Science Student Council Presents
In Conversation With:
Anatomy and Cell Biology
Table of Contents 3
Project Overview Cancer Biology Dr. Alison Allan Dr. Trevor Shepherd Dr. Vanessa Dumeaux Brooke O’Donnell
5 7 9 11
Jenna Kitz
13
Biology of Disease Dr. Patrick Lajoie Dr. Doug Hamilton Dr. Dale Laird Dr. Lauren Flynn
16 18 20 22
Clinical Anatomy Hannah Martin Miranda Wysoczanski
25 27
Developmental Diseases Dr. Michelle Mottola Dr. Stephen Renaud Kelly Baines Julia Brott
30 32 34 36
Neurological Diseases Dr. Shawn Whitehead Dr. Steven Laviolette Salonee Patel Sarah Myers
38 40 42 44
Scholarship of Learning and Teaching Dr. Sarah McLean Dr. Tim Wilson
48 51 53
Acknowledgements
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Project Overview Inspired by the stories and insight provided by members of the department last year, this second edition of “In Conversation With: Anatomy and Cell Biology” includes another 21 conversations with both faculty and graduate students. This year, I have conducted interviews with faculty members and graduate students that I previously didn’t have a chance to chat with last year, as well as revisited some of last year’s faculty interviewees to see how their research had evolved over the course of the last year. This edition not only focuses on providing a spotlight on the diverse research happening within the department, but maybe even some assurance to upper years who are worried about their future careers. If you read on, you’ll see that things tend to work out. I would also like to thank all the interviewees for sharing their research, stories, and future ambitions. They have absolutely broadened my perspective about what it means to be a professor and a researcher in this department. Most importantly, this second edition has reminded me why we, as students, should not be afraid to start a conversation. You might just learn something you weren’t expecting. Beverly Gu Anatomy and Cell Biology Department Representative (2020–2022) Participants by Area of Research Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
9%
Cancer Biology 22%
Neurological Diseases 18%
Developmental
Clinical
Diseases 18%
Anatomy 9% Biology of Disease 18%
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Cancer Biology 4
How has your work changed over the course of the last year? s
Dr. Alison Allan Department Chair & Professor (Joint Appointment with Oncology)
“One of the projects that we have made a lot of progress with is related to the translational work that we're doing in collaboration with Dr. David Palma in radiation oncology. We have a phase three clinical trial looking at a very specific type of radiation called stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, which allows very precise targeting of metastatic disease. My lab is doing all the blood biomarker collection and analysis for that study. In terms of patient numbers, progress is occurring much faster than we anticipated, even despite COVID. We also recently just got a grant from the Canadian Cancer Society to do some more detailed downstream analysis of the biomarkers. We’re pretty excited.”
“Progress is occurring much faster than we anticipated, even despite COVID”
More about her research https://bit.ly/AllanLab Contact Info alison.allan@lhsc.on.ca (519) 611-2111 Ext. 84054
Generally, what does your day-to-day look like? “I am in a unique situation in that that my lab is located at the London Regional Cancer Program in Victoria hospital, but I have two offices because I am also Chair of the department. My day never looks the same, which is exciting and is one of the things I love about this job. I spend two to three days a week at the cancer center and then the rest of the week at the university. I also teach ACB 4461 and the biochemistry 4455 courses in the winter semester. This semester has been pretty crazy because I have to balance out all the research work with writing papers, meeting with students and staff, and sometimes doing a little bit of lab work myself (not often enough though!) Then there’s all the administrative pieces of being a chair. The department is actually coming up on an external review where we have to create a self-study report about what we've accomplished in the last five years, and where we are looking to go both on the education and the research side. It’s kind of three jobs right now, but it keeps me busy and it's really interesting.”
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What are some of the greatest challenges to your research? “The major challenge that we face every day as researchers is funding and keeping our programs running. Each individual professor is essentially running what can be compared to a small business. Our salaries are paid by the university when we're hired as professors, but everything else related to our research program is our responsibility. Running a research program is essentially like running a small business, even though we're not trained for that in grad school at all. That’s why this new grant from the Canadian Cancer Society and the one I got last year from CIHR are really exciting because that means I can focus completely on the research. In cancer research, the scientific challenge is really the complexity of the disease. There’s a need to collaborate with other people who have a different expertise than you and bring all those different personalities together to do research. That's more impactful, not only from a scientific point of view, but from a patient perspective as well. The rate at which different cancer therapeutics and different imaging modalities are changing is very high. There’s also a computational side of it that's really coming to the forefront that we also need to keep up with.”
How do you see the field evolving over the course of the next 5-10 years? “Breast cancer in particular is making great progress on the development of new targeted agents. There’s definitely a lot of effort that people are putting in to understanding how immunotherapy might be applicable to breast cancer. Breast cancer has not really found it’s true home yet with immuno-oncology drugs, but we'll definitely see more progress in this area in the near future. Another really interesting trend in breast cancer is the movement towards patient informed research; meaning more involvement and input from the patients themselves on the direction of research. A lot of agencies now are requiring you as a scientist to have patient consultants or patient advocates on your research team, so that there's constant feedback about the relevance of the research, how it gets communicated to the public, and how it gets translated. I think it will be a richer kind of research model, because it will bring in more social science, psychologic, socioeconomic, and equity and diversity considerations.”
