Montreal woman recipient of the Personnel Awards for Black Scholars

A doctorate student from Montreal is the recipient of the new Personnel Awards for Black Scholars.

Khady Diagne from McGill University, whose work identifies the mechanisms that underlie early heartbeats with the goal of helping physicians choose the best treatments for their patients, was awarded $60,000 by the Heart & Stroke, along with Brain Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Circulatory and Respiratory Health (CIHR-ICRH).

“It makes me feel like my research matters, that what I’m doing is really important and people want to know more and care about it,” said Diagne.

The award supports outstanding Black students engaged in masters and doctoral programs at institutions across Canada and aims to promote Black representation within the heart and brain health research community.

“To be able to have that support definitely makes me feel a little bit better, but also makes me feel like I can pursue my studies because I want to, a take my time to finish things and not try to wrap up and finish and do something quickly just because I feel like I don’t have enough funding or support,” said Diagne.

The multi-year awards will provide financial support for up to eight masters students for two years ($50,000 per award) and up to five doctoral students for three years (maximum of $90,000 per award).

“With increasing diversity of the research workforce, it leads not only to innovation, wider audiences, greater impact, but in I think one of the best things it does is it reduces the disparities amongst the outcomes we’re seeing impact certain communities disproportionately,” said Delaney Hines, Lead for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Heart & Stroke Foundation.

According to Heart & Stroke, Black communities are among those with the greatest prevalence of risk factors for heart disease and stroke. The organization hopes to remove financial barriers for Black researchers so they can focus on expanding their research while increasing representation of Black researchers in the cardiovascular research space.

“This is just one step and hopefully achieving that goal, but it’s something that we’re hoping can actually begin to light the fire under these early career researchers and be sure that they can stay along this path and not be distracted and end up in different fields,” said Hines.

“It also motivates me to keep going,” said Diagne.