Future 40 winners work toward healthier Manitoba, 1 garden and polar bear cell at a time
Ozten Shebahkeget | CBC News | Posted: January 26, 2026 11:00 AM | Last Updated: 2 hours ago
These Manitobans under age 40 aim to enrich society through education, research, activism
Every year, CBC Manitoba's Future 40 showcases some of the brightest young minds and influential change-makers under age 40, who are blazing their own trails to a brighter future for the province.
Get to know our 2025 winners, selected by a CBC Manitoba panel based on nominations from the community.
Dr. David Perrin
Dr. David Perrin says he didn’t plan to become a cancer surgeon, never mind Manitoba’s first and only orthopaedic oncologist.
Perrin, 39, became Manitoba's first and only orthopaedic oncologist in 2019. He specializes in diagnosing and treating adults and children suffering from cancers that affect the musculoskeletal system, particularly sarcoma.
Some of the surgeries he's performed were the first to be done in Manitoba, but the proud francophone — who offers care in English, French and Spanish — didn't set out to treat cancer.
"When I entered medical school, I wanted to be a family doctor and return to the French community here in Winnipeg," Perrin said. "Unfortunately, that got derailed a little bit because I discovered surgery, and I really loved it."
During his surgical training, Perrin often saw sarcoma patients sent out of province for treatment.
"It was very challenging for the patients and their families," he said. "If it's a child, well, their whole family has to [go, and] their entire lives are kind of flipped upside down."
Now, many patients he sees are unaware he's the only surgeon who can treat them in Manitoba, he said.
"They might not realize that, like, 'Hey, five years ago, I would have been shipped out to another province.'"
WATCH | Get to know Dr. David Perrin:
Perrin describes becoming a surgeon as a "lifetime dedication." But while many surgeons pursue their careers to save lives and see positive results, he says that's not always a realistic goal when treating cancer.
"Sometimes, you can't always cure [a patient's] cancer, and so it takes a certain person to be able to deal with both the highs and lows of being a cancer surgeon," he said.
But "when you know that you've made a difference in someone's life, it makes it all worth it."
Jennifer McIvor
Jennifer McIvor had one main goal when she stepped into her current role: to grow food.
McIvor, 35, has been manager of Sioux Valley Dakota Nation's greenhouse, gardens and grasslands program since 2019.
Under her leadership, the southwestern Manitoba First Nation has expanded its small community garden into a network of food initiatives, including nearly 2.5 hectares of gardens, two greenhouses and a saskatoon berry orchard, she said.
The community also recently established its own hydroponic food production facility, called Sioux Valley Grocer, aiming to produce healthy organic food — all without soil — and to create local opportunities for employment, education and youth engagement year-round.
McIvor says last year, her program sold over 1,000 heads of organic lettuce. She wants to see the program produce revenue and become self-sufficient, but says she feels empowered by its accomplishments thus far.
"You know what makes you really feel good? To know that you're helping your community," McIvor said. "I love my job. I'm so happy that I went in this direction."
A graduate of Assiniboine College's horticultural production program, McIvor says she's always been interested in food security.
McIvor's program donates fresh produce to two local food banks. With more community members becoming interested in growing their own food, it also offers workshops on skills like salsa-making, and canning and preserving food.
She plans to expand Sioux Valley's hydroponic food production, and to partner with more schools, local businesses and First Nations to teach people how to grow food.
"I would really like to see our students over here, in the gardens and in the greenhouse, on an annual basis."
Shakerah Jones Hall
Shakerah Jones Hall says so many nursing students look to her for advice that she sometimes needs to close her office door to keep them at bay.
Jones Hall, 39, says she's currently the only Black instructor at the University of Manitoba's college of nursing.
She trained as a nurse in her home country of Jamaica, practising there for three years before moving to work in the western Manitoba town of Swan River in 2014.
"Nursing is nursing wherever you are," she said.
Jones Hall also comes from a family of educators, earning a master's degree in nursing in 2016.
But when she started working at the University of Manitoba about six years ago, she noticed some students starting to fall behind.
"I recognized that Black and racialized students were struggling a lot more than their white counterparts — struggling financially, struggling academically, struggling to kind of fit in and to be understood," she said.
"I didn't like how that made me feel … so I thought about creating a Black student support group."
WATCH | Get to know Shakerah Jones Hall:
Jones Hall is the founder and leader of the University of Manitoba's chapter of the Canadian Black Nurses Alliance, using her lived experience as an internationally trained nurse to share her expertise.
The group creates a "sense of belonging" through monthly meetings and mentorship opportunities in between, she said, and has grown to 150 members in about a year.
Many of those students look to Jones Hall for her support.
"Students that I don't even teach, that I don't even know, they'll just reach out to me to have a conversation," she said. "They want my advice, they want my guidance, my support, and this is something I do off the side of my desk."
Jones Hall wants to continue working, teaching and mentoring, but also hopes to pursue a PhD in nursing down the road.
"I never envisioned this is where I would be at all. There's no way I would have known, but I'm happy."
Jesse Steckley
Jesse Steckley says he'll know when Manitoba achieves economic reconciliation, because scholarship programs like the one he runs won't need to exist.
