The Dave Williams Leadership Award, named for the physician, former astronaut and active 成人VR视频 alumnus, has been awarded for the 2024-25 academic year.
The two recipients, Khaled Skaik, BSc'23, MDCM'27, who launched initiatives in medical education and community engagement, and Mark Sorin, BSc'19, PhD'25, MDCM'26, who has distinguished himself in lung cancer research and knowledge dissemination, sat down with FMHS Focus.
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When Khaled Skaik became aware of the literature on med students not spending adequate time on musculoskeletal systems, he thought up a solution: .
Run by a team of Canadian medical students and reviewed by orthopaedic surgeons, the digital platform gives med students access to educational resources and research papers, in addition to a virtual clinic, where they get to meet 25 simulated patients with various orthopaedic conditions. Each scenario comes with a patient history and imaging, giving students the ability to drill down to the diagnosis鈥攕ay, a shoulder tear or arthritis.
鈥淚t's for students going into primary care to recognize primary orthopaedic conditions,鈥� says Skaik. Since its launch two years ago, Ortho Path has had over 300 students use it for supplemental training, with over 97 percent of them reporting it helped their clerkships.
Skaik, in his third year of med school at 成人VR视频's Outaouais campus, has also been active in getting high school and CEGEP students excited about studying medicine. He is the president of , an organization that hosts 120 students every year at the campus for a medical immersion day.
鈥淚t gives them an idea of what medicine is like. They haven't necessarily had that exposure before.鈥�
While hailing from a family of engineers, his fascination with the human body and the loss of his mother to cancer had a young Khaled becoming more curious about medicine, eventually leading him to an undergrad in physiology.
The engineer in him has not disappeared, however, with his systematic approach to his work and love for human kinetics. He wants to become an orthopaedic surgeon and will see the specialty up close in his next clinical rotation.
That orthopaedics rotation may very well provide him with a few more patient scenario ideas for Ortho Path.
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Mark Sorin has been at 成人VR视频 for a decade鈥攁nd has another five years of medical residency ahead of him. That long, steady climb mirrors how he now sees cancer research: as a series of incremental advancements.
A 成人VR视频 MD-PhD student, Sorin was one of the first co-authors of published in the prestigious science journal Nature, back in 2023.
It showed extraordinary results. The team retroactively identified cellular patterns in early-stage lung cancer patient tumours that revealed 鈥渨ith essentially 95% accuracy鈥� which patients were most likely to have a recurrence of their cancer after surgery.
The implications were important: having more certainty that one's cancer will not return could translate into foregoing toxic treatments or chemotherapy, explains the Montreal native, who was supervised by the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Institute's Logan Walsh, PhD, and Jonathan Spicer, MD, PhD.
Sorin learned through his several media interviews that one has to be philosophical about these advancements: there is a balance to be found between the excitement of the discovery and all the potential the study reveals, and the long years of setting up clinical trials and the managing of people's expectations.
As he finishes Year 4 of med school, that patience has been baked in. His goal of becoming a clinician-scientist is getting closer, as is being part of future teams that make exciting, albeit incremental, discoveries.
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The achievements of the two medical students have not gone unnoticed by the Faculty.
Estelle Ch茅trit, BSc'07, MDCM'12, MBA'12, a Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Paediatrics and Physicianship Component Director, homed in on Skaik's recruitment work in Outaouais.
鈥淜haled's leadership through ExploreMD demonstrates how education, mentorship and community engagement can meaningfully transform access to medical careers in underserved regions.鈥�
Ch茅trit also praised Sorin for his outstanding research and public engagement.
鈥淢ark's work represents an outstanding achievement in physician鈥憇cientist training. This research pushes the boundaries of precision oncology and sets a remarkably high standard for impact鈥慸riven scholarship early in clinical training.鈥