Ryerson Alumni - 2018 Summer - 16

FEATURES

11:5 3 A.M.
At iBest, PhD candidate
Eno Hysi researches
a new way to measure
the effectiveness of
cancer therapies.

2:0 5 P.M.
The Library was one
of the first to offer
a virtual help desk,
now known as
Ask a Librarian.

(TRSM) looms over Bay Street; the building opened in 2006 along
with the new MBA program and became Canada's largest undergraduate business school. TRSM is also home to Enactus Ryerson,
the student society dedicated to harnessing entrepreneurship for
social good. Its influence has spread all the way to Nunavut through
Growing North, a food-security initiative designed to generate
sustainable food sources in remote, underserved areas. In 2015,
Growing North built a $250,000 greenhouse in Naujaat, Nunavut,
which has local employees and a student co-op program. Now an
independent non-profit, Growing North will build a new greenhouse in collaboration with the community of Arviat this summer.
IT ' S 2 : 20P. M . at iBEST (the Institute for Biomedical Engineering
and Science Technology), a 22,000-square-foot lab located at St.
Michael's Hospital. Eno Hysi, biomedical science PhD candidate, is
there developing the technology that earned him a Vanier Canada
Graduate Scholarship. "My project arises from a very simple problem: how early after cancer treatments commence can you tell that

Ryerson University Magazine / Summer 2018

1974
The Ryerson
Library and
Archives
building opens
1991
Pitman Hall,
the first major
co-ed residence,
opens

the treatment is working?" says Hysi.
Cancer treatment usually involves radiation, chemotherapy, or a combination; the
best clinical tools to monitor treatment are
MRI and CT scans. Treatments can last anywhere from 12 to 32 weeks, and an MRI can
only be performed infrequently-typically
at the beginning and middle of treatment,
and before surgery. Hysi seeks to measure
the effectiveness of cancer therapies just
hours after treatment in an inexpensive, noninvasive way through photoacoustic imaging-using short laser bursts to irradiate
tissue and produce detectable ultrasound
waves to study tumor blood vessels.
"In layman's terms, the analogy is of
thunder and lightning," says Hysi. "The
lightning is the laser. The thunder is ultrasound. When it's a rainy day, you first see
the lightning, and that basically causes an
expansion of the clouds, and then you hear
the sound a short time after."
Launched in 2016 as a partnership between
Ryerson and St. Michael's Hospital, iBEST
develops health-care solutions and supports
biomedical startups. It represents the kind
of inter-institutional collaboration that has
become Ryerson's forte, combining the university's engineering, science and entrepreneurial strengths with the hospital's biomedical research and clinical expertise. For
his part, Hysi represents the kind of Ryerson
student who only became possible in 2003,
when the university began admitting its
first doctoral students.
Ryerson's ambitions have expanded with
the size of its campus. When the George

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