top of page

NEWS

Biomedical Communications Alumni Association

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO


Dear alumni community,

It's almost been a whole month since our 12th annual UnConference was held with great success. We owe a big thanks to all the participants in this year's event, especially to the amazing line up of speakers who so generously shared their knowledge, wisdom, and stories.

During the meeting, we announced that our current BMCAA Executive Team will be stepping down at the end of December, and we'll be welcoming an enthusiastic new roster of alumni who will fearlessly lead our community over the next two years.

Stepping down from their current roles are: our co-presidents, Susan Le and Wendy Gu; Paul Kelly, our Treasurer; Bobby Lancefield, our Secretary; our 1T8 Student Rep, Dani Sayeau; our Webmaster, Michael Corrin; and our Newsletter Editors, Joyce Hui, Ashley Hui, and Geoffrey Cheung. To everyone here, thank you for an amazing and successful two years!

Incoming for the 2019-2020 cycle are: Lisa Qiu and Annie Tseng, our new Co-Presidents; Dani Sayeau, for a new round as the Treasurer; Geoffrey Cheung, who will be taking on the new Head Media Editor position; Chelsea Canlas and Jerry Gu, our newly minted Viewbook Editors; Sarah Crawley, for the new News Editor role; Lucas Lin, as the Secretary; and Nancy Ji, as the Webmaster. Avesta Rastan will continue her role as the 1T9 Student Rep.

Currently, we are still looking for a couple of talented and dedicated alumni to help fill out the following spots: Social Media Manager, and Events Coordinator. If you're interested, you can find out more about the roles on our elections post, and you can let us know at bmcaa.exec@gmail.com.

***

If you weren't able to join us this year, you can still catch many of the talks on our BMCAA Youtube page! Make sure to check out the links to all their amazing works in the summary below.

We kicked off the day with tech talks from fellow alums, Stuart Jantzen and Brendan Polley. Stuart taught us about script-derived automations in expediting 3D workflows, and Brendan delighted audiences with a showcase on new rendering capabilities offered by Unity. Real-time subsurface scattering? It's a thing! Then right before our morning break, Shizuka Aoki caught us up with her new start-up, BioRender, an ambitious and powerful science illustration and visualization tool that allows researchers and scientists to create beautiful and effective educational graphics.

Our next set of morning speakers came in to challenge the way we approach communications design. Dr. Joseph Ferenbok from the University's Institute of Medical Science provoked us to really question the way we viewed art and creativity – to break down our held notions of aesthetics and reason in order to unlock our own maximal creative potential. Alumnus Christine P'ng shared her experiences and design strategies to tackling complex data and information visualization and to transforming biased raw data into meaningful communications strategies. Finally, Mathieu Ranger from Bridgeable closed the morning off with a reminder to us all that communications design is a fine balance that bridging the complex and the simple.

In the afternoon, we heard from current 2nd year student, Felix Son who shared his experience working at the National Institute of Health generating 3d models for the Carnegie Human Embryo Collection. Our alumni and Life Coach, Gwun Chin, left us words of wisdom and strategies to build and project confidence. Our own Dave Mazierksi led us down uncharted history as we traced his steps investigating the link between creation of both J.C.B. Grant's and Eduard Pernkopf's monumental anatomical atlases. Finally, and not least, our keynote speaker, Gladys Tong, wowed us with the story of her life's work at G Creative Productions, a motion graphics company she started in Vancouver to serve the movie and film industry.

***

Again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts to everyone who's encouraged and supported us along the way. We're proud to have been able to serve the community these past two years, and we're still here with you for one last hurrah this month! Stay tuned for the December event, and hope to catch you guys again at our Winter Reunion in 2019. :)

Best,

The 2017-2018 BMCAA Exec Team

bottom of page