Maeve Doyle

Neuroanatomy course takes a personal approach to brain illustrations

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 14:20:29 +0000

Neuroanatomy course takes a personal approach to brain illustrations

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 03/28/2022 - 10:20

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Students taking a neuroanatomy course as part of �山ǿ��'s biomedical communications program were challenged to draw both an accurate representation of the brain – and themselves (images via Instagram)

Maeve Doyle

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Our Community

Biomedical Communications

Academics

Graduate Students

�山ǿ�� Mississauga

A medical illustrator may well be asked to create illustrations of the brain over the course of his or her career – but rarely do the assignments get personal.

Shelley Wall, associate professor of biomedical communications and biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, says she wanted to challenge the design and rendering skills of graduate students when the “Neuroanatomy for Visual Communication” course was rescheduled from the master of science in biomedical communications program’s first year to its second year.

The course teaches students the structure and function of the brain and the cranial nerves. They engage in interactive exercises, examine brain specimens and skulls, study historical and contemporary texts, and watch videos of dissections.

"In first year, students are still finding their way in anatomical illustration,” says Wall, adding that the course’s first assignment had previously been a straightforward illustration of the brain in isolation. “Now that Neuro is a second-year graduate course, I could take it to the next level because the students' skills are so much more developed.

“So, I conceived the neuro self-portrait assignment."

Making the assignment a self-portrait not only raised the bar in terms of understanding, it also allowed the students to show off their creativity.

“Drawing the brain is one thing – you must make it accurate,” Wall says. “But what makes this assignment so different is that you really must understand all the important relationships between the brain, the brain case, and the external features of the head. And making the assignment a self-portrait is a way of making it also a completely unique illustration that really puts the students’ stamp on it.”

Even working within the constraints of the course assignment, and the strict parameters of depicting the brain with accuracy, the course’s second-year graduate students delivered a broad range of unique and original illustrations.

Mimi (Yuejun) Guo used two different traditional mediums and then digitally composited them to create her self-portrait.

“I used carbon dust to create a black-and-white self-portrait with less saturation and colour to not compete with the brain illustration,” Guo says. “I used acrylic paint for its vibrant colours and to highlight the brain.”

Guo also added a whole new layer of complexity to the assignment by portraying the brain from an upward angle, and at a three-quarter view.

“I chose this perspective to show all the crucial anatomical parts – the cerebral hemisphere, the cerebellum, the brainstem and the origins of the cranial nerves,” says Guo.

One student in Wall’s course worked with brain imaging data belonging to his father, who was diagnosed with a pituitary tumour two years ago and received copies of his MRI scans.

"Before my father's surgery in 2021, I tried to help him understand his condition better,” says Shehryar Saharan. “I was shocked by the lack of high-quality visuals available to explain the tumour in relation to the optic nerve and the rest of the brain. When this neuro assignment was introduced, it became the best excuse to help fill this void and create a neuroanatomy visualisation that would explain my dad's condition in a meaningful and simplified way.”

Saharan asked his father to pose for the portrait and he used his father's brain scans plus many other references to illustrate the brain and the tumour.

Saharan says that his father, whose surgery was a success, was thrilled with his neuro portrait. "After my dad saw the finished piece, he was better able to understand what he had gone through,” Saharan says. “He said he wished that he had had it earlier."

Sana Khan’s brother posed for her portrait, which Khan created in a style that references the 19^th-century anatomical atlas Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme written by Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery, and illustrated by Nicolas Henri Jacob.

“Rather than “ghost” the brain over the portrait, I wanted my illustration to look in vivo – as if you could pull back flaps of skin and tissue to see the brain within,” says Khan.

The homage to Bourgery’s canonical text also adds a touch of whimsy to the illustration, Wall says. She adds that, for medical illustrators, the neuro self-portrait assignment, which can be viewed on the program’s Instagram account, is the perfect intersection of complexity and accuracy, and creativity and originality.

“I like to think that this assignment not only challenges the students, but let’s them have some artistic fun as well.”