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“In cancer research, the scientific challenge is really the complexity. There’s a need to collaborate with other people who have a different expertise than you”
How has your work evolved over the course of the last year? “Science can sometimes be somewhat slow going in terms of generating new data and new ideas and moving things forward. But, I would say that looking back over the last year, a lot of things have really taken shape with my own research program and for those working in my lab. There’s been really nice progress on every trainee’s project and it’s contributed to a couple of different research publications. I was also successful in getting three new grants to support my research. It was an excellent year – one of those rare times where in one year you get that much success with grant funding and publications. It’s been a combination of a few years of work to get preliminary data and putting that data together to get publications into scientific journals to ultimately be successful with those grants. But what’s most exciting with getting grant funding means I foresee a lot of evolution in my research over the next few years.”
Generally, what does your day to day look like? “Overall, this involves the perspective of short- and long-term goals for my own research program. The highest priority are my own trainees, my own research, getting publications, and getting grants. Long-term thinking involves recognizing that we've experiments to do for a publication that may be a year from now, so I can submit a grant following that. You have to recognize that the things you're doing on a day-to-day basis will contribute to things that are going to be required in three months, six months, or a year down the road. This is balanced with other little things that just crop up on a daily
Dr. Trevor Shepherd Associate Professor, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology (Cross Appointment with Anatomy and Cell Biology)
More about his research http://bit.ly/ShepherdLab Contact Info tshephe6@uwo.ca (519) 685-8500 Ext. 56347
basis. For example, editing an abstract for one of my trainees or taking a look at a grant for a colleague. It’s about that balance of things that are going to be dropped on your plate for the shortterm, as well as the ongoing day-to-day responsibilities that contribute to the long-term.”
“what’s exciting is getting grant funding means I foresee a lot of evolution over the next few years” 7
Where do you see the field heading in the next 5-10 years? “One of the grants that was funded is for a Pan-Canadian Initiative supported by Ovarian Cancer Canada and Health Canada. Federal money is there to specifically build a network of ovarian cancer researchers, where we have research models and patient samples to do preclinical work on. Another part of the initiative is to test new therapeutics and new ideas. The last part of the initiative is to support clinical trials. The whole idea of this five-year initiative is that there will be major progress in all three of those priorities. I'm lucky to be contributing to two of those priorities with some of the grant funding that I've received and some of the collaborative work that I am actively doing. Also, on an international level, there's a huge network of collaboration to make inroads on this devastating disease. I've been watching this happen over the last decade and I will continue to see this happening over the next five or 10 years. It took a long time to get to this level where we're at now in Canada with the number of different research labs that are focused on ovarian cancer, the great amount of funding support available, and the level of collaboration.”
“You either throw up your hands and go, ‘There’s nothing we can do’, or you accept that challenge and try to understand that complexity.” What were some influential steps you took for your career? “The most important is funding – biomedical research is not cheap. Another is having a good team so you can have access to expertise. It's about being able to attract the right people into your lab and maintain an interactive team – that's something that takes time and effort to do. It can be tough because if you don't have the funding, you can't do the research, and you can't attract the students. It’s like a ‘catch-22’: to have a great team you have to have sufficient funding, but they only come together.” From the science perspective, what are some of the major areas that scientists still are trying to work out? “It comes down to the idea that cancer is extremely heterogeneous. There are some malignancies that seem to be very straightforward with one driver mutation and a similar phenotype in every tumour. But we know that in most malignancies, with their genomic instability, every patient's tumour is different, and even within one patient over the course of their disease. After treatment, the tumour can change and evolve. It feels like it's a whack-a-mole game that you're playing in terms of trying to predict what's going to happen. I think scientifically we know that that's our challenge and we've got a lot of tools and technologies to try to understand that. But it's still recognizing that cancer always seems to be that one step ahead. You can almost take one of two routes – you either throw up your hands and go, ‘There's nothing we can do’, or, you accept that challenge and try to understand that complexity.” 8
What are you currently working on?
Dr. Vanessa Dumeaux Assistant Professor Contact Info vdumeaux@uwo.ca
“We are studying health and disease in the context of the individual. I have had a longstanding interest for breast cancer and have invested research efforts to look at molecular fingerprints to help predict disease progression and response to therapies. My research looks at the interplay between the disease cells with the surrounding tissue and the interactions with tissues that are further away. We are particularly interested with the circulating immune cells and the gut microbiome and how they interact with the diseased tissue. For that, we use high throughput technologies to measure the expression of genes in multiple tissues and extract information from that. Data science is an important discipline in my lab, mostly because the data we collect are very large – there are 22,000 genes, multiple individuals, and several tissues. So in order to help us find patterns in that data and extract biological knowledge, we do a lot of programming, data analysis and visualization. The goal is to develop clinical assays and translate this knowledge into the clinic.”
