LMP undergraduate student recognized in GLSE awards
Programs: Undergraduate
Graduate and Life Sciences Education (GLSE), in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, awards annual Undergraduate Student Leadership Awards in Life Sciences. The purpose of these awards is to recognize undergraduate students for their leadership, scholarship, and outstanding contributions to academic and student life at the University of Toronto.
We are delighted that Karen Mao, Co-President of the LMP Student Union (LMPSU) has received the GLSE Undergraduate Leadership Award 2021.
Not only a Co-President of the LMPSU, she was the 2019-2020 Co-President of the Medical Sciences Student Union, which represents the life science departments at U of T, activities that are focussed on providing seminar series and both academic and wellness activities.
In her leadership roles, she has been instrumental in expanding the LMPSU mentorship program, which helped contribute to its eventual CCR accreditation, and organized a Town Hall event to involve current students in the development of the Undergraduate program. She has also played a large role in helping her peers adapt to virtual learning during the pandemic by introducing the “Welcome Back Package” which helped inform students about how to access academic and social resources digitally. The LMP Annual conference, which she led with LMPSU co-President Ziqi Liu, was considered one of the most successful so far, with faculty commenting “how professional the conference was”, and which had very high attendance numbers.
Dr. Jeffrey Lee, Co-Associate Chair, Undergraduate Life Science Education in LMP commented: “Karen has been an exemplary leader in our Pathobiology Specialist program. She is a pleasure to interact with and her engaging personality and strong leadership makes her very well respected and admired as a role model amongst her classmates. She very much deserves this award.”
Karen commented, “This is such a great honour and I am so delighted to be recognized like this. It would never have been possible for LMPSU and I to come this far without the support we received from everyone in LMP along the way.”
