Uottawa's youngest grad pursues master's
Twelve-year-old aims to make people's lives better with neurological research
The youngest graduate in the history of the University of Ottawa is now a 12-year-old master's student in the University of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine.
Anthaea-grace Dennis turns 13 next month.
“It has been really great,” Dennis said of her graduate experience at U of T. “There's a lot of collaboration between researchers at the institute and health-care clinicians.”
Dennis is affiliated with the University Health Network's Krembil Brain Institute, where she's conducting research on how artificial intelligence can be used to better diagnose Parkinson's disease. Artificial intelligence, she said, has the potential to detect important differences in a patient's symptomological and medical data that could lead to earlier diagnoses.
Dennis said she's interested in the study of movement, and its orchestration by the brain.
“It has always really fascinated me,” she said in an interview. “I love to play the violin and to figure skate, and I understand how these movement disorders like Parkinson's can have a massive effect on a person's life.”
Parkinson's affects about one in every 500 people in Canada, usually when they're over the age of 60.
Dennis's supervisor is neurologist Dr. Antonio Strafella, an expert in movement disorders and brain imaging. He has developed a research program that uses neuroimaging — positron emission tomography (PET) scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) — to investigate the pathophysiology of Parkinson's patients' motor, cognitive and behavioural symptoms.
Dennis wants to pursue further research in the same field as a doctoral student.
“I want to continue to research and deepen my knowledge of neurogenerative diseases and movement disorders,” she said. “I want to make an impact.”
Dennis graduated last June from uottawa with a bachelor's degree in biomedical science — the youngest graduate in the 176-year history of the university.
Born in Ottawa on March 15, 2011, Dennis began her university career at the age of eight while living in California with her mother, a law professor. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the family returned to this city and Dennis transferred to uottawa when she was nine. The pandemic meant most of her classes were online, so her age went largely unnoticed. When in-person classes resumed, few people identified her as a child.
“I can play child, I can play adult, but I had to learn how to play adult,” she said at the time of her graduation. “Now that I know how to play adult, people don't really know unless I outright say, or somebody says, `Hey, Anthaea-grace is 12'. … I would like to hope that it doesn't affect how people see me.”
Dennis's mother, Johanna, a lawyer who also holds a master's degree in biotechnology and a PHD in higher education, first recognized her daughter's exceptionality in Montessori school. A teacher said Dennis had completed the school's kindergarten curriculum at two and a half.
An educational psychologist later pronounced Dennis “profoundly gifted” with an IQ of 147. Hers was in the top 10 per cent of all IQ scores. Determined to ensure her daughter was challenged, Dennis's mother contacted 42 school districts before finding one near Boston that would enrol her underage daughter in Grade 2. The family moved to Boston, then Arkansas and, later, California.
At five, Dennis read the entire Harry Potter series. In Grade 4, she vaulted ahead again when testing showed she was working at a Grade 8 level. She took her first high school calculus course at seven. She also played basketball, studied violin and was a competitive figure skater.
At U of T, Dennis said, her age has not been an issue. “I don't think it has had an impact on my relationship with any of the other students or researchers,” she said. “It's very collaborative here.”
Dennis lives with her mother in Toronto, and travels frequently back home to Ottawa.