‘Outstanding work’ nets young researcher three awards

If science were a baseball game, Thuvaraha Jeyakumaran’s batting average would rank her an all-star in her first major-league season.

For the third consecutive time, the research coordinator and knowledge-mobilization specialist at St. Joseph’s Parkwood Institute has become an award-winner for three different presentations at three research conferences.

The latest in her three-for-three streak is receiving the early-career scholar award for her poster submission to the International Spinal Cord Society conference, which will take place in September in Belgium. Jeyakumaran’s specialty is intentionally enlisting and embedding the insights of people with lived experience into research studies, from pre-grant planning through to implementation and impact.

“Health equity in research is more than just saying, ‘we’re designing studies for you,’” says the young researcher. “It’s about designing studies with people and asking, ‘Does what we’re researching have meaning for you?’ We’re not asking just because we want to check the lived-experience box, but because they bring new insights and added value to our work.”

For the upcoming conference in Antwerp, Jeyakumaran submitted a poster that outlined how this co-design process helped in planning a clinical trial about the impact of intermittent fasting among people with chronic pain and depression. People with lived experience had an opportunity to plan and identify how to recruit participants, and they helped shape a website and app developed by students in work-study programs at Western University.

“They came up with ideas and questions we would not have thought to ask,” Jeyakumaran says of that study.

Jeyakumaran began working with the Gray Centre for Mobility and Activity as part of a work-study program at Western and was hired on in Sept. 2023 after earning her Master of Management of Applied Science in global health systems.

“Thuvaraha has brought so much to our team in shifting how we do things and make research impact as great as it can be,” says Dalton Wolfe, scientist at Lawson Health Research Institute and leader of the Research 2 Practice team – a team at The Gray Centre bringing innovative research ideas into clinical practice.  

Wolfe calls the three-peat honours – from Jeyakumaran’s different poster presentations at conferences in Atlanta and London as well as the upcoming one in Belgium - “an astounding achievement representing outstanding work.”

“We start with the premise that the end game of health research is impact for patients,” he says. “A layperson will say, ‘well, isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?’ But this approach is different from how some researchers are trained, which is often to start from intellectual curiosity. This requires the researcher to relinquish some control over the questions and the process.”

Jeyakumaran, who is also lead author on a newly published paper about integrated knowledge translation in research, is among hundreds of students whose fresh perspective and experience contributes to a thriving ecosystem of research at St. Joseph’s.