Steckley, 37, is director of the Manitoba Business Council's Indigenous education awards program, which has provided 3,000 scholarships — worth over $8 million total — to Indigenous post-secondary students since 2001.
"Over the last three years, I've grown the awards program from 100 [annual] awards to 533," Steckley said.
He credits that success in part to the province, which "matched our program dollar for dollar, so every dollar that I raise, the Manitoba government matches."
A 2021 assessment by the University of Winnipeg found students who received the scholarship were nearly four times more likely to graduate, Steckley said.
The program, which also hosts an annual job fair to match prospective students with employers, is helping to build a "credentialed workforce" in Manitoba, he said.
"If corporate businesses want to grow their business here in Manitoba, they need to find people to work for them, and the largest pool is going to be the Indigenous workforce, so we're becoming an economic driver for the province."
Steckley, a member of Wasauksing First Nation in central Ontario, says he wants First Nations people experiencing challenges to "see that there is opportunity here."
"When you get innovative with things, and you try to improve it and do different things, it can grow into something significant," he said.
WATCH | Get to know Jesse Steckley:
He wants more people to know about the awards program, describing 533 annual awards as a "small drop in the bucket."
"I honestly believe there's thousands more Indigenous students who are going to school annually that could use the award."
However, Steckley says the program's aim is to ultimately eliminate the need for it.
"With any reconciliation program, I think the goal is to have it dissolve one day."
Ivan Iurchenko
Ivan Iurchenko's love of chemistry has taken him around the world, but Russia's war on his home country of Ukraine changed his life as he knew it.
Iurchenko, 39, is a sessional instructor at the University of Manitoba's college of pharmacy, teaching courses in pharmaceutics, research methods, and toxicology. He studied pharmacy at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia State Medical University, becoming a pharmacist and professor in 2010.
He spent most of his life in the Zaporizhzhia region, where Russian forces have occupied large swaths of land and have been making recent gains, though the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
Iurchenko was moving between Canada and Germany for injury rehabilitation when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, forcing him to rebuild his life in Winnipeg with his mother and his wife.
In Manitoba, Iurchenko mentors newcomers through the Immigrant Centre Manitoba, assists refugees through TeleHelp Ukraine — a U.S.-based emergency telemedicine service for displaced people — and teaches English as an additional language in rural parts of the province.
"I'm taking my mom with [me] every class, so she can speak to Ukrainians there," he said.
Ukrainians often struggle when settling in Manitoba, primarily due to language barriers that prevent them from pursuing education and employment opportunities, he said.
"Ukrainian newcomers, young and old, need to start from scratch if they don't know how to speak English," he said.
"I can see my mom as an example that some people really struggle with the new life because they do not know [the] language."
WATCH | Get to know Ivan Iurchenko:
At the University of Manitoba, Iurchenko became drawn to exploring connections between Indigenous medicinal knowledge and Ukrainian folk medicine.
"That's really interesting, how the culture is changing when you are changing the continent."
But he's motivated by more than scientific achievement, saying kindness is key to helping others. He hopes to help Ukrainian newcomers and students find themselves in Manitoba.
"They lost everything, and you are trying to show … who they could be."
Daria Jorquera Palmer
Daria Jorquera Palmer wants to see an end to the "widespread and systemic" issue of racism in Canadian sport.
Jorquera Palmer, a Pan-American and Canada Games medallist in fencing, led Canada’s first research report in 2021 on anti-racism in sport in the country.
The idea for the report came after some newcomers reported facing racism while playing sports to Immigration Partnership Winnipeg, the 37-year-old said.
About 40 Winnipeg athletes, coaches, officials and service providers were interviewed as part of the research, with nearly 70 per cent saying they had lived experience of racism in sport, according to the report.
The results weren't a surprise to Jorquera Palmer, but a confirmation.
"When we were talking about racism in sport, [it] was very anecdotal, but there wasn't anything really concrete that people could point to, and now people can," she said.
"If we want to change it, then we have to acknowledge that it exists and we have to call … out the fact that we're not actively and intentionally working towards being an anti-racist sport system."
But many, if not most, sporting organizations do not collect race-based data, she said.
"I think we have a long way to go, just because we don't have enough data."
WATCH | Get to know Daria Jorquera Palmer:
She's continuing her research, and is now taking a national approach to focus on why many racialized girls, between ages of 12 and 17, stop playing sports in Canada.
"What we want to look at is … what can we do to keep girls in sports just in a general sense, but also why are racialized girls leaving sport?"
Now, Jorquera Palmer is also helping shape the next generation of fencers in Manitoba. Sports can be an important tool for a young person's development, she said.
"When I look at coaching, I'm not just coaching an athlete [or] a fencer," said Jorquera Palmer. "I'm preparing them for the rest of their life."
Robert Beattie
Robert Beattie is interested in watching things grow — at a cellular level.
Beattie, 39, is an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba's department of biochemistry and medical genetics.
He grew up in the rural municipality of St. Andrews, just north of Winnipeg, returning to the province after his studies took him to England, where he completed a PhD in biomedical science, and to Switzerland and Austria.
