2019 Discovery Award Recipients

We are thrilled to announce the Banting Research Foundation 2019 Discovery Award recipients! This year, we were able to fund six projects from outstanding applicants, chosen out of 79 applications. These applicants were the highest ranking in our 2019 peer-reviewed competition.

The Banting Research Foundation Discovery Award is unique in that it it focuses on early-career researchers with limited funding across all the disciplines in health and biomedical sciences. Discovery Award recipients receive $25,000 to support their new lines of research and help generate data that will strengthen subsequent applications for longer-term grants from other funding agencies.

Lindsay Bodell, PhD

2019 Discovery Awardee

Department of Psychology
Western University
Negative Affect and Reward Processing in Individuals with Binge Eating


Andrea Bombak, PhD

2019 Discovery Awardee

Department of Sociology
University of New Brunswick 
Intersections of Weight Stigma in New Brunswick

Mahsa Jessri, PhD

2019 Discovery Awardee

Department of Food, Nutrition, and Health
University of British Columbia
Dietary Patterns and Food Policies: Measuring the Impact on Health

Benoit Laurent, PhD

2019 Discovery Awardee

Department of Biochemistry
Université de Sherbrooke
Deciphering the epigenetic regulation of alternative splicing in neurons

Daiva Nielsen, PhD

2019 Discovery Awardee

Department of Human Nutrition
McGill University
Characterization of the workplace food environment in Montreal Canada: New directions for gene-environment interaction and health research

Arneet Saltzman, PhD

2019 Banting Research Foundation/McLaughlin Centre Discovery Awardee

Department of Cell and Systems Biology
University of Toronto
Investigating the role of heterochromatin readers in genome stability