“These efforts will help predict disease progression and response to therapies.” What are some of your research goals? “Definitely translation to the clinic is one thing that is very important. I was describing assays for breast cancer - for example, we aim to develop tests that will inform clinicians and the patients about whether, for example, a woman diagnosed with a non-invasive breast cancer needs radiotherapy or not. It has a direct impact in guiding treatment. Another interesting goal that I'm looking forward to when I start at Western is training bio students in data science. Data scientists have to think about how to study those giant Excel tables and how to best present and illustrate the results. The last goal is about developing new technologies. There is a lot of technology development in genomics so we can look even deeper into one tissue. Now, you can go as far as looking at all genes in a single cell. I'm looking forward to participating in developing those approaches so I can get the most exciting results out of my research data.” 9
What are some important steps you took to get to where you are? “I have had a rather non-canonical career path. The academic research road is generally very linear – you do a master’s, PhD, postdoc, maybe a second post doc. But, this linear path does not always fit all personal situations., I wanted to be with my family and didn’t want to sacrifice that. It was a bit of a roadblock, but I found creative ways to do what I love, for example, by starting my own freelance consultancy business. During this time, I developed a lot of collaborations, which was really empowering and exciting. I think that being resourceful is very important in many aspects of a researcher’s life. There is now a lot of information on the internet that you can use to learn a new skill. I have, and still do, continuously take advantage of that.”
What led you to this breast cancer research?
“I wanted to explore breast cancer and work with genomics and data science. The rest is history.”
“I come from a very small place in France, and I didn't really even know what research was all about. I just followed what I wanted to do; I decided on pharmacy just because I liked the courses, then I read a book about viruses, and decided to do a master’s in epidemiology. My first research project was looking at the risk factors of breast cancer back in the early 2000s. At the same time, the first DNA sequence of the full human genome was being released. So, we could now locate where the genes are and how they are coded. A new technology was also coming out so we could look at a lot of genes in the same tissue. I thought it was fascinating. As an epidemiologist, I was always thinking about what were the best data that I could collect to answer the questions I was the most excited about. At the end, I wanted to explore breast cancer. I was interested in biology in a very exciting time and this is how I fell in love with genomics and data science. The rest is history.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “Research is really about digging for information and communicate the results the best way possible. The first step is about having a question, collecting the right data and digging into it to get some answers. I find it very thrilling and interesting. The second step is more about finding the best way to illustrate or communicate those results to the community. I want to impact society by being helpful and contributing positively, and that could be by carefully putting a figure together to help share knowledge.”
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What are you currently working on? “I'm a PhD student in Dr. Silvia Penuela’s lab in the ACB department. My project focuses specifically on pannexin 3 in skin and skin cancer. Pannexin 3 is part of a family of channel-forming proteins that are important for cell-to-cell communication. Before I started my project, we knew that this protein was present in the skin and that it's important in cellular differentiation and cutaneous wound healing. Nothing was really known about how it's regulated as the skin ages, its role in the establishment of proper skin structure, or even what it does in tissue homeostasis. I've been characterizing this pannexin in skin using a pannexin 3 knockout mouse model, and investigating what happens to the skin architecture and properties when the protein is absent. The second area of interest of my project is looking at the role of pannexin 3 in skin cancer. Previous findings have shown that pannexin 3 levels are decreased in squamous cell carcinoma, which is a skin cancer that arises from keratinocytes that are in the epidermis — that's the uppermost layer of the skin. They found that there are decreased levels, but no one has investigated why this is the case. So, I’m using human cell lines, patient-derived tumours, and a mouse cutaneous carcinoma model to try to determine the effect of pannexin 3 downregulation on the malignant properties of squamous cell carcinoma.”
Brooke O’Donnell Graduate Student PhD Candidate Contact Info bodonne3@uwo.ca
What are some of your future goals? “When you're a student, it’s a given that you want to finish all your experiments, publish your papers, and graduate. Further to that, my goal with my research is to build a strong foundation for the pannexin 3 in squamous cell carcinoma project in the lab. It’s a new area of research for the lab that I was able to start with the guidance of Dr. Penuela and a surgical oncologist named Dr. Kathy Roth, and I take pride in the fact that I created this project and did the preliminary work. I hope that it's one the ways I leave my mark on the Penuela lab after I've graduated. As for my career, that's a hard question to answer because I'm still in the work phase of my project, and there's been a lot of uncertainty in research (and the world) over the past couple of years. I originally thought I wanted to go into industry and not continue in academia, but I've learned that you have to keep all your doors open and not shut yourself off to any opportunities. Maybe if you asked me this question again in a year, I would give you a different answer, but that's where I'm at right now.” 11
“It was one of those things where you keep an open mind and end up finding something that you really enjoy doing.”
What are some important steps you took to get to where you are? “In undergrad, I found it was easy to be narrowly focused on your GPA, and all the exams and assignments you have to do. To get to the place where I am today, I found that I had to change my mindset. I kept an open mind to any opportunities that came my way and I encouraged myself to step out of my comfort zone. Research as a graduate student is very different than being an undergrad, which was obviously what I was familiar with at the time. Another key step for me was networking and getting myself out there. Honestly, putting myself out there has shaped more than half of my project. The pannexin 3 in squamous cell carcinoma project came from a conversation at London Health Research Day. I was just at my poster and a surgical oncologist that specializes in skin cancer (Dr. Kathy Roth) and I just started chatting about my project. From that one conversation, we were able to create a new area of research in the Penuela lab.”