A neuroscientist and a stem cell biologist by training, Beattie's research seeks to understand the progression of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, Rett syndrome — a rare neurological disorder — and schizophrenia.
"We use advanced genetic models to study them, and understand how those develop at the single cell level," he said.
"It's not to fix or cure people. It's more to improve their quality of life and to be able to reach their full potential."
Beattie was instrumental in the creation of Manitoba's first "frozen zoo," which combines neuroscience, conservation and environmental stewardship to collect and study cells from the province's polar bears.
"I thought, well, we could take some of those tools that we're using to study human disorders and human stem cells and apply that to polar bears," he said.
"What I hope this project inspires is that Canada creates its own large-scale frozen zoo that can then be used to preserve cell lines from all of our endangered species."
WATCH | Get to know Robert Beattie:
In April 2025, Beattie co-authored an open letter to provincial leaders that was signed by over 200 researchers, scientists and academics, calling for renewed provincial investment. The province later increased its annual funding for Research Manitoba from $14 million to $19 million.
"For me, that was phenomenal," he said. "Funding is not just for research or innovation, but it also helps in the environment, job creation [and] health care."
But as a researcher, Beattie says it can be more difficult to measure success.
"Every great discovery comes with another three or four questions," he said. "There's always something more to learn and always something more to ask."
The key to research is getting comfortable with failure, and to be able to "go from failure to failure without giving up," he said.
"Research as a whole is really important to me, because this is what leads to progression and pushes a society forward."
Sunday Queskekapow
Sunday Queskekapow is working toward a future where no one has to leave northern Manitoba to be themselves.
Queskekapow, 24, is a neurodiverse two-spirit and transgender Néhinawak (Swampy Cree) community activist, currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in social work at the University of Manitoba.
A member of Kínoséwi-Sípiy (Norway House Cree Nation) and raised in Ohpáskowayáhk (Opaskwayak Cree Nation/The Pas), Queskekapow helped organize Ohpáskowayáhk’s first Pride float at age 15, and later led a regional conference to connect 2SLGBTQ+ people from northern and remote communities.
At 17, Queskekapow worked full time to save up and buy a used car in order to drive over six hours to Winnipeg to access gender-affirming health care not available in the north.
"I would drive myself to the city, and it was hard to leave my family and my community to a place that I didn't spend a lot of time in."
Queskekapow moved from northern Manitoba in 2019. Since then, they have supported North America's first two-spirit sun dance ceremony, co-ordinated the delivery of gender-affirming care supplies to seven northern communities, and done research on youth homelessness in Winnipeg.
They continue to make an influence as co-chair of the national 2 Spirits in Motion Society's youth council, and as a member of Manitoba’s suicide prevention advisory circle.
But Queskekapow still thinks of home, wanting to return.
WATCH | Get to know Sunday Queskekapow:
"When I first moved here [to southern Manitoba], I was like, 'I'm never going back home,'" Queskekapow said.
"I always thought that my change would happen from somewhere else, but now I really feel safe and accepted — not even just within the community, but within myself — to go back and to be able to help the community," they said.
"I can go back home and not feel so much resentment towards not having enough resources and access to health care and whatnot, but I really want northern Manitoba to be a safe place where people aren't feeling like they have to leave to just be themselves and get health care."
Being selected as a Future 40 recipient means more than just personal recognition, said Queskekapow.
"The most important thing out of this is that it gives light to a lot of issues faced by my fellow community members."
Renée El-Gabalawy
Renée El-Gabalawy knows the importance of a calm headspace, using her research to help ease Canadians through life-changing situations.
El-Gabalawy, 39, is an associate professor at the University of Manitoba's department of clinical health psychology, as well as its department of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine.
Her research focuses on how mental health challenges can affect adverse or traumatic medical experiences, and how to better support a patient's mental health as they live with a rare illness or undergo major surgery.
"Anxiety is the norm right before surgery," she said. But "when anxiety is very high, at really debilitating levels, we know that that's going to impact their potential risk for complications during surgery and postoperatively."
El-Gabalawy's research is timely, as provincial data suggests wait times for all publicly reported surgeries rose in Manitoba last year, especially for cataract and hip and knee surgeries.
"We know that having anxiety and depression before surgery, for example, impacts rates of reinstitutionalization, and we even published a study recently that found an association with mortality — so death — within a year."
El-Gabalawy was part of a University of Manitoba research team who established an online portal to help Canadians living with chronic pain access resources, called Power Over Pain, which is free and has been accessed by over 300,000 Canadians, she said.
WATCH | Get to know Renée El-Gabalawy:
She's done research on the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and says there's been less stigma around talking about mental health in Canada in recent years.
"I think that where we need to focus now is catching up as a system to be able to match that openness, and to be able to support the people who need it," she said.
"The mental health need is very high right now, and the supports are extremely limited."
El-Gabalawy also developed a virtual reality program to help psychologically prepare patients before a major cancer surgery or lower limb amputation, which she used to help a patient who was extremely fearful of an upcoming breast cancer surgery.
"She ultimately underwent surgery, which changed her life, and now she is living fully in the community," El-Gabalawy said. "It was very rewarding to me."