91直播

The Richard H. Tomlinson Fellowship aims to attract high-caliber doctoral听students in any discipline at听91直播. The Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowships are worth $35,000/year for up to 3 years, making this one of the most prestigious fellowships programs in Canada and a significant contribution to recruiting and supporting exceptional graduate students at 91直播. Read more听on what it means to be a Tomlinson Scholar. More information about the fellowships are available here.

2025-2026 Scholars

Alessio Tosolini, Linguistics

Alessio Tosolini is an incoming first-year Linguistics PhD student at 91直播. He worked on creating and evaluating speech technologies for low-resource Australian languages at Yale and has degrees in linguistics and computer science from the University of Washington. His goal is to reintroduce linguistic theory in speech processing to improve the quality of these tools for endangered languages.

Documenting, studying, and creating learning resources for languages requires large corpora of transcribed speech, a process that is expensive and time consuming in a context where time is already running out. Though modern automatic speech recognition systems (such as Siri) have improved greatly in the last decade, these systems require enormous amounts of annotated data to function well, worsening the gap between the computational tools available to different languages. Languages differ greatly in the specific sounds they employ, limiting the generalizability of speech technology trained on any individual language.

Though the specific sounds used in each language differ, linguists have theorized the existence of a language-independent system that underlies the language-dependent sound inventories of any language. I will work towards creating speech technology that learns to identify these features rather than sounds directly to make transcription systems that are much more language-flexible. Doing so would significantly speed up speech transcription for data-scarce languages, benefitting both linguists wishing to perform downstream analyses and community linguists hoping to create pedagogical materials for their languages.

Alessio is honoured and honored to be a recipient of the Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship and is excited to see how the Tomlinson fellowship will allow this research to make a greater impact on speakers of endangered languages.

Alondra P茅rez,听Anthropology

Alondra P茅rez is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at 91直播. For her undergraduate and master鈥檚 studies, she conducted research in northwestern Mexico studying how Indigenous communities had dealt with conquest and colonization between 16th-century and 19th-century, surviving both Spanish and Euro-American control. Through Historical Archaeology, her current project examines interethnic negotiations and Indigenous agency in a colonial settlement in northern Mexico founded by Tlaxcalan people sent by Spanish Crown to colonize the peripheries of New Spain. Integrating archaeological evidence, historical records, and community oral histories, her research analyze how Indigenous communities navigated and enacted the expansion of New Spain. This project challenges binary interpretations of conquest and assimilation, instead highlighting the Tlaxcalan complex dual identity as Indigenous colonial agents and colonial subjects, while also exploring northern groups鈥� varied responses to colonial encounters, thus revealing a complex process of adaptation, hybridity, and strategic resistance. A cornerstone of this work is its collaborative, decolonial approach, ensuring that descendant communities lead in reclaiming their roles in the production of historical narratives.

I am honored to receive the Richard H. Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship, which will provide me with an enormous support to conduct the before mentioned research project. Furthermore, I am very grateful for the opportunity to develop my knowledge and skills as part of the 91直播 community.

Emma Bock, History

Emma Bock is a first year PhD student in History working under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Desbarats. She received her BA from the University of Saskatchewan, and recently completed her MA at Queen's, where she examined the material lives of merchant-class women in late-eighteenth-century Upper Louisiana. In particular, she looked at the relationship between the domestic sphere, feminine goods, community-building, and women's agency in post-Conquest North America.

Her proposed doctoral research expands on this thesis work, widening the geographic scope of the project. Emma aims to examine the material lives of merchant-class francophone women in Upper Louisiana, Lower Louisiana, and newer French Creole communities in the eastern United States to better understand how women's work helped craft francophone settler societies in the late-eighteenth century.

Emma is honoured and grateful to have been award the Richard H. Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship, which will support her research into the lives and material culture of women in the French North American diaspora.