What drove you to research in cell biology? “When I was an undergrad at Western, I didn't originally intend on pursuing a graduate degree and going into research – I kind of stumbled across it. I was taking a MicroImm course in second year and the professor put up an announcement at the start of class for the SURF program, which is the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. When I looked into it further, I came across another program called DUROP (Dean’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) and ended up applying for both of them at the same time. I was lucky enough to hear back from my current supervisor, Silvia, and she accepted me into her lab. It originally just started as a summer project, getting some experience in research that was relevant to my degree. But, after spending time in the lab, I found that I enjoyed the work and the people and decided it was something that I wanted to continue to do. Since then, I’ve had almost every role that you could have in a lab: I volunteered in my third year, received an NSERC-USRA the next summer, did my fourth-year thesis in Silvia’s lab, and now I’m a graduate student. My positive experiences through each stage is really what inspired me to continue on in research. Silvia is a tremendous mentor, and the Penuela lab is a really great team. I didn't know that I was going to like it until I tried it. It was one of those things where you keep an open mind, and you end up finding something that you really enjoy doing.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “It has to be the discovery. You're on the leading edge of knowledge, finding out new things that no one has ever found before, and becoming an expert in your area of research. It's the satisfaction of asking a question or finding a gap of knowledge in the field, and being the one to discover the answers. It’s also about having the chance to make contributions to the field and to future research, with the hope that it can eventually make a difference in our understanding of basic science, and specific to my research, in the lives of skin cancer patients. That's not to say that research is discovering a new thing every day – there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes, like the optimization and the failed experiments. You have to think of it as part of the process, but it’s the discovery aspect that keeps you going and it makes it all worth it in the end. That's the part at the end of the day that I look forward to, and it makes me enjoy what I do so much.” 12
What are you currently working on?
Jenna Kitz Graduate Student PhD Candidate Contact Info jkitz@uwo.ca
“I am gearing up for my PhD thesis defense, which is scheduled for next week. The way that a thesis traditionally works is you have three published papers from your work which become your three research chapters for your thesis. I'm working on submitting my last primary research article associated with the thesis to tie up loose ends associated with the project. My research looks at circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which are cells from a primary tumor that are using the blood vessels to move throughout the body. The research focuses on how to detect them from the blood and how we can use these biomarkers for earlier diagnosis of metastasis, which ultimately is the number one leading cause of cancer related deaths. Also, I am in a full-time in a role as a medical communications writer for a Torontobased consulting company. The company works with pharmaceutical companies who are about to release drugs or have drugs in development. Specifically, we work with the companies that are in phase two clinical trials to create any scientific materials or strategic rollout plans which are associated with the launches of these drugs.”
What are some of your goals, looking forward? “Research is great, but I felt that I needed to do something different from that, for now. When I started in the lab, I was already fairly certain that I was not interested in staying in academia forever, which is the typical course for someone who's in research. As I was getting on in the degree, I was set on working with a scientific company in Toronto. For a few years I have known that I wanted to go into industry use my scientific knowledge and the many skills that we develop in grad school that are so applicable to both corporate jobs and jobs within the scientific community. There are so many uses for what we learn and I really wanted to make sure that I was in a career that utilized my skillset. So, my future goal is just to continue on the path that I am now. I don't like to close doors, so anything is possible.”
“we’re in really close proximity to patients, which provides a lot of opportunity for impactful research” 13
What are some important steps you took to get to where you are? “Obviously, when you're getting into research, having a fourth-year thesis project helps you to s develop some skills, but it's not the be-all and end-all. You can get into a master's program without having research experience. But for me, the biggest thing to get me to where I am now was pursuing extracurricular activities. Ultimately in the end, we're grad students for a short period of time in our life, but we are people beyond that. If you just get so siloed into your research, you can lose yourself and your passions. So, I joined clubs, organizations, and committees, and I developed interests beyond the lab. These interests and connections ultimately led me to where I am today.”
What drove you to cancer biology? “In my undergrad, I spent a long time trying to figure out if I wanted to do a fourth-year thesis project. I ended up choosing cancer research because I thought it had a lot of potential impact on patient lives. I really wanted to do something that would help me develop skills that I could use later on, which ultimately led me to applying for ACB at Western. To be honest, I was mostly interested in working with Dr. Allan and I applied directly to her lab not the ACB program. What drew me to her was her research as it was in the field I was very interested in. I met with her and realized that we have very similar backgrounds. She went to Guelph, where I did my undergrad, and did her PhD just a few benches over from where I did my research, small world! Also, her lab is a translational research lab located at the hospital with the cancer center downstairs. So, we're in really close proximity to patients, which provides a lot of opportunity for impactful research. I would suggest to anyone who's looking to like apply to a lab to really make sure that the research is what you want to do first and foremost. You can do that in two ways: You can find an advisor and apply directly to them, or you can find the program that has research that you're interested in and apply to the program. Make sure that what you're doing is what you're passionate about because there's always going to be these unforeseen roadblocks, which are hard to overcome. Then, make sure that the lab environment is right for you as well. There are a million ways you can run a lab and some advisers are really hands-on or hands-off and have different expectations. Have these hard conversations and be picky.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “There's a lot of amazing things about research. I would say that what I love about research is that every day is different. There are some jobs where you just do the same thing day in, and day out, and it gets kind of mundane. Research is always changing. From day to day, you are working on completely different aspects of a project, teaching, doing different experiments, or traveling to some other part of the world and giving a talk. And you’re doing all of this, while you are potentially impacting patient lives. I really like that as it keeps research engaging, interesting and impactful.” 14
Biology of Disease 15
What are you currently working on?
