2022-2023 Multidisciplinary Health Research Experience (MHRE) Research Pitch Competition

Abstract

The Multidisciplinary Health Research Experience (MHRE) Research Pitch Competition 2022-2023 was an inaugural competition hosted at the University of Manitoba, aimed to engage undergraduate students in research thinking and innovation. In this competition, students were offered the opportunity to form teams of 1-3 people, with a graduate student acting as a research mentor. As a team, members collaborated on designing a research proposal, presented as an abstract and poster, to address an issue of their choice that was related to the competition theme. Moreover, the competition theme for this year centred on ‘limiting the spread of infectious diseases during a humanitarian crisis’. Students were encouraged to explore different fields of STEM that interested them for their research proposal. The competition received over 30 team applications spanning various disciplines such as STEM, statistics, biology, microbiology, epidemiology, public health, community health, medicine, social sciences, engineering, and more. The following abstracts feature the top submissions evaluated by both graduate students and professors.