Giuseppe D鈥橝ndrea,听Mental听Health

Giuseppe D鈥橝ndrea earned his medical degree from the University of Naples 鈥� Federico II and completed his psychiatry residency at the University of Bologna 鈥� Alma Mater Studiorum. During his training, he contributed to the EU-GEI study on environmental and genetic factors in first-episode psychosis. He later worked as a general psychiatrist in Modena before moving to Montreal for a research fellowship at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and CRCHUM, under the supervision of Professors Srividya Iyer, Amal Abdel-Baki, and Jai Shah. His work in early psychosis and youth mental health has been published in leading journals and presented at international conferences, including SIRS and IAYMH. He was recently awarded a $25,000 scholarship from the Canadian Consortium for Early Intervention in Psychosis.

Giuseppe鈥檚 PhD research investigates the social determinants of psychosis through intersectionality, complex systems modeling, and the social exposome. Using geospatial analysis and machine learning, he aims to uncover patterns of vulnerability and resilience to inform equitable mental health policies and services.

He is honoured to be a recipient of the Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship, which supports his commitment to advancing equity and innovation in mental health research.

Hunter Dyche,听Neuroscience

Hunter Dyche is a first year PhD student in the Integrated Program in Neuroscience under the supervision of Dr. Mark Brandon. He completed his BS in Computational and Systems Neuroscience at Virginia Tech. His research will investigate how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information to support spatial navigation in both healthy and disease states.

We constantly navigate the world around us. This ability is essential for survival and depends on 鈥榗ognitive maps鈥� formed in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Each new environment we experience is represented by distinct groups of brain cells, which prevents memories of different environments from overlapping. A long-standing theory in neuroscience is that the brain avoids confusion between encoding (storing new information) and retrieval (recalling old听information) of memories by separating these processes in time, using a local rhythm in the hippocampus called 鈥渢heta鈥�. This theory has been difficult to test due to the challenges of recording from large populations of neurons while simultaneously manipulating the activity of neural circuits in awake behaving animals. However, recent advancements in technology now make it possible to directly test this theory. By precisely controlling neural activity and monitoring the brain's internal maps as animals explore both new and familiar environments, his work could provide novel evidence that memory encoding and retrieval are separated in time by the theta rhythm. If successful, he will apply these novel methods in mouse models of Alzheimer鈥檚 disease to determine if disruptions in theta coordination contribute to memory impairments, and if听so, whether we can recover these processes. Collectively, his work could validate a key theory of memory and lead to new treatments for Alzheimer鈥檚 and other memory-related diseases.

Hunter is very honored to receive the Richard H. Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship and grateful for the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research in the Brandon Lab at 91直播.

Jacob Deschamps,听Sociology

Jacob Deschamps is an incoming Ph. D student in the Department of Sociology under the supervision of Dr. Milo拧 Bro膰i膰. He joins 91直播 after having completed his MSc degree in Population Studies at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, specializing in social statistics. Prior to that, he received his BSc degree in Sociology in 2023 from the Universit茅 de Montr茅al. During his studies, Jacob was involved as a sociology teacher at Coll猫ge Bois-de-Boulogne and as an external consultant for Kativik Ilisarniliriniq.

His project focuses on the role that social media play in the political socialization of young people. Specifically, his research investigates how day-to-day digital interactions - such as liking, posting, and sharing - shape political beliefs, even among youth who do not perceive themselves as particularly political. As more and more facets of our lives become digitized, he proposes that the convergence of self-expression, social association and information gathering on the same platforms has important consequences on why and how we come to believe in what we do. More broadly, by shedding light on the digital roots of political identity, Jacob strives to address important contemporary social issues such as institutional distrust, political polarization and misinformation.

Jacob is grateful to be a recipient of the Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship and join 91直播 as a graduate student.

Konstantin Stock,听Chemistry

Konstantin Stock is a first-year PhD student supervised by Dr. Chao-Jun Li in the Department of Chemistry. Before pursuing his Doctoral Studies, he earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees with distinction in Chemistry from Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. During his master's, he completed an internship in the Li Lab at 91直播. After finishing his studies, Konstantin worked briefly in the pharmaceutical industry before returning to 91直播 in Winter 2025 to begin his PhD.