From colour-changing lizards to 'buff' birds, �山ǿ�� students create fun, science-focused trading cards

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 17:11:38 +0000

From colour-changing lizards to 'buff' birds, �山ǿ�� students create fun, science-focused trading cards

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 10/18/2021 - 13:11

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Taking a cue from Pokémon trading cards, students in �山ǿ�� Mississauga's biomedical communications program created the BMC SciCard Collaborative project to build community and inspire incoming students (image courtesy of Shehryar Saharan)

Maeve Doyle

Topic

Our Community

Biomedical Communications

Student Experience

Graduate Students

�山ǿ�� Mississauga

Move over Pokémon – BMC SciCards are here.

Inspired by the Pokémon collectible trading cards of their childhood, University of Toronto biomedical communications students Shehryar (Shay) Saharan and Michie (Xingyu) Wu developed the BMC SciCard Collaborative project.

“The project began back in February 2021 when Michie and I were talking about ways we could collaborate as a cohort and involve other BMC students,” says Saharan, now a second-year student in the Master of Science in Biomedical Communications (BMC) program at �山ǿ�� Mississauga.

BMC students are educated and trained in medical illustration and scientific visualization. Saharan, Wu and their cohort completed almost their entire first year online due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

“We felt like a lot of our projects were individual, so we thought, ‘Why not have a fun side-project that we could all contribute to and also get the incoming BMC students involved in?’” Saharan says.

Shehryar (Shay) Saharan and Michie (Xingyu) Wu co-created the BMC SciCard Collaborative project (photo by Dave Mazierski)

The SciCard Collaborative project is based on the idea of trading cards but with a BMC twist. Unlike Pokémon's imaginary creatures with magical powers, the SciCard “creatures” are real.

“Everyone could choose an animal, a plant or a molecule with some sort of special ability that can be explained by science,” says Saharan, who still owns a Pokémon collection of over 200 cards.

Each participant tackled subjects with seemingly impossible traits and then created cards for them. Participants were encouraged to illustrate the card fronts in their own unique, explorative and creative styles. The card backs had to explain the science.

Saharan chose to depict the panther chameleon, which can change the colour of its skin – an ability Saharan finds fascinating and wanted to learn more about.

"The front of the card was called Colour-Changing Crystals,” he says. “The back shows the different layers of the skin and explains how the structure within the skin allows different light to bounce off and cause that colour-changing effect. So, although it sounds very magical, there are interesting scientific properties to explain it.”

Shehryar Saharan rendered the panther chameleon in carbon dust and then scanned and inverted the image so that light and dark tones were switched, giving the Colour-Changing Crystals card a nocturnal look and emphasizing the “wizardly” nature of the chameleon (Image courtesy of Shehryar Saharan)

First-year BMC graduate student Anaïs Lupu hadn't yet started the program when she received an invitation from Saharan and Wu to participate in the SciCard Collaborative project.

Anaïs Lupu (photo by Dave Mazierski)

“I was excited. I wanted to make a good impression and put my first piece out there,” says Lupu, a former Yu-gi-oh! trading card collector and, according to Saharan, a very talented artist.

“I did a detailed illustration in a [National Geographic] style,” says Lupu. Her card front is a realistic depiction of the deadly southern cassowary on a forest background. A pretty, blue, flightless bird, the Cassowary's special ability is its powerful kick. “This bird is buff,” she says. For the card back, Lupu chose to communicate the science through infographics rather than text.

Saharan and Wu organized online meetings for the SciCard participants where they presented their sketches and received feedback.

Anaïs Lupu llustrated her card front in a realistic National Geographic style, using infographics to communicate the science behind the bird’s powerful and dangerous kick (image courtesy of Anaïs Lupu)

Like Pokémon cards, SciCards have power rankings or "hit points." Lupu's Spear Kick card has a hit point of 55. Saharan's Colour-Changing Crystals has a hit point of 48.

“We even met to vote on the strength of the special ability,” says Lupu.

Saharan describes the SciCard Collaborative project as a precursor to the program’s information visualization course and a chance to explore visual communication principles. “The stakes were low. It was just collaborative and fun and we all got to know each other in the process, too. So, that was really rewarding,” he says.

He says he hopes that, with a larger collection in the future, there may be an online archive of the artwork and even printed physical copies of the SciCards. For now, the digital files are stored within the BMC program.

Saharan says that he and Wu hope someone will take on the SciCard Collaborative project next year and recruit a new group of current and incoming students to participate.

Lupu may just be that someone.

“I want to do this again next year if it's offered,” she says. “If not, I'd like to borrow their idea and run it myself.”

Using a borrowed 3D printer, �山ǿ�� prof prints dozens of skulls for students in his virtual class

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 18:33:23 +0000

Using a borrowed 3D printer, �山ǿ�� prof prints dozens of skulls for students in his virtual class

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 01/22/2021 - 13:33

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Associate Professor Dave Mazierski printed and prepared skulls of a bat-eared fox for the nearly 50 students in his scientific drawing class, a laborious process that took 22 hours (photo by Dave Mazierski)

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Dave Mazierski spent the holiday break focused on an un-seasonal task: printing 3D models of bat-eared fox skulls.

Mazierski, a vertebrate palaeontologist and associate professor of biomedical communications at the University of Toronto Mississauga, teaches a scientific drawing class. The skulls were needed for his nearly 50 undergraduate students to complete one of the course’s exercises.

Normally, rows of drawing stations would be set up in one of the biology department’s laboratories so students can observe and sketch primate skulls.

“Like a skull-sketching factory,” Mazierski says.

But with teaching forced online by the global COVID-19 pandemic, Mazierski needed to get creative since there wasn’t a space large enough to accommodate students in safe, physically distanced manner and the primate skulls were too valuable and too fragile to lend out.

So, Mazierski got approval to borrow the program’s 3D printer. He researched online repositories for 3D data for skulls and settled on the bat-eared fox.

“It’s got interesting teeth,” he says, holding up a resin model of the skull. “It’s slightly smaller than life, but it’s large enough that students can see the features we want them to understand, and to draw the various elements of the skull. The size and shape was easy to print as a single object and to clean.”

He taps the desk with the 3D print.

“And they’re durable.”

Working in batches of nine, Associate Professor Dave Mazierski says it took 22 hours to print the skulls (photos by Dave Mazierski)

Mazierski printed the models in his newly converted 3D printing studio, formerly his daughter’s bedroom.

“It took 22 hours to print them nine at a time (the maximum the desktop 3D printer could produce) and another 20 minutes per skull to remove them from the build platform and clean them,” says Mazierski.

He then packed the models into envelopes for each student, along with grids and a stand that he built from pine boards.

It took 20 minutes to remove each skull from the build platform and clean it (photo by Dave Mazierski)

Many students collected their skulls from lockers in the biology department, but some supplies had to be mailed to students as far away as British Columbia, Ireland and Pakistan.

Laboratory drawings are a standard part of life science studies. In comparative anatomy courses, for example, students are expected to create manuals in which they draw their observations.

“In vertebrate palaeontology, you have to be able to draw your specimen to report it for publication,” Mazierski says.

Encouraging people to draw is sometimes a way to encourage them to learn in a different way.

“While you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, a scientific drawing can’t be vague or ambivalent. If it’s going to be accurate and convey information, all those lines must have meaning,” Mazierski says. “The act of drawing forces you to understand.”

�山ǿ�� student creates postcard to support disaster relief in Beirut

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 15:37:22 +0000

�山ǿ�� student creates postcard to support disaster relief in Beirut

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 08/13/2020 - 11:37

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Farah Hamade poses for a photo in Lebanon – a country she describes as her "second home" – in the summer of 2019 (photo courtesy of Farah Hamade)

Maeve Doyle

Topic

Global Lens

Lebanon

Biomedical Communications

Graduate Students

�山ǿ�� Mississauga

Farah Hamade woke up and checked her phone the morning of Aug. 4. Her family chat group was crammed with messages: "Is everyone OK? What happened?”

