A Health Studies student who designed studies for prostate cancer research and who determined that a rapid diagnosis centre cut by two months the time from suspicion to treatment is among six outstanding co-op students honoured as University of Waterloo Co-op Student of the Year.
The honour is as a result of exemplary performance during a 2013 work term and other factors, including community involvement, contribution to co-op, and academic achievement.
"Experiential education is a cornerstone at Waterloo—it's in our DNA," said Peggy Jarvie, executive director of Co-operative Education and Career Action at Waterloo. "The achievements of these extraordinary students illustrate the kind of high-quality work terms that our co-op students experience.”
Perakaa Sethukavalan worked as a clinical research assistant at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Her passion for prostate cancer research motivated her to design effective studies, receive ethics board approval, and collect and analyze the data and publish the results.
She is first author on two of the four articles and of six of nine abstracts she has published. Sethukavalan presented at the 2013 American Society of Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO), and at the 2013 Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Association of Radiation Oncology (CARO), and a poster discussion at the 2013 European Cancer Congress.
She published that stereotactic radiation saves cancer patients almost $2,000 in out-of-pocket costs, and showed that a rapid diagnosis prostate centre cut wait times from suspicion to treatment by two months on average.