Niki Banaei was selected to attend McMaster’s Co-op Student of the Year ceremony in recognition of work undertaken with the FLOURISH Group, where she is an undergraduate student under the supervision of Rohan D’Souza.
Since September 2025, Banaei has worked with a team of three other undergraduate students on a rapid review designed to synthesize international and domestic guideline evidence, identify gaps, and inform improved post-partum care. The project involved screening around 22,000 articles before narrowing the field to the guidelines that would move forward to data extraction and thematic analysis. The selected material was then organized across themes including maternal conditions and mental health. The team has now begun drafting the manuscript.
The nomination reflects the scale and seriousness of that contribution. Reviews of this kind demand patience, consistency, and close attention to how evidence is defined, grouped, and interpreted. In this case, the work is focused on a part of care that can appear settled from a distance, but still contains important gaps once the guidance is examined more closely.
D’Souza nominated Banaei for consideration. From the wider pool of nominated students, McMaster’s Science Co-op and Career Education office selected a smaller group of individuals to move forward to the ceremony. He said the nomination reflected both the quality of Banaei’s contribution and the seriousness with which she had approached the work from the outset, adding that the review had required “a great deal of care, discipline, and intellectual stamina.” He described her as “thoughtful and consistent throughout” and said the recognition was “a fitting acknowledgement of the contribution she has made to the project.”
For Banaei, the recognition also carried a personal significance. When she first became interested in joining the lab, securing funding as part of her co-op had been, in her words, “a very stressful process,” though she was ultimately awarded an NSERC. Looking back, she said the nomination had been “very motivating” and had inspired her to continue in this line of research and to keep contributing to the FLOURISH Group. “It is very fulfilling to look back,” she added.
Banaei’s nomination is a welcome recognition of her individual achievement, but it also speaks to the kind of research environment the FLOURISH Group is building. Undergraduate students are not kept at the edge of the work. They are trusted with ambitious questions, brought into projects with real analytical weight, and given the chance to contribute to research that may help strengthen care after pregnancy.
