From Obstacles to Opportunities: A Student Spotlight on Julia Tomasi From Obstacles to Opportunities: A Student Spotlight on Julia Tomasi

By Mahbod Ebrahimi

The graduate school journey is both enriching and rewarding. However, it is a path filled with uncertainties and obstacles. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the challenges faced by graduate students. Despite the adversities, Julia Tomasi, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Medical Science (IMS) in her sixth and final year of her PhD studies, stands as a testament to resilience and perseverance. Julia had to make a major pivot in her research due to the pandemic, but she refused to succumb to uncertainty. Instead, she embraced the hurdles as opportunities to flourish and thrive.

Julia started her post-secondary studies at the University of Toronto (UofT), double majoring in neuroscience and psychology. Throughout her time at UofT, Julia was very interested in being involved in innovation and research, especially exploring psychiatric genetics and the human brain. “In psychiatry, I felt there’s a special need for research because the treatments have not changed much over the past several years,” Julia explains. This inspired her to join Dr. James Kennedy’s lab at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Specifically, Julia was fascinated by anxiety disorders and dedicated her research efforts to identifying genetic factors that contribute to their development. “In the context of anxiety, it’s not just a feeling; it’s certain thoughts, behaviours, and physiology,” Julia explains. Since each person could experience these symptoms associated with anxiety differently and to various degrees, Julia sought to find underlying genetic risk factors of this disease. Anxiety is most often studied using self-report measures that are prone to bias, and thus there is a need for more biologically-based markers. To achieve this, Julia needed to establish objective measures of anxiety. She explored physiological indicators associated with anxiety, including startle response (the magnitude of one’s reaction to a sudden noise) and heart rate variability (the difference in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats). Julia then delved into genes linked to these objective measures of anxiety, examining whether these genes could also provide insight into the anxiety risk.

As Julia commenced her recruitment efforts for her primary PhD project, the COVID-19 pandemic restricted research operations, shutting down research facilities. Before the pandemic, Julia had devised a plan for her PhD project that entailed collecting startle response data from patients with anxiety disorders and healthy individuals, determining whether genetic markers that predict exaggerated startle also contribute to the risk of developing anxiety disorders. Although she had intended to start recruitment in March 2020, restrictions precluded her from doing so. Since remote measurement of startle response was impossible, Julia had to alter her research approach to incorporate a different physiological measure. Despite the immense stress accompanying this situation, Julia leveraged her resourcefulness and transformed stress into an opportunity to innovate. As she notes, “I used the stress to buckle down and try to find something that would work for the pandemic situation.”

During her first committee meeting following the research shutdown, Julia presented an alternative project plan that would enable her to remain on track. Her proposed project centered on heart rate variability, which is another objective physiological measure linked to anxiety disorder, assessed with a wristband device that can be mailed to participants (similar to what Apple watches do). She also wanted to find a method to model real-time anxiety reactions, to assess adaptive versus pathological responses.

Traditionally, researchers have attempted to induce anxiety in participants using methods such as electric shocks to observe the anxiety-altered state. However, given the remote nature of Julia’s research and plan to create an anxiety scenario that more closely mimics the real world, she explored an innovative approach involving a virtual reality (VR) environment. The objective of this VR environment was to induce mild anxiety in participants, allowing Julia to collect heart rate variability data and investigate differences in responding between individuals with and without anxiety disorders. To accomplish this, Julia teamed up with Dr. Richard Lachman, an experiential media expert at Toronto Metropolitan University, to create a method for inducing an anxiety-altered state. She drafted the scripts, and together with Dr.

Lachman, they designed the VR scenes. They created the videos to be viewed on a participant’s own smartphone with a cardboard VR headset. Julia also contacted and visited Dr. Kerry Ressler at Harvard to obtain expert advice on measuring physiological phenotypes, including heart rate variability.

Julia has successfully achieved her goal of recruiting 240 participants for her project over the course of two years, thanks in part to the utilization of videoconferencing and remote technology. The required equipment (wristband, cardboard VR headset, and saliva DNA kit) was shipped to participants.

Julia supervised their installation via videoconferencing and monitored data collection. Additionally, she identified a chance to examine the impact of COVID19 on anxiety in her study sample by integrating a validated COVID-specific questionnaire. Reflecting on the unique circumstances brought on by the COVID19 pandemic, Julia acknowledges that the project may not have progressed in the same way had it not been for the shift to remote work. She recognizes that a remote approach to research, which allows people to participate from the comfort of their own homes, is very valuable and can still be used even when in-person interactions become more feasible.

Besides her academic pursuits, Julia also engages in a range of extracurricular activities. These include her role as an IMS mentor, crisis responder for the Kids Help Phone Crisis Text Line, and membership in the University Consulting Group (UCG). In fact, she finds that these activities can boost her productivity, as they push her to have better time management skills. Moreover, Julia’s experience with the IMS mentorship program has provided her with the opportunity to guide newly admitted students through their academic journeys, giving her valuable insights into the importance of a good supervisor. Julia also recognizes that having a supportive supervisor who is invested in their students’ professional development has played a significant role in her success. After graduation, Julia plans on pursuing a postdoctoral position that would bridge the gap between academic research and industry, with the ultimate goal of making a positive impact on people’s lives by contributing to innovative solutions on a larger scale. She aspires to take the research she has conducted and translate it into practical applications that benefit society.

Overall, through her journey, Julia has demonstrated that perseverance and resourcefulness are key to achieving success as a graduate student. Julia notes, “entering grad school, there could be a lot of anxieties, a lot of unknowns. You might feel like a small fish in a massive pond. It’s normal to feel this way at the beginning and you will meet people that will support you. There will be obstacles that come in along the way, but you are capable of pushing through them. If you seek the right people and find the field you are passionate about, all of the exciting things will far outweigh any stress. IMS has a really great community and wide range of research. Try to enjoy the ride and as long as you are motivated and resourceful you can absolutely work through any challenges that come your way”.