patient partners across the country, and have gained so much momentum.
— Professor Kelsey McLaughlin
Critically, Temerty Medicine has also created new joint chairs and professorships to support faculty members working on research with potential to impact patients, families and communities. These positions help attract and empower top talent, including promising early-career researchers, to pursue their academic work in Toronto.
Among this group is Kelsey McLaughlin, an assistant professor recruited to Temerty Medicine and Sinai Health in 2023. McLaughlin holds appointments in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology and the Institute of Medical Science at U of T, and is a translational research scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital.
She studies high blood pressure that develops in pregnancy, and a blood test to screen and diagnose these conditions.
The test measures a protein called placental growth factor. Low levels of this protein can allow doctors to identify preeclampsia, a dangerous pregnancy complication that elevates blood pressure and can lead to premature birth, stillbirth, bleeding problems, stroke, and even death. Globally, the condition affects eight per cent of pregnancies.
“Mount Sinai Hospital was the first in the country and among the first in the world to use placental growth factor testing in the care of pregnant patients,” says McLaughlin. “Now researchers at four other Canadian centres have expanded access to the test. Without collaboration between Temerty Medicine and Sinai Health, this wouldn’t have been possible.”
The purposefully unrestricted portions of the Temerty gift have allowed the faculty to be flexible and meet emerging needs, including recruitment, retention and support of top-tier researchers, notes Lisa Robinson, dean of Temerty Medicine and vice provost, relations with health-care institutions at U of T. “These chairs and professorships will help us and our TAHSN partners build on our collective record of excellence in research and education, and will ultimately improve clinical care,” Robinson says.
McLaughlin recently set up a national working group on hypertension in pregnancy and use of the new blood test with her colleagues John Snelgrove and John Kingdom,a professor at U of Tand clinician-scientist at Sinai Health. Funding for her position and work may soon have additional impact: researchers across Canada could start work on a full-scale trial of the blood test in the next year.
“We have research collaborators and patient partners across the country, and have gained so much momentum,” she says.
In the coming months, McLaughlin andSnelgrove, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, and laboratory medicine and pathobiology at U of T who is also a clinician-investigator at Sinai Health, will co-edit a special issue of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada that will highlight the blood test.
That work will allow the pair to share their experience and translate knowledge to an even wider audience.
“As we do this work, we’re careful to consider the needs of patients accessing care outside major urban centres,” says McLaughlin. “Canada is a very large country. People often access pregnancy care in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and we need to make sure our research is relevant to all pregnant people in Canada.”
Jiwon Lee, MD student
Why more medical students can go ‘all in’ on education
By Erin Howe
Like many of her peers, Jiwon Lee puts everything she can into her education.
“We want to give our all to our studies, whether we’re in the classroom, the clinic, at home preparing for an exam or reviewing what we learned that day,” says Lee, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.
That level of commitment leaves little room for other pursuits, including part-time work to offset the costs that come with studying in one of Canada’s most expensive cities.
“Tuition and living in Toronto, where the cost of living is very high, were big concerns for me when I began medical school,” she says.
Lee is one of more than 560 students across Temerty Medicine who, since 2020, have received a grant, bursary or scholarship that was made possible by Jamesand LouiseTemerty and the Temerty Foundation’s gift to U of T.
“Over the last five years, and thanks in large part to the Temerty gift, our ability to provide financial assistance to learners has grown dramatically in terms of number of students we can help and amount of support we can provide,” says Glendon Tait, director of MD admissions and student finances, who is also an associate professor in the department of psychiatry. “This funding has had a significant impact on our ability to alleviate the impact of financial burden for students in our MD program.”
Money is a major concern and obstacle for many medical learners, before and after training.
We want to give our all to our studies, whether we’re in the classroom, the clinic, at home preparing for an exam or reviewing what we learned that day.
Student awards are especially beneficial to those pursuing demanding combined or dual degrees through the ‘MD plus’ program, which can add to their financial burden and reduce their ability to hold part-time jobs. Learners in the program pursue expanded studies, such as concurrent degrees in business administration, engineering, or health system leadership and innovation, while also completing medical school.
For Lee, her bursary support allowed her to pursue non-academic activities that significantly enriched her learning experience, such as joining the Korean Medical Students Association and participating in Daffydil — the faculty’s annual, student-led musical that has raised money for the Canadian Cancer Society for over 100 years.
