Join us for a special dinner to celebrate the winners of the Thomas H.B. Symons Seminar Series on Graduate Student Research. After dinner and toasts, enjoy a Q&A and discussion session with our winner and mingle with other attendees while music plays.

Our 2026 Symons Series winner is Irina Badell Garcia, PhD Candidate in Forensic Epigenetics, with her presentation, “How long has a cadaver been dead? DNA methylation helps us find the answer." A thoughtful and stubborn 4th year PhD in forensic epigenetics at Trent, Irina was born in Barcelona and has been in Canada for three years. She has worked in identifying WWII victims from mass graves in Poland, analyzed XV century skeletal remains found in a medieval church in Spain, helped track the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 variants in Germany, and for a year worked at the European Patent Office. Curious and solutions-oriented, she aims at continuing to pursue research that matters —to people, to practice and to the questions worth asking.

Symons Gala