Abdullah Syed Wins 2020 Donnelly Thesis Prize

When Abdullah Syed moved to San Francisco in January for his dream research job, he did not expect to end up confined to his apartment due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

With his research on hold, Syed is dividing time between helping set up a SARS-CoV-2 testing lab and learning new computer programs for future data analysis. Such advance preparation allowed him to make fast progress during his PhD, for which he won a prize.

Syed is the latest winner of the Donnelly Centre Research Thesis Prize, awarded annually for the best doctoral research completed at the Centre. An engineer by training, he studied how tiny nano-scale particles travel through the body to deliver drugs directly to tumours under the supervision of Warren Chan, a principal investigator at the Centre and the director of U of T’s Institute for Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering.