College of Pharmacy celebrates research excellence

By Danica Hidalgo Cherewyk

Dr.Ted Lakowski, associate dean of research in the College of Pharmacy, opened the college’s Research Day on March 12 at Apotex Centre on UM’s Bannatyne Campus on a high note.

“This year has been another successful one with respect to research,” he said.

Faculty members were awarded $6.22 million in funding between March 2025 and March 2026, including nearly $4.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and almost $400,000 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Faculty members and students in the College of Pharmacy published 48 manuscripts during that period.

“We thank our principal investigators for their hard work and dedication,” Lakowski said. “We also thank our research personnel, our graduate students, undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research associates and technicians. As I'm sure the faculty knows that research is extremely difficult — it is, in fact, impossible — without our personnel.”

Research Day chairs Drs. Anna Chudyk, assistant professor, and Kaarina Kowalec, associate professor, also shared welcome remarks.

The power of storytelling and collaboration with Indigenous peoples

Dr. Jaris Swidrovich, assistant professor and Indigenous engagement lead in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, was the keynote speaker at the event. He is also founder and chair of Indigenous Pharmacy Professionals of Canada.

Swidrovich is a queer, Two-Spirit, Saulteaux and Ukrainian pharmacist from Yellow Quill First Nation — and said he’s Canada’s only Indigenous pharmacist researcher in academia. He spoke about supporting mino-bimaadiziwin — “the good life” — through Indigenous research in pharmacy education and practice.  

“Everything that was asked here and what we want to engage with comes down to collaboration,” Swidrovich said. “Indigenous knowledge systems are not the norm, unfortunately, in academia and Western health disciplines like pharmacy. Decolonization and Indigenization are required for reconciliation, which are made possible through collaboration.”

Relationships, he said, are central to fostering collaboration.

“You've probably heard the phrase ‘in a good way’, or ‘open up a meeting in a good way’, or ‘collaborate in a good way’,” Swidrovich said. “It's a way that we First Nations, Métis and certainly some Inuit phrase that what we're doing has to be in a good way.

“And that's a really heavy statement. It's not just lingo. It must be in a good way, for good reasons, and to lead to good for our people and all people.”

He emphasized the power of stories and their essential role in collaboration with Indigenous peoples.

Highlighting faculty and student research

Dr. Abdullah Al Maruf, assistant professor of pharmacogenomics, presented his team’s work on implementing psychiatric pharmacogenomic (PGx) testing across Manitoba. PGx testing, he said, analyzes genes to help predict how a person’s body may respond to certain medications.

Two of his students won first- and second-prize awards in the poster competition’s dry lab category. 

Nuzhat Tabassum, a second-year international master’s student from Bangladesh, won second prize. Her research focuses on clonidine and guanfacine — medications used to treat mental health disorders such as ADHD in children and adolescents. 

With an undergraduate degree in microbiology, Tabassum has previously explored antibiotic resistance. 

“It came to my mind that the future of medicine is moving towards precision medicine — where treatment is personalized,” she said. “I started looking at precision medicine and exploring research groups in Canada and across the world.” 

Mental health, a topic not widely discussed in Bangladesh, was another field she wanted to explore. While searching for master's programs in Canada, she came across Maruf’s profile. 

“Both precision medicine and mental health are studied in his lab,” Tabassum said. “Dr. Maruf is one of the few pharmacy professors in Canada who passionately advocates for the use of precision medicine in mental health care."

Diverse research across pharmacy areas

Undergraduate students in the doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) program and graduate students presented research spanning a wide range of topics during the poster competition. Areas included diabetes, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease and more.

Wet lab category winners:

1st prize: Janessa Sawatzky, PharmD student

2nd prize: Rushie Tyagi, PhD student

3rd prize: Meher Kantroo, PhD student

Dry lab category winners:

1st prize: Natalia Morcilla, PharmD student

2nd prize: Nuzhat Tabassum, MSc student

3rd prize: Gabrielle Villaflor, PharmD student