It was 6 p.m. local time in Beirut, when a stockpile of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse exploded in the city's port. A second, stronger explosion obliterated buildings and devastated the densely populated area. Hundreds of people died. Thousands were injured. Many more were displaced.

Next, videos of the destruction appeared in Hamade’s social media feed.

"The footage was shocking,” says Hamade, a second year graduate student in the master of science in biomedical communications program at the University of Toronto Mississauga. “I was in utter disbelief. My family sent photos of damage to their offices and homes, of destruction in the streets that are so familiar to me.

“Thankfully my family is safe, but we all know someone who has been injured, left homeless or killed."

Hamade was born in San Francisco. She lived in multiple countries while growing up and considers Lebanon her second home. “I grew up visiting family in Beirut multiple times a year for holidays and summers. A big part of my family lives in Beirut and the surrounding areas,” she says.

Her memories from Beirut are of family greetings at the airport, pillow forts in her grandmother’s apartment and morning coffees on her aunt's balcony.

To help raise money for disaster relief efforts, Hamade is selling postcard prints of a watercolour sketch that depicts the view from her aunt's balcony in the Hamra neighbourhood of Beirut circa 2017.

“It's a city filled with life and creativity, nestled between the sea and the mountains,” says Hamad, a biomedical visualization specialist.

Already concerned about Lebanon’s financial crisis and public protests, Hamade says she now worries about the coronavirus pandemic as victims made homeless by the catastrophe try to find shelter with family and friends.

Despite feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, Hamade says that she knows she can help, even from a distance, by raising funds and sharing news. So, she is selling postcard prints of a watercolour sketch that depicts the view from her aunt's balcony in the Hamra neighbourhood of Beirut circa 2017 (funds can be sent via Venmo to farahamade). She says the sketch represents both a happy memory for her and a hopeful future for the city.

“All the funds raised from the postcards will go to disaster relief efforts in Beirut,” she says, adding that the first batch of donations will go to the Lebanese Red Cross and future donations will go to other NGOs working in the area.

Regardless of the reasons behind the catastrophe, Hamade says the important thing is people who are suffering need help.

“I hope that these postcard prints will encourage people to donate and maybe even inspire them to visit Beirut one day.”

Forests for the future: �山ǿ�� researcher seeks to make trees more resilient amid a changing climate

davidlee1 — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 14:52:26 +0000

Forests for the future: �山ǿ�� researcher seeks to make trees more resilient amid a changing climate

davidlee1 Tue, 08/13/2019 - 10:52

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Katharina Braeutigam, a plant epigeneticist at the University of Toronto, is studying how trees respond to external signals such as drought in the hopes of finding individual genotypes that can be adapted to a changing climate (photo by Maeve Doyle)

Maeve Doyle

Topic

Our Community

Cell and Systems Biology

Biology

Climate Change

Research & Innovation

Sustainability

�山ǿ�� Mississauga

Katharina Braeutigam, a plant epigeneticist at the University of Toronto, wants to grow trees fit for a future climate.

By studying plants at the molecular level, Braeutigam looks at how trees respond to external signals such as drought, and how they record “memories” of stress. She also researches how they respond to internal signals – specifically those that determine sex.

The hope is to find individual genotypes that can be adapted to a changing climate. That’s because a fast-changing environment may not allow trees – which themselves play a key role in driving the planet’s climate by buffering carbon dioxide levels through photosynthesis – to reproduce quickly enough for standard natural selection to happen, leaving them to die in their own habitat.

“Unlike us, trees are not mobile,” says Braeutigam, an assistant professor in the department of biology at �山ǿ�� Mississauga. “They are fixed in place for a very long time.

“It is important for them to acclimate within the moment, which for a plant is its lifetime, and to adapt within the evolutionary time scale.”

Braeutigam gives an example of a young poplar that experiences an unusually hot and dry summer – a heatwave combined with a drought. This affects the tree’s growth immediately. It may be smaller than its cousins that grew in wet and cooler years.

If this stress happens repeatedly, the tree might make a record alongside its genome. This record would give the tree the capacity to respond differently to environmental changes than others that had never experienced a heatwave. In a sense, this tree would have learned how to cope with the changes and may be able to pass that knowledge on to the next generation.

