Current Trainees

Dr. Piché-Renaud completed his medical degree and general paediatric training at the University of Montreal, and subspecialty training in Paediatric Infectious Diseases at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). He is now pursuing a clinical and research fellowship at SickKids and graduate studies in clinical epidemiology at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto.

His research interests include vaccine uptake and effectiveness, vaccination of special populations and the epidemiology of infectious diseases and vaccine-preventable diseases in children, including COVID-19. He is a co-investigator on the Stop COVID-19 in Kids project and multiple other studies related to COVID-19 and infectious diseases in children.

Costanza Di Chiara is a paediatrician with expertise in the field of Infectious Diseases. She is a PhD candidate in the Division of Paediatric Infectious Diseases, University of Padova in Italy, attending a research fellowship at SickKids in Toronto. Viral infections are her research interest area, and since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been focusing on epidemiological, clinical and immunological features of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination in children.

Hannah is passionate about developing and applying new technologies to improve the health of people in low-resource communities. She is completing her MD/PhD at the University of Toronto. In her PhD, she used nanotechnology to create new diagnostic tests for common infectious diseases and developed a methodology to improve the performance of nucleic acid diagnostics. Post-PhD Hannah is working to identify new biomarkers that can predict when a fever will lead to severe illness. In the future, she hopes to integrate these biomarkers into clinical decision-making algorithms and diagnostic tests.

Caitlyn is a Paediatric Infectious Diseases Fellow at SickKids. She completed her general paediatrics and medical training at the University of Toronto. She has an interest in common childhood infections, providing infectious diseases care to at-risk communities in Canada and the intersection between infectious diseases and social determinants of health. With the Morris Lab, Caitlyn is working on a study related to malaria in children and a systematic review about COVID-19 vaccination in children aged 5 to 11 years old.

Dr. Michelle Dimitris obtained her PhD in epidemiology from McGill University and is currently a Lap-Chee Tsui Fellow at SickKids. She is especially interested in applying advanced epidemiological methods to explore research questions about maternal and child health that are global in scale and impact. As part of her project with Dr. Morris, she seeks to develop strategies for evaluating multicomponent interventions. Specifically, she is using causal mediation analyses to better understand the mechanisms of an integrated newborn care kit implemented in Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan.

Vinyas Harish is a sixth year MD/PhD Candidate at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Prior to medical school, he completed his undergraduate studies in computer science at Queen’s University. His research interests include emergency preparedness, spatial epidemiology and emerging infectious diseases.

Dr. Lauren Tailor (Pharm.D., R.Ph., MPH) (she/her/hers) is a pharmacist who received both her Bachelor of Science in Honours Science and her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Waterloo in 2020. She is a recent Master of Public Health in Epidemiology graduate from the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH) with a Collaborative Specialization in Global Health.

She is pursuing a PhD in public health sciences (epidemiology) at DLSPH this fall. Her pharmacoepidemiology research will focus on mental health medication use in pregnancy and outcomes among offspring. Lauren is passionate about paediatric health, global health, women’s health and mental health.

Joelle Peresin is currently working towards the completion of her undergraduate studies in the Bachelor of Health Sciences (Honours) program at Queen’s University. Joelle is very excited to be exploring the fields of global and population health through her work as a research student for Dr. Morris. Joelle is involved with Stop COVID-19 in Kids’ resource review, systematic review and meta-analysis, surveys and focus groups, and presented the team’s work on these projects at the SickKids Summer Research Symposium in August 2022.

Additionally, Joelle is a volunteer with the Leading Toward Equity through Adolescent Participation (LEAP) Lab under Dr. Ashley Vandermorris at SickKids and a member of the Dean’s Action Table on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen’s University. In her spare time, Joelle is also a music teacher and composer.

Ryan is a medical student at the University of Toronto. He holds a Master of Management Analytics specializing in Machine Learning and a Master of Science in Experimental Medicine. His area of interest in research is clinical epidemiology. With the team, he is examining the clinical features and outcomes of children hospitalized for severe COVID-19 in Canada with pre-existing neurological conditions, as well as describing socioeconomic characteristics associated with severe COVID-19.