Dr. Patrick Lajoie Associate Professor More about his research https://bit.ly/LajoieLab Contact Info plajoie3@uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 88220
“We’re a cell biology lab and we're interested in how cells respond to stress, especially how they regulate their gene expression to adapt to stress during the aging process. We are particularly interested in protein misfolding and the how the inability of fold proteins properly is associated with human diseases such as Huntington's Disease. We do that is by using yeast as a model organism. Yeast have been shown to recapitulate several of the basic mechanisms associated with how cells function in humans. Many of human diseases have the aging as contribution factor. If you think about diseases like Alzheimer's, and Huntington's, for example, these are diseases people get when they're older. Another question that we are interested in is the resistance to antifungals drugs. We recently started to work with fungal pathogens such as Candida albicans and are investigating how pathogens can acquire resistance to drugs through regulating cells stress responses.”
“Yeast have been shown to recapitulate a lot of the basic mechanisms associated with how cells work in other animals and humans.” What are some future research goals?
“We are looking forward to understanding these pathways and doing more translational work. For example, we started working with pathogens. A lot of our work so far has been done using the common baker’s yeast that people use to make bread because it is the canonical model organism. Determining the genetics in other fungi, especially in yeast pathogens, has previously been very hard to do because people didn't have the genetic tools to look at this. But now we have genome editing capabilities that we did not have 10 years ago.”
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How did you approach getting to your current career? “I think the first thing is to follow what you love, because if you get up in the morning and you don’t enjoy your job, you're likely going to be miserable for the rest of your life. Aside from that, you have to think outside the box, especially when you're a student. It's important to network and see what kind of opportunities are there, not just wait around for people to feed you the information. That's my best advice. Start early. It's very competitive but keep an open mind because you never know what's going to happen. You might choose a career that's very different from what you thought you would do when you started your undergrad. Also, try not to be affected by the negativity that's around science sometimes. I think professors don't always do a good job at selling the profession because we can be very negative. But it's a beautiful job and there are many careers out there inside and outside academia. You just have to keep an open mind and do what you really enjoy.”
What drove you into this career?
“That’s the best part about research – it’s never boring”
“When I finished my undergrad, I really liked science and trying to understand how the cell worked. I also liked microscopy and taking microscopic images. I got really interested in understanding the basic mechanisms of the cellular world, which is how I got into cell biology research. I did most of my graduate work on tumour cells and cancer models. Later, during my postdoc, I shifted to yeast models and more genetics, trying to merge both interests together. Science often takes unexpected turns – we started working on stress pathways and now we're really getting into the regulation of transcription and epigenetics using bioinformatics. I don't do as much imaging as I used to do because that's where the science went. You just won’t know what you're going to work on in five or ten years from now. The job always new challenges. That's what drove me into this career.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “I think my favorite thing is that there are never two days that are the same. It's a new job every day. You work with a lot of different kinds of people and it's always a new experience. That's the best part about research – it's never boring.”
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What are you currently working on? “My lab works predominantly on wound healing, specifically the molecular factors that influence and regulate wound repair processes. We then use this knowledge to design materials to try to enhance repair. We do everything from animal work through to using human tissue to understand how and why cells decide whether they’re going to make extracellular matrix or not. We have situations where they make too much and situations where they don't make any. We really don't understand that much about why this occurs particularly in humans. We work on many different aspects of repair including culturing cells on materials of varying compliance to see how they respond, because they're very mechanically sensitive and this impacts on the repair process.”
Any future research goals you’d like to share? “My ultimate career goal is to use research to educate students and pass the torch onto the next generation. The students and trainees are the future guardians of research. Our goal is to educate and just try to move the field forward, like increasing our understanding of why people are still having their legs cut off because the skin won't heal. I think by understanding that, hopefully we can change treatment plans. Ultimately, having a
Dr. Doug Hamilton Professor (Cross Appointment with Dentistry) More about his research https://bit.ly/DHamiltonInfo
Contact Info douglas.hamilton@schulich.uwo.ca
(519) 661-2111 Ext. 58194
clinical impact is the goal. If you can get to a point where your research program actually influences something in the clinic, that’s great, but that can also be done in other ways, such as having students in your lab who themselves go on and become clinician scientists. If you don't realize that the trainees are the key focus and should be front and center in dissemination of lab results, you've missed the point of academic research in my opinion.”
“it’s very easy to stay in a comfort zone, but it’s much harder to challenge yourself to try something which you wouldn’t have normally considered.” 18
What was an important step you took for your career? “When I first went into my undergrad, I was actually going to do Marine biology. I discovered that there really weren’t a lot of jobs in that field and it wasn't as interesting as I thought. At the time, I was doing a lot of courses in second year university on molecular biology and physiology, which were more relevant to humans, so I ended up doing a major in cell and molecular biology. Later, I interviewed for a couple of jobs and ended up instead going to do a PhD. I think sometimes people get stuck in a position of thinking, ‘Well, that's just what I'm going to do’. No, you can do anything you want if you have the drive. One of the key things I always teach my students is persistence. If you want to do something, persist and you're more likely to be successful. I was very fortunate to have some amazing mentors. I learned a ton of different lessons from each one of them, which have set me up as who I am. I think it was also about challenging myself to work with an engineer, then in a dental faculty, and every time I went somewhere new, they worked with something I hadn't worked with before.”