“Does it teach its children? This is a hotly debated topic in biology that we call transgenerational molecular memory. We know that this happens in short-lived plants,” says Brauetigam.

Katharina Braeutigam on the ‘memory’ of trees

Braeutigam’s work includes a focus on the balsam poplar, a dominant tree species in Canada.

“It’s a very typical tree for Canadian forests, even more so than the maple tree. It is more widespread,” she says.

Poplars grow for between five to 10 years before they flower, which is necessary to make the seeds that produce the next generation. But Braeutigam takes cuttings from her trees and propagates them under controlled conditions at �山ǿ�� Mississauga’s research greenhouse before transplanting them outdoors.

Braeutigam propagates experimental tree saplings under controlled environmental conditions in the �山ǿ�� Mississauga research greenhouse (photo by Maeve Doyle)

“We have seen that they can carry over epigenetic marks or ‘memories’ into a new plant. We have published some of this work and are continuing to work to understand how long the memory lasts, which specific positions in the genome are affected, if there are individual trees that do this more or better than others from the same population,” says Braeutigam.

Braeutigam and collaborators from the University of British Columbia, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the University of Guelph recently identified a strong candidate for a master regulator of sex in balsam poplars using genomic information, epigenetic information and machine learning.

“If the master regulator, the ‘switch,’ is turned on, a female tree is produced. Turned off, and a male is produced. Now we are working to understand exactly how this master switch works,” says Braeutigam.

“Understanding this can have implications for breeding.”

There is a wealth of information to be learned from how the same genome can be interpreted in many different contexts such as cell types, stress situations and different ages, Braeutigam says.

“It is important to study and understand and to harness the solutions that all these organisms have found to solve a certain problem.”

Critical images from new satellites aid �山ǿ�� faculty member's lake ice research

noreen.rasbach — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 14:00:48 +0000

Critical images from new satellites aid �山ǿ�� faculty member's lake ice research

noreen.rasbach Fri, 08/09/2019 - 10:00

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“Our research will help Canadians and others in temperate regions around the world as we learn to live with our changing climate,” says �山ǿ�� cryospheric scientist Laura Brown (photo by Maeve Doyle)

Topic

Research & Innovation

�山ǿ�� Mississauga

University of Toronto cryospheric scientist Laura Brown says a trio of satellites recently launched by the Canadian Space Agency will help improve how she researches lake ice and climate change because it provides satellite and radar images of all of Canada’s territory daily, as well as images of the Arctic up to four times a day.

“Thanks to the new RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), there will be much better coverage so we won’t have gaps in the data,” says Brown, an associate professor in �山ǿ�� Mississauga's department of geography.

Brown studies lake ice in both the Arctic and temperate regions. She wants to know how freshwater ice and snow are responding to the change in climate. She combines the satellite data with information from other sources to represent the ice and snow system in climate models.

Until now, Brown accessed data from the RCM’s predecessor. “But my field site in Haliburton is just outside the region with daily coverage by RADARSAT-2, so we only had imagery about one in every three days from the radar bands we need,” she says.

She and her research team filled the data gaps by inferring it through temperature data. “But actually being able to visualize the ice cover itself is so much better than just looking at the temperature.”

Brown says that lake ice is a proxy of our climate. “If the climate warms or cools, if there is a change in the snow, the ice responds.”

Temperate region lake ice differs from Arctic ice. Arctic ice is thick and black with just a thin layer of white reflective ice from snow on top. Arctic ice stays frozen until spring. In temperate regions, snow piles up on lake ice, mid-winter thaws cause flooding, then the water refreezes. “So we get a layer of white ice which is more reflective but thinner ice overall and not as strong,” Brown says.

The three RADARSAT Constellation Mission satellites provide images of all of Canada’s territory daily, as well as images of the Arctic up to four times a day (image courtesy of the Canadian Space Agency)

With more data from the RCM, Brown will be able to see daily surface changes from mid-winter thaws and track how often they happen. She will be able to develop models to better project if lake ice is forming later and disappearing sooner.

