Carmela Rapino is a first-year medical student at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Medicine and a recent graduate of the Master of Science in Epidemiology program at Queen’s University, completed under the supervision of Dr. Sahar Saeed (Queen’s University) and Dr. Giada Sebastiani (McGill University), where she was the inaugural Canadian MASLD Network Research Fellow. Her research focuses on the prognostic implications of steatotic liver disease classifications in association with all-cause mortality, with particular attention to sex differences. Using population-based data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging and advanced epidemiological methods, including causal inference approaches and marginal structural models, her work aims to better understand how changes in alcohol consumption, hepatic steatosis, and cardiometabolic risk factors over time influence mortality risk.

Prior to medical school and her graduate degree, Carmela previously earned a Bachelor of Health Sciences (Honours, Distinction) from Queen’s University, specializing in Global and Population Health and the Physiological Basis of Health and Disease. Her honours thesis focused on evaluating a public health-led HIV prevention clinic within Southeastern Ontario. This work served as an advocacy project aimed at supporting the scale-up of HIV prevention services beyond urban centres in Canada.

Overall, she is committed to bridging research and clinical practice to promote more equitable and patient-centered health outcomes.