Why choose a career in cell biology? “It’s an inherent desire to understand how things work and how systems work together. With cell biology, I'm just thoroughly fascinated by cells and understanding what cell are capable of doing. I've always had this discovery bulb; that’s what Jeff Dixon, a professor in phys pharm used to call it. You can see people have this discovery bug where they want to figure out how something works and why it does what it does. I didn’t necessarily come straight through to research. But once I started my PhD and it just took over me. My PhD, it opened my eyes. I was kind of different than a lot of people in that I went on to challenge myself in different areas rather than just to stay in the area where I did my PhD. I actually went and worked for a mechanical engineer for three years on vascular biomechanics. It gave me a completely different appreciation for the role of mechanics and engineering in the human body. I always try to challenge my students to move out of their comfort zone because it's very easy to stay in a comfort zone, but it's much harder to challenge yourself to try something which you wouldn't have normally considered.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “One of the things that always blows my mind is that you can be looking down a microscope at something and know that you right now are the only person in the world who is seeing it. I think that is quite amazing, right? The fundamental basis of why we do what we do is because we want to be able to help people. There always has to be an eye on the clinic, and with wound healing in particular this is extremely important. I mention this one all the time – the percent of the annual healthcare budget in Canada that is spent on improper skin healing alone is 3%. I would be happy if 20 years from now another scientist or clinician picks up and revisits our work. That’s the beauty of science, you don't know when you may have an impact.” 19
How has your work evolved over the last year?
Dr. Dale W. Laird Professor More about his research http://bit.ly/LairdLab Contact Info dale.laird@schulich.uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 86827
“As we continue on with COVID, it's remains challenging to have a How normal year. In the fall, I was going into the office every day for the most part. My laboratory continues to function within the restrictions that we have. It’s a bit challenging, but I think people are continuing to make the best of it. Also starting last September, I began a new position which is an Assistant Dean of Research Chairs and Awards. This is an administrative position for me. My portfolio is a new one, and it includes looking after what we call endowed research chairs. Schulich has about 42. These endowed chairs are in perpetuity and held by Faculty members. The revenues from these chairs are used to either offset research costs or provide some salary support. My job is to oversee this program. The other part of my job is to encourage Schulich faculty to seek awards and honors, which not only brings recognition to the individuals, but it also brings recognition to the faculty as well as the University. It’s been good fun. I call it my ‘good news Dean’ job, because most times I'm calling up people to encourage them to go for something they will find personally rewarding and I participate by helping them shape their nomination packages.”
What do you generally do on a daily basis?
“Right now, I'm probably dedicating the equivalent of one to two days a week to my Deanship role. My other duties essentially have to do with teaching, which tends to occur mostly in the fall. I coordinate two fourth-year cell biology courses. I participate in first year medical teaching, and I also engage in spot teaching for different courses where I do anywhere from one to four hours within a unit or as a small segment of somebody else's course. On the research side of things, I’m constantly trying to drive our laboratory’s research mission in gap junctions. I meet with my staff our regularly as we strive to ourcan research students and staff regularly as students we strive and to reach research objectives soreach that we move objectives so that we can move towards publishing papers. In my towards publishing papers. In my world publishing papers is something that we do all the time – world publishing is something that we do all thejobs. timeI'm – we’re constantly moving data through to the finishpapers line. I also have a lot of university-level we’resubcommittees, constantly moving through to the finish line. I also have on Senate, I sit on a couple of Senate anddata I server on different search committees. a lotupofhaving university-level jobs. on“service Senate,duties”, I sit onwhich a couple of As a professor at Western, you end a lot of what weI'm call can be subcommittees, I a server differentforsearch rather time-consuming but alsoSenate transient. In the last yearand I wrote coupleon of reviews major committees. As a professor youtime. end up having a lot journals that are pretty high profile. Those reviews took a lot at of Western, preparation Collectively, all of what we call “service duties”, which can be rather time-consuming these activities keep cycling year after year.” but also transient. In the last year I wrote a couple of reviews for major journals that are pretty high profile. Those reviews took a lot of preparation 20 time. Collectively, all of these activities keep cycling year after year.”
What are the major challenges you face in your research? “From the science point of view, we work on a family of 21 genes and these genes produce 21 different connexins. It’s always challenging to sort out what all these connexins do. I'll give you an example from the skin, which is one of our areas of focus. We all express eight, nine, or even 10 connexins just within keratinocytes. That's great, but that's an incredibly complicated situation to analyze because it is not clear why do we need so many connexins that do essentially the same thing in a single cell type? What are they all doing? I'm a full believer that nature didn't make us with this kind of complexity without a reason. You always have to wonder when you are analysing data if you’re getting information from a second, third or fourth keratinocyte connexin, which complicates the assays we use to interrogate the skin. If you try to take a reductionist perspective and look at one particular connexin at a time, then you're not really mimicking the in vivo or the in situ situation. I think the challenge in our field is knowing what goes through all these intercellular channels. Why do we need so many connexins? Many connexins in the skin can give you a genetically inherited disease when mutated. An interesting aspect of inherited diseases is they tend to be a little mysterious as to where and when disease will present, and the presentation of disease can vary from person to person. These are the challenging questions that we need to investigate. Of course, to do all of this, you always need research dollars. Even with research funds in hand, it is always challenging to design the most informative experiments to address the most pressing questions.”