“We also use the satellites to look at a larger area from space,” she says. “Rather than just drill a hole and look at one lake, we can look at a whole region at once to see how it is changing.”

A change in ice cover impacts recreational activities on the ice like snowmobiling and ice fishing. It impacts transportation over ice roads. It also impacts what happens under the ice.

Brown says that less ice cover means more open water. More open water means more evaporation and more sunlight coming into the lake. “This would change the organisms living in the lake that respond to different light conditions. It could also change the nutrients within the lake,” says Brown.

In a forthcoming paper, Brown and PhD candidate Alexis Robinson present a new climate model “to better represent the reflectivity of our ice cover here so that we can get the melt timing with more accuracy.”

Brown, members of her research team and a scientist from her industry partner Campbell Scientific Canada are taking part in a summer trip to the Arctic. The first stop was the Polar Continental Shelf Program’s research station in Resolute, an Inuit community, on Cornwallis Island in Nunavut. With help from a member of the Resolute Bay Hunters and Trappers Association, Brown collected data on Arctic lake ice conditions from two of her research lakes.

Next the researchers flew to Polar Bear Pass National Wildlife Area on Bathurst Island where Brown has another lake instrument to observe ice cover. She also helps to maintain Campbell Scientific’s weather tower there in exchange for data.

“By the end of the century, the research lakes in Haliburton probably won't have ice cover every year,” says Brown. “Our research will help Canadians and others in temperate regions around the world as we learn to live with our changing climate.”

Beautiful tumours: biomedical illustrators capture top honours

sgupta — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 08:58:16 +0000

Beautiful tumours: biomedical illustrators capture top honours sgupta Wed, 08/13/2014 - 04:58

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Kateryna Procunier's award-winning images of the tumour known as a vestibular schwannoma (image courtesy UTM)

Maeve Doyle

Author legacy

Maeve Doyle

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"This really is a remarkable piece"

Artists from the University of Toronto’s Biomedical Communications (BMC) program brought home top honours from the Association of Medical Illustrators’ conference.

A first-year graduate student and a faculty member from the University of Toronto Mississauga were both recognized at the AMI annual meeting July 23-26 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Kateryna Procunier, a first-year student in the Master of Science in Biomedical Communications program, won the “Orville Parkes Best of Show” award for her piece, “The Clinical Significance of the Formation and Growth of a Vestibular Schwannoma.”

“I didn’t believe it at first, and had to double-check the list of winners to make sure,” said Procunier.

The artwork depicts the four stages of progression and structural effects of growth of a vestibular schwannoma, a benign tumour involving the cells that insulate and support the vestibular nerve of the inner ear. The illustrations show how the tumour is formed, and the ear and nerve structures the tumour affects as it develops.

Procunier digitally painted the piece, which is intended for use in an anatomy textbook for medical students.

“This really is a remarkable piece,” said Nicholas Woolridge, director of the Biomedical Communications program. “It clearly explains the growth of a tumour in a complex, tiny space deep in the skull.”

Assistant Professor Jodie Jenkinson with her co-investigator, Gaël McGill of Harvard Medical School, received the “2014 Literary Award” for their outstanding article, “Using 3D Animation in Biology Education: Examining the Effects of Visual Complexity in the Representation of Dynamic Molecular Events.”

The editorial board of The Journal of Biocommunication selects the award winner from the scholarly articles published in the journal in the preceding year.

BMC graduate students and alumni also won in a number of categories at the Salon Exhibit that opened the meeting. Kateryna Procunier, Qingyang Chen, Natalie Cormier, Megan Kirkland, Man-San Ma, Brendan Polley and Andrew Tubelli and alumni Jerusha Ellis and Stuart Jantzen represented the BMC program with their winning pieces in multiple student categories.

Winners in the professional categories included �山ǿ�� alumni Kate Campbell and Ian Suk, and BMC industry partners and employers of BMC alumni, Artery Studios, AXS Studio Inc., and INVIVO Communications.

Maeve Doyle is a writer with the University of Toronto Mississauga.

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