His research focuses on sustainable chemistry and photocatalysis, which utilizes light energy to drive chemical reactions. Imagine using sunlight not only to grow plants but also to power chemical reactions that produce medicines, materials and everyday products. Konstantin is exploring a new, metal-free method for harnessing light in chemical synthesis, thereby avoiding the traditional use of rare and costly metals, such as iridium or ruthenium, as catalysts. His work employs accessible, modifiable, and environmentally friendly metal-free photocatalysts. Currently, he is developing a library of these light-activated molecules and testing them efficiently using small-scale, low-waste methods. To enhance their efficiency and reusability, he plans to embed these photocatalysts into sponge-like materials known as Covalent Organic Frameworks. These solid structures stabilize the light-reactive components, making recycling the catalyst as simple as filtering a cup of coffee. By integrating green chemistry, advanced materials and solar energy, Konstantin's research aims to create cleaner, scalable tools for industries such as pharmaceuticals and agriculture鈥攈elping science move forward without leaving the planet behind.

Konstantin is deeply honoured to be selected as a Tomlinson Scholar, an award that provides him with financial support and allows him to concentrate on his research. He is excited to be part of the esteemed community of researchers supported by this award.

Linlin Li,听Educational and Counselling Psychology

Linlin Li is a first-year PhD student in Learning Sciences, supervised by Dr. Maria Cutumisu in the Assessment of Learning and Transfer (ALERT) Lab. He completed his Bachelor鈥檚 degree in Software Engineering at Qingdao University, China, where he later worked as a full-time university counselor for two years. He then earned a Master鈥檚 degree in Education under the supervision of Dr. Xinghua Wang, also at Qingdao University.

Linlin鈥檚 doctoral research lies at the intersection of educational psychology and computer science, with a focus on leveraging recent advances in machine learning and educational data mining to enhance computational thinking and promote deeper learning outcomes. He is also interested in examining the effects of generative AI on education, particularly in the area of AI-driven personalized feedback. The overarching goal of his research is to advance machine learning methods in educational research and to positively impact teaching, learning, and assessment across diverse educational contexts.

Linlin is honored to represent the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology as a Tomlinson Scholar. This fellowship provides generous support for him to pursue his research interests as a PhD student at 91直播. He looks forward to pursuing his doctoral research with passion and to make a meaningful impact as part of the 91直播 community.

Madeline Fabiano,听Kinesiology听Sciences

Madeline Fabiano is a first-year PhD student in Kinesiology working under the supervision of Dr. Lindsay Duncan. She recently completed her undergraduate (HbKine 鈥�23) and masters degree (MSc 鈥�25) within the School of Kinesiology at Lakehead University. Madeline鈥檚 previous research explored behaviour change interventions, exercise psychology, and undergraduate women鈥檚 health, which she named the SHINE (Supporting Her In Navigating Exercise) program.

In her doctoral research, Madeline will examine strategies to improve symptom management among women experiencing perimenopause through exercise participation, as informed by a needs assessment and community partnerships.

Madeline is honoured to be the recipient of the 2025-26 Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship. This recognition underscores her commitment to academic excellence and emphasizes the importance of investigating behaviour change throughout the menopause continuum. The fellowship provides essential support for the advancement of her doctoral studies and affirms the significance of this work.

Pingsheng Li,听Computer Science

Pingsheng Li is a first-year PhD student at 91直播, working at the intersection of听neuroscience and artificial intelligence under the supervision of Prof. Blake Richards. Before听returning to 91直播, Pingsheng completed a BSc in Neuroscience at 91直播 and an MSc in听Neuro-X at EPFL in Switzerland. Their research draws on both theoretical and applied听machine learning to study the brain and artificial intelligence and develop human-aligned听artificial intelligence systems.