“I’m optimistic that in the next 10 years, you will be able to pick up a drug that is designed to target connexons” What kind of progress in the field do you think you’ll see in the next 510 years? “I'm optimistic that our field will develop one or more therapeutics. I think one of the things that we've known about connexins for a long time is they have linkages to many diseases, from cancer to many inherited diseases. But there’s nothing on the marketplace that targets connexins. I'm optimistic that in the next 10 years, you will be able to pick up a drug from the pharmacy that is designed to target connexins. There are several clinical trials in the works. Many of these have gone to phase 3 targeting everything from chronic skin wounds to eye diseases. There’s a good chance that some of these new drugs will prove safe and effective. That’s pretty exciting for our research field because we've known for a long time that connexins are linked to so many different diseases, but it's never been totally clear if they're the best target. Evidence is mounting that they will be the right target for one or more diseases. The future is bright.” 21
What are you currently working on? “My research lab is focused on developing cell therapies to treat a variety of conditions, including chronic wounds, peripheral vascular disease, and soft tissue damage, where there is a need for strategies to promote new blood vessel formation. In particular, we use a regenerative cell population called adipose-derived stromal cells (ASCs) sourced from fat. ASCs are similar to the mesenchymal stromal cell population that's found in the bone marrow, but offer advantages of being more accessible, expendable and abundant (most people would have a sample of fat to donate), as well as having some differences in their capacity to stimulate regeneration. One of the things that the field is now discovering is that these cells primarily function in the body by secreting factors that help establish a more pro-regenerative environment, rather than functioning by differentiating to form tissues. We call this cell empowerment. ASCs have the remarkable ability to stimulate new blood vessel formation and modulate the inflammatory response to create a more permissive environment for healing. So, we're developing strategies to be able to harness this cell empowerment ability more effectively. My background is in bioengineering. Building from this, one of our strategies involves designing biomaterial platforms that can promote cell survival and help guide cell function, including injectable materials and larger scaffolds tuned for different applications. If you think about a human chronic wound, it's a very hostile environment – we need to shift that to support the regenerative cells so that they can function much more effectively.”
Dr. Lauren Flynn Professor (Joint Appointment with Chemical & Biochemical Engineering) More about her research https://bit.ly/FlynnInfo Contact Info lauren.flynn@uwo.ca (519) 611-2111 ext. 87226
What are some of your future goals? “My long-term goal is to see our technologies translated to the clinic. We do a lot of preclinical work in our lab, including cell culture studies, as well as validation in small animal models. Recently I submitted a CIHR yesterday where we're proposing to move grantgrant where we're proposing to move into a large animal model to test a novel wound into pig therapy, studies. which I thinkisthat that's an excitingtowards sort of clinical transition, healing an exciting transition application. I was fortunate to have moving great mentors from a when small Imodel startedtoas aa larger professor, animal who model. encouraged I think also meI to be mindful of whether there is was fortunate to benefit fromtogood mentors when I started at as could a intellectual property related our therapeutic approaches that be patented. Promisingly, we professor, and they were very mindful encouraging me to think have had several patents issued on ourof scaffolding platforms. I'm also working with WORLDiscoveries about whether have intellectual thatbe could be patented. to connect withI industrial partnersproperty who might interested in commercializing our technologies. I'm That's very excited also something about fundamental that I have research been doing. and understanding We have several what's happening in terms of the cell patents in the lab on to some the scaffolds that we have biology, but I also want moveofforward on that translational aspect. Hopefully, we can get our developed. alsoclinic working to look for technologiesI'm to the wherewith theyWORLDiscoveries could really help people.” potential industrial partners who might be interested in 22
commercializing our technology. I'm very excited about fundamental research and understanding what's happening in
What were important steps you took to get to where you are now? “I think the first research position I had during my undergraduate studies allowed me to recognize that that I loved working in a lab and was passionate about research, and that an academic career focused on research was a possibility. I encourage all students to start early - be proactive and reach out to professors, and don’t get discouraged if you don’t find the right fit immediately. In research, you often need to create the opportunity for yourself and it’s important to try different things to gain experience and see what you really enjoy.”
What drove you to this area of research? I decided at the last minute to go into engineering. In high school, I was very much thinking about pursuing a degree related to cell biology. Then, I found out about the Engineering Science program at the University of Toronto, which had a dedicated biomedical engineering program. The field of tissue engineering was just emerging at that time, and I thought that the concept of growing new tissues in the lab sounded amazing. I also liked the interdisciplinary nature of the program, and how it combined both theory and application. Starting in my third year, I began working in Dr. Molly Shoichet’s lab developing biomaterial scaffolds for neural regeneration. I had an exceptional mentor who was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab and within a couple of months into my undergraduate thesis, I knew I wanted to go to grad school. I essentially fast tracked myself into an academic path because of my love of research, along with my strong interest in teaching. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and secured my first faculty position at Queen’s before I even finished my PhD. As I’ve mentioned, I've been very fortunate to have great mentors along the way who've provided me with a supportive environment so that I could really focus my energies on research.”
What is your favourite thing about research?
“Even though my training is in engineering, I feel so much at home here.”
