Community Stories
‘All in:’ meet Dr. Akila Whiley, family doc who charted her own map and made Red Lake home
“It was minus-40 and it was January,” recalls Dr. Akila Whiley, recounting her arrival in the small community of Red Lake, some 500 km northwest of Thunder Bay. “It was a dark night,” she remembers. “I had no clue where I was. The person who cleans the runway drove me home… I didn't have my luggage.” “It was just crazy!” Dr. Whiley was born and raised in Halifax. Following an undergraduate degree at McGill University in Montreal, she went back to Halifax to attend Dalhousie’s medical school. She then earned a spot at the University of Toronto and was working through a family medicine residency. She says that bec...
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Mentorship and community support inspires rural generalist practice for NOSM alumnus
Dr. Adam Moir (MD 2009, Family Medicine 2011) says one of the things that has helped him as a rural generalist is finding mentors. “If I have one skill, it's recognizing people that I admire and identifying them as a mentor. I reach out to physicians from different fields of medicine with different skill sets than me and I try to emulate their passion for clinical work or teaching.” He recalls how, in his early days of medical school at NOSM, he made connections with mentors that he still values to this day. Some of his earliest placements included the north shore communities of Terrace Bay and Marathon. “I spent the entire thir...
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NOSM grad stays North to practise as a clinical medical physicist
Dr. Lalageh Mirzakhanian is one of NOSM’s many notable women in science, and she’s making an impact in the field of medical physics. The NOSM alumna and newly-minted medical physicist says she joined NOSM’s Medical Physics Residency Education Program (MPREP) in 2019 to gain clinical experience and to have access to a future clinical medical physicist position. After graduation, Dr. Mirzakhanian quickly secured a position at Health Sciences North (HSN) in Sudbury, where she completed her residency. “I always wanted to become a scientist,” she says. “I began with an undergraduate degree in physics, followed by a master's deg...
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