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Kiera Farrell-Beaulieu is one of six winners of the 2020 .

A Faculty of Arts & Science student in her second year at Innis College, Farrell-Beaulieu is a political science major. She won for a research paper on the opioid overdose epidemic among youth in Ottawa.

Farrell-Beaulieu says her experiences growing up in Ottawa inspired her winning paper, which was completed for the course JGI 216: Globalization and Urban Change.

“Winning this prize shows that my research is going in a positive direction that can lead to an attitude shift in society’s treatment of teenage addiction and mental health,” she says. “It also means hope – for me, my classmates, community members, and the parents of those who passed away – that this crisis doesn’t have to be a permanence in our community.”

Instructor Dylan Symone says Farrell-Beaulieu's work was exceptional, noting “her creative efforts in searching, evaluating, and synthesizing information sources across traditional disciplinary boundaries in scholarly research.”

The Patricia and Peter Shannon Wilson Undergraduate Research Prize is made possible due to an endowment by Mrs. Patricia Wilson and Mr. Peter Wilson. 

Read the U of T News article