The funding has also meant Lee can occasionally visit her family in British Columbia. She is the first member of her family to attend medical school; they moved to Canada from South Korea in 2009.
Lee’s experience motivates her to make medicine more welcoming and approachable for other newcomers and marginalized populations.
“As immigrants, it’s challenging to navigate the health care system when you’re not familiar with it. I want to help facilitate access for people like my family, and others who may not have anyone to help guide them through,” Lee says.
So far, clinical rotations have been the most exciting part of medical school, Lee says. From helping provide end-of-life care to facilitating the births of newborns, the many opportunities to learn are exhilarating, she says.
And thanks to financial assistance from Temerty Medicine, Lee and her peers can be all in on the experience.
Professor Muhammad Mamdani
Building Canada’s biggest AI-in-medicine network
By Emma Jones
In 2020, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine established the Temerty Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM). At the time, the centre was a national first — the only university-based organization dedicated to developing and applying AI in health care. Since then, T-CAIREM has become Canada’s largest AI-in-medicine network and is among the largest in the world. In 2022, the international AI-in-medicine community recognized T-CAIREM as Institution of the Year.
The centre now includes a community of nearly 2,000 members, based across U of T and dozens of partner universities, health-care organizations and research centres. Faculty and staff at T-CAIREM have established leading AI-in-medicine training programs for learners of all levels, provided over $2 million in research funding and created the Health Data Nexus — a secure and accessible digital platform to fuel applied AI learning and research.
We spoke to Professor Muhammad Mamdani, inaugural director of T-CAIREM and vice president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto, about the past, present and future of the centre and AI in medicine.
What were the key factors that enabled the centre’s rapid and impactful growth?
First and foremost are the people. The Temerty gift allowed us to make long-term investments in forming a community passionate about AI in medicine as well as an environment to support them, making it possible to bring together incredibly talented people across multiple disciplines who otherwise may not have connected.
Secondly, there is an appetite for AI in the medical field but also generally in society — there is a thirst for this knowledge. People are realizing this is the new reality we live in, and many people are eager to understand it better. We’ve set up a highly capable AI in medicine education team around a good vision to fill that gap. I think it’s really led to where we are today.
How has the Temerty gift shaped T-CAIREM’s trajectory?
It was critical. One can have aspirations, but aspirations need resources. And if we were going to do this, we were not going to be second best. We were going to be the best in the world at what we do. The Temerty gift enabled us to fulfill that vision of being the benchmark that others measure themselves against.
Faculty leaders envisioned the foundational concept for the centre in 2017, well before AI had captured everyone’s attention. It was an ambitious idea for the time, and it could only be brought to life through the gift. The unrestricted nature of the Temerty support also enabled us to respond quickly and strategically to this rapidly changing field, while thinking long-term.
What gaps in AI education and literacy are you aiming to address?
There was a survey this summer by KPMG that looked at 47 countries worldwide. In terms of AI literacy, Canada ranked #44, which is concerning. When you have a knowledge gap like that, you start with basics: What is AI? What does it mean for medicine? How do I use it as an end user? What are the up-and-coming initiatives or advances I need to know about? The first task was to make sure everyone who interacts with T-CAIREM comes away really understanding the basics of what to expect from AI and its fundamentals uses.
The University of Toronto has the top computer science program in the country and is highly ranked globally in AI. Further, the University of Toronto is home to one of the top 5 medical schools in the world. This is the perfect home that has all the ingredients to fill the knowledge gap.
There is an appetite for AI in the medical field but also generally in society — there is a thirst for this knowledge.
— Professor Muhammad Mamdani
What are your biggest opportunities in the near and long term?
First, this field is changing so incredibly rapidly, a lot of the work is keeping abreast of the latest technologies — how the models function and perform, and how we can best interact with them. After that, it’s about seeking and providing educational opportunities for clinicians and researchers.
Second, we need to understand how we leverage AI responsibly. While these technologies are incredibly powerful and hold immense promise for advancing patient care, they’re also capable of producing a lot of harm if not used appropriately. So, how do we enable more advanced thinking about the responsible use of AI?
Looking at clinical education, how do you see the role of AI evolving in the next five years?
Our students are the future of medicine. We have to train them now so that when they get out of medical school, they understand both the potential of these AI solutions and their potential limitations, so they too can use them responsibly.
