Samira completed her MD at Dalhousie University in 1999 and Internal Medicine training in 2002 at McGill University in Canada.  She specialized in Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology at the University of Manitoba (2005). She went on to a research fellowship at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Palese, Department of Microbiology (2009). Samira focused on the development of a novel model for the transmission of influenza virus, developing an interest around the aerobiology of respiratory virus transmission, which remains a focus of her work. 

 

Samira is currently a virologist, medical microbiologist and infectious disease physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto.  Samira has been working on SARS-CoV-2 since the outset of the pandemic in North America with a focus on virus biology, bioaerosols and exposure, genomics and diagnostics through close and cross-disciplinary collaborations across engineering, computational biology, molecular virology and animal health.