Hey everyone! My name is Daniel Kurtz, and I am a 3rd-year MD/PhD student. I am running to be reelected to the VP MD/PhD role to give students in the MD/PhD program a voice in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. As the liaison between the faculty and MD/PhD students, I will continue advocating for your concerns to ASoc, the Faculty, and the Canadian scientific community. Following up on my work over the past two years, I will be your guide and resource for all things MD/PhD-related at uOttawa and will work with my peers to solve pressing issues in healthcare research. With the recent changes to the MD/PhD program format, I have successfully connected incoming students with the MD faculty and advocated for them as they prepare to enter pre-clerkship. I plan to continue my efforts to connect incoming students with those currently completing their MD/PhD degrees for advice and mentorship as the program continues to grow and expand into the MD-MSc and MD-PhD streams. Over the next year, I will continue to host fun events for MD/PhD students and CIP residents to blow off steam, connect, and meet other trainees. Whether grabbing some food, skating on the canal + beavertails, or playing sports, we will have a blast! As the uOttawa student representative for the Clinician Investigator Trainee Association of Canada and through the VP MD/PhD role in ASoc, I will continue to push for increased faculty support for your research and give all uOttawa MD students greater access to research opportunities. Finding research opportunities is a difficult slog requiring way too many emails and broken websites. I hope to be your resource for any and all research-related questions, so you can find the research supervisor (and project) of your dreams! Through my role on the International Congress of Academic Medicine’s Health Research Advisory Group, I have put my advocacy into practice by organizing workshops and programming specifically for MD and MD-PhD students in Ottawa this April. I plan to apply the knowledge I’ve gained from this role to my work with ASoc to ensure students feel supported and empowered throughout their research journeys. uOttawa also has numerous sources of information on research grants and applications, making it challenging to navigate research funding. While I have successfully advocated to the Faculty of Medicine over the past two years to improve their website and make resources more available, more work can be done to make our school's resources easier to access. Furthermore, I want to continue organizing workshops for students which discuss grant applications to reduce barriers in healthcare research. If I am reelected as VP for MD/PhD, I will strive to address your concerns, research-related or otherwise, and work to increase accessibility to research at uOttawa. Last year, Maclean’s University Rankings ranked uOttawa as the 7th-best medical school in Canada, a ranking largely driven by the worldwide impact of our research. Let’s reach even higher!