More and more, we’re seeing AI-focused curricula mandated in medical schools all over the world. When we look at our own medical school, T-CAIREM has developed many educational resources. I would say we’re among the most, if not the most, advanced in Canada in terms of our offerings for practising health-care professionals and medical students. We also lead an international effort through our AI in Medicine Education Working Group, which brings together 20 universities to establish which forms of AI education should be required in medical school.
T-CAIREM has also launched multidisciplinary trainee rounds — how has this impacted student engagement with AI in medicine?
The training rounds were a bit of an experiment initially, where we thought it shouldn’t just be about medical students. What if we put medical students together with students from computer science, engineering and statistics? The Trainee Rounds feature 10 of the most exciting research projects from across Canada by emerging researchers from across disciplines. Their presentations help online audience members from around the world learn from each other and how different disciplines approach AI.
It’s been quite successful — every month, close to 100 students learn from each other and how different disciplines approach AI.
It’s okay not to know everything and to leverage expertise you may not have, especially as we move to more team-based health care. That’s one insight I hope students take from these rounds.
T-CAIREM has awarded over $2 million in research grants. What criteria do you use to identify high impact projects?
Our multidisciplinary team — statisticians, computer scientists, physicians, pharmacists, methodology and translation specialists, to name a few — assesses projects and looks for interesting ideas. Where are the gaps in AI knowledge and application? Where’s the novelty? What can advance the field and patient care?
The breadth of what we can fund, thanks in large part to philanthropy, is what makes T-CAIREM unique. We fund not only methodological work in AI, but also the creation of datasets that can be used for AI, as well as translation grants that focus on the adoption of AI solution in clinical environments and their impacts on patient outcomes. We focus on the potential impact the research initiative has on advancing our understanding of AI in medicine and its impact on the health-care system and the patients we serve.
Have any projects particularly stood out to you?
Quite a few. One is a translation grant we funded on fertility for couples having trouble conceiving. It’s hard to identify sperm with the highest chance of success, so a team of engineers and fertility physicians used AI to help solve this problem. We expect they’ll increase fertility rates considerably for couples who are just so heartbroken that they can’t conceive.
How has the Health Data Nexus impacted research?
You can’t do AI without data. And if you have the data, you need a secure environment with substantial computing resources — most work laptops won’t cut it.
So, we collaborated with MIT and Google to create an open-source data community on Google Cloud built for AI in medicine that any researcher can access. We started this recently, and already we have voice, imaging and clinical data. Any researcher in Canada at an accredited university with the proper training can apply to access it with very few hurdles.
What strategies have been most effective in fostering collaboration across such a large and diverse AI community?
Canadians like to collaborate; we just need the venues in which to do it. The Temerty gift gave us the resources to implement strategy: to hire the people to coordinate this work, develop the grants that support multi-disciplinary teams, build the Health Data Nexus and bring summer students here from across the country to learn how to use these systems. Without that gift, none of this would have happened.
The biggest thing the centre has done is create community. It has basically brought Canada together to share our learnings and experiences around AI. There’s also an awareness now that this is a place almost anyone can come to learn about AI, so they’re seeking us out. That’s increasingly true internationally as well.
Looking ahead, what are some of the most exciting opportunities or challenges for T-CAIREM?
I’m really excited about creating pathways to accelerate innovation and scale it. That means engaging people in government, the private sector and hospital administration, to take these projects to the world. Innovation and problem-solving at U of T are incredible. Let’s get those solutions into peoples’ hands to benefit society at large.
At Unity Health Toronto, for example, we use AI to monitor our patients and help us identify those at high risk of deteriorating, which has led to a 26 per cent reduction in unexpected mortality. Other solutions developed by University Health Network create radiation treatment plans in a couple of minutes, rather than hours or days. Still others detect pneumonia and pulmonary embolism in seconds. These advances are all sitting here at U of T — we have the opportunity to scale them globally to benefit society at large.
Rankings
Renowned for world-class research and strong hospital partnerships, Temerty Medicine drives innovation in health sciences, shaping the future of care, education and discovery worldwide.
Research
Collectively, Temerty Medicine has received 23 per cent of all CIHR investigator-initiated research project funding and foundation grants awarded in Canada.
Practice
Temerty Medicine is the largest contributor of newly trained physicians in Canada, and graduates over half of the new specialists in Ontario annually.
