Andrea Edginton and Anil Maharaj at spring convocation
Anil Maharaj graduated from Waterloo Pharmacy’s PhD program in June and has been recognized with two awards. The first is WB Pearson Medal from the Faculty of Science which acknowledges the creative research presented in his PhD thesis. The second is the Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies honour from the University of Waterloo awarded for overall academic excellence.
These prestigious awards celebrate a graduate career full of ground-breaking research, high-quality teaching, and numerous publications and presentations. A member of Professor Andrea Edginton’s lab group, Maharaj specializes in pharmacokinetics, a field of study that uses math to understand how human bodies absorb, distribute, break down, and remove medications. In his time in Edginton’s lab, Maharaj published six manuscripts and was awarded over $180,000 in scholarships.
“Anil’s curiosity drives him to examine new paths of discovery with a breadth and depth that many others would not have the patience for,” says Edginton. “Barriers only drive him to learn more.”
Maharaj’s thesis focused on the development of a mathematical model of the pediatric gastrointestinal tract to predict drug absorption. Such models are used to design clinical trials: they help researchers predict how drugs will act in the body, enabling them to come up with the safest possible doses. In children, where small changes in dosing can have drastically different outcomes, this kind of modelling is especially important.
“Anil’s thesis represents work from six published manuscripts,” explains Edginton, his supervisor.
“They tell a cohesive story and firmly cement Anil as a global expert in pediatric physiology-based pharmacokinetic modelling.”
The Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies award also celebrates Maharaj’s well-roundedness. He is a natural teacher to fellow graduate students and undergraduate classes at Waterloo Pharmacy. He taught pharmacokinetics to pharmacy undergraduates and was a ‘go to’ graduate student in the Edginton lab group for both conceptual and quantitative questions on the topic.
Now, Maharaj is a post-doctoral fellow at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. The hospital is a world leader in the treatment of childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
"My research at St. Jude focuses on developing improved dosing strategies for therapeutic agents used in the treatment of childhood cancer,” Maharaj explains. “The ability of this facility to effectively translate research from the laboratory to humans was part of the reason I chose to come to Memphis.
Here, I have the privilege of seeing how my research can directly contribute to improving the treatment and care of childhood cancer patients.