Annalisanguyen

Anna-Lisa Nguyen is a current medical student at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and alumna of the Bachelor of Health Sciences (Honours) program at McMaster University. Her research experience is broad, spanning multiple disciplines including but not limited to: surgery, urology, pediatrics, neonatology, and epidemiology. Anna-Lisa was also a member of the McMaster University Rowing Team.

Secondary school

In 2017, she competed at the Fraser Valley Regional Science Fair and won gold and a monetary bursary, as well as an invitation to Canada-Wide Science Fair. In 2018, she worked briefly at the Hancock Laboratory at the University of British Columbia for her Sanofi Biogenius project.

Undergraduate degree

During university, Anna-Lisa started volunteering at the Aquatic Behavioural Ecology Lab under the supervision of Dr. Sigal Balshine in 2018. From there, she joined as a project student and worked under Nick Brown and Dr. Balshine on multiple projects. For her final project, she supported the development of a computer-vision project that aimed to improve video annotation and analysis of animal behaviours.

During her tenure at ABEL, she also began to volunteer as a biocurator in the McArthur Lab and the Institute of Infection Disease Research in 2019. Here, she completed curation for the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database. Over the summer, she worked on the amr_curation community project underneath Alex Bateman to improve community biocuration and troubleshooting and a project on Burholderia curation. She received authorship on the CARD 2020 publication, first-authored by Brian Alcock. Following her volunteering, she became a project student in a collaboration with Dr. Lori Burrows and the McArthur Lab.

Her thesis on the analysis of maternal milk began in Fall 2020 and ended in Spring 2021. Starting in Spring 2021, Anna-Lisa conducted a systematic review under the supervision of Dr. Bradley S. Quon from the University of British Columbia and St. Paul's Hospital (Vancouver). Her review focused on identifying viable biomarkers to diagnose and predict pulmonary exacerbations in cystic fibrosis patients. This review[1] was published on May 31, 2022 in Frontiers in Pediatrics.