Gem Newman

Home About Writing Software GitHub Academia

I am a Resident Physician in the Univeristy of Manitoba's bilingual family medicine residency program. I am also a member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Since 2010 I have produced Life, the Universe & Everything Else, a podcast that focuses on the intersection of science and society.

Education

I obtained my MD from the University of Manitoba's College of Medicine in 2024 and I had the honour of serving as valedictorian. I also have a BSc in Computer Science with a specialization in artificial intelligence.

During medical school I was IT & Design Editor for the University of Manitoba Journal of Medicine and sat on the executive of both the Medical Journal Club and the Parents in Medicine Advocacy (PIMA) group.

Work

In 2021 and 2022 I worked as a COVID-19 immunizer for Shared Health. During the summer of 2021 I worked as a Research Assistant for the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and volunteered at the East St. Paul Medical Clinic administering COVID-19 vaccinations.

Prior to studying medicine I wrote C# and ReactJS for Permission Click. I have a decade of experience crunching data in Matlab for a machine learning startup, and I've made contributions to the Julia language's base library.

I'm also one of the developers behind Help Next Door, a volunteer matching platform developed to help Manitobans during the COVID-19 pandemic, B2B Manitoba, which aids Manitoba businesses in finding PPE to protect their workers, and Student Jobs MB, which allows students to submit job applications to employers in Manitoba.

Other Projects

In addition to writing open source software in my spare time, I also enjoy writing fiction; a few of my short stories have been published in anthologies, and have been fairly well received.

I am a member of the Manitoba Writers' Guild and the Winnipeg GMB of the Industrial Workers of the World. I'm a past board chair at Canadian nonprofit Bad Science Watch and former organizer of the Winnipeg Skeptics.