Throughout their academic journey, Pingsheng has worked across several international听institutions including Mila 鈥� Quebec AI Institute, the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit听at UCL, and the Mathis Lab at EPFL. Their past work has spanned biologically inspired听neural networks, latent variable models for neural data, and scalable methods for analyzing听complex behavioral and neural recordings. He has also led applied research in industry听settings, including a project at SilicoLabs and UdeM, exploring how immersive, interactive听virtual reality (VR) environments can be used to enable better human-AI comparisons in听solving complex problems.

Returning to 91直播 for their PhD was a deliberate decision, drawn by the unique synergy听between Mila鈥檚 cutting-edge AI research and the world-class neuroscience community at听91直播. Pingsheng is excited to contribute to Montreal鈥檚 vibrant NeuroAI ecosystem and to听advance research at the interface of intelligence, computation, and human well-being.听Pingsheng is honoured to have been selected as a recipient of Tomlinson Fellowship, and is听grateful for the support this award provides at the beginning of their doctoral research at 91直播.听

Sarah Dickson,听Epidemiology

Sarah Dickson is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health. She obtained her Master鈥檚 of Science in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where her research examined how conflict scenarios impact the risk of measles transmission in Gaza, Palestine. She is looking forward to beginning her PhD under the supervision of Professors Mathieu Maheu-Giroux and Caroline Wagner, which will examine the feasibility of control mechanisms to detect zoonotic leaps of H5N1 into high-risk agricultural populations and halt eventual transmission chains to densely populated areas.

Avian influenza (H5N1) is a virus that is primarily transmitted among birds but that can sometimes infect humans in close contact, such as poultry sector workers. As concerns for eventual sustained H5N1 transmission in humans grows, public health agencies have called for research on feasible methods of early detection of human cases. In her doctoral project, Sarah aims to assess the feasibility and potential impact of novel surveillance strategies to detect human H5N1 infections in high-risk agricultural populations. Throughout her research, she will employ a One Health research approach, which regards human, animal and ecological health as interdependent. The work will begin by conducting a novel survey among poultry farmers to understand their willingness to comply with novel influenza surveillance protocols (e.g., wearable sensors and rapid antigen tests). This data will be used to develop a state-of-the art model for H5N1 transmission from farms to urban settings, simulating the effectiveness of various surveillance methods at halting H5N1 transmission in humans.

Sarah is honoured and grateful to receive the Richard H. Tomlinson Fellowship and become a member of the esteemed community of researchers supported by the award.

Supun Manathunga,听Experimental听Medicine

Supun Manathunga is a first-year PhD student in Experimental Medicine at 91直播 under the supervision of Prof. Alton Russell. He completed his MBBS degree at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and worked in the public health sector prior to starting his doctoral studies, with experience in SARS-CoV-2 and dengue. His research interests include the application of Bayesian and machine learning methods to infectious disease epidemiology.

His thesis focuses on developing an integrated probabilistic spatiotemporal model for West Nile virus (WNv), the leading cause of mosquito-borne illness in Canada. WNv can range from mild fever to severe, sometimes fatal encephalitis, and poses significant health and economic challenges. The project has two main goals: first, to develop a model capable of predicting WNv outbreaks up to two months in advance across different regions in Canada, particularly Quebec, Ontario, and Saskatchewan. Drawing on his prior experience in dengue surveillance and modeling in Sri Lanka, the project integrates diverse data streams including mosquito and bird populations, human and animal cases, and environmental factors such as temperature and rainfall to simulate the virus鈥檚 spread over time and space using Bayesian particle filtering methods. Second, the model will be used to evaluate the potential effects of different control strategies, such as larvicide spraying to reduce mosquito populations, issuing public health advisories, and screening blood donations. By estimating both health and economic outcomes, the project aims to provide evidence-based recommendations to support policymakers in implementing the most effective and cost-efficient measures to mitigate WNv鈥檚 impact.

Supun is deeply honored to be a recipient of the Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship and to join this distinguished community of scholars supported by the award. This award will greatly support his goal of advancing research that improves public health outcomes.

Previous Years 2013-2024

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