“For me, my favourite thing is collaborating, whether that's with my students or with other scientists, engineers, and clinicians. Science is very much a team sport – I feel it’s important to bring together people with different expertise who can really look at problems in unique and different ways. For example, if you're trying to translate something to the clinic, having a clinical perspective is so important, because if a new technology doesn't meet a clinician’s requirements, all the development work is not worth it in the end. I feel that Western really stands out to me for its collaborative spirit, both within the anatomy and cell biology department and more broadly in Schulich. Even though my training is in engineering, I feel so much at home here.”
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Clinical Anatomy 24
What are you currently working on? “I am currently a first-year student in the clinical anatomy master's program working under the supervision of Dr. Shawn Whitehead. My project focuses on evaluating the relationship between vascular stress and microglial activation in a transgenic rat model of Alzheimer's disease. I'm specifically exploring how aging, neuroinflammation and loss of the blood-brain barrier integrity contribute to Alzheimer's disease. Some techniques I'm using include immunohistochemistry, microscopy, image analysis, and by using markers of vascular stress, I can determine if they are responding to activated microglia. Finally, I can see how that contributes to Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis.”
“Seeing this deterioration firsthand has driven me to get involved with this kind of research.” Any future research goals you’d like to share? “I hope to eventually further my research in contributing to specifically neurodegenerative diseases. For me, this hits close to home as my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease about seven years ago. Seeing this deterioration firsthand has driven me to get involved with this kind of research. I think something that particularly interests me is that individuals with vascular risk factors such as diabetes and mid-life hypertension are at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. So, by focusing on the various contributing factors, we can come up with effective preventative measures, even as simple as lifestyle changes which may decrease the overall inflammatory load on the body and Alzheimer's disease risk drastically. After my master's though, I would like to further my education in medicine. But, I am still really interested in this research.”
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Hannah Martin Graduate Student MSc Clinical Anatomy Candidate Contact Info hmarti28@uwo.ca
What are some influential steps you took for your career? “I realized what I liked and what I didn’t like in terms of courses and research. Once I reflected on these, I could really focus on what I was passionate about. For me, that was anatomy. By setting realistic short-term and long-term goals, I continue to be challenged to learn new things and push myself past comfortable boundaries. Like with setting up informational interviews, the one I had in 4th year was really helpful. By setting those up, either in your field or in a field that interests you, is a great way to establish your professional network. I also think that working on my professional development has really helped me to identify what my strengths and weaknesses are, so that I could focus on developing transferable skills, which are beneficial in any step of a career.”
Why did you choose to study anatomy? “During my undergrad, I took a few courses offered by the anatomy and cell biology department and I enjoyed them immensely. These courses really opened up my eyes to the incredible clinical applications of anatomy and cell biology. I soon realized that pursuing graduate studies in anatomy was perfect for me as it closely aligned with my future. In my fourth year, I took an integrative neuroanatomy course and one of the assignments was to interview a graduate student. So, I reached out to a student in the clinical anatomy master's program. And I just learned more about the program and the department and the diversity of research in anatomy and cell biology. That’s what ultimately led me to research in the department.”
“a positive impact, not only within the research community, but also on society as a whole”
What is your favourite thing about research? “That's a tough question. I think my favourite thing is that there’s always more to learn due to research’s evolving nature. Every day is different and I collaborate and network with so many amazing people in the department who share their ideas and their perspectives and experiences. Everyone in this department is so open and willing to help. Also, for me specifically, since a young age, I have always enjoyed figuring things out and following through with projects and watching things grow from hard work. I think research is so incredible because we can use our findings about something that we’re passionate about to make a positive impact, not only within the research community, but also on society as a whole.”
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What are you currently working on?
Miranda Wysoczanski Graduate Student MSc Clinical Anatomy Candidate Contact Info mwysocyza@uwo.ca
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“I'm a second-year Master’s student in the Clinical Anatomy program in Dr. Shawn Whitehead's lab. My research project focuses on white matter inflammatory cells and their relationship with beta-amyloid in Alzheimer's disease. Microglia are the resident immune cells of the brain and these white matter inflammatory cells have been identified as being one of the earliest pathological changes to occur in the Alzheimer's disease brain, along with being predictive of future cognitive decline. My research project is investigating the sex-related-age trajectory of microglia using animal models. We have a pre-clinical rat model that does not develop amyloid plaques to reflect a much earlier stage of disease progression. We also have a rat model that does develop amyloid-plaque pathology to represent a much later stage of disease progression. What’s the clinical anatomy program like? In our first year of the program, we were involved in full-time coursework – we completed a full cadaveric body dissection and other courses such as histology, neuroanatomy along with a teaching and professionalism course. In our second year of the program, we moved to full-time research. Right now we’re working on finishing up our research project and are in the process of completing our teaching certificate. We also TA medical students and several undergraduate courses. I recently also gave a guest lecture, which was one of our milestones in the program.”
“I discovered the Clinical Anatomy program, and I knew right away that it was a perfect fit for me.” What are some of your future career goals? “For the longest time, I’ve been very passionate about pursuing a career in the medical field, but clinical research is a very important component in medicine. So, I'm interested in pursuing clinical research down the line as well. So far, my passion for anatomy and teaching have been further solidified in this program and medicine aligns perfectly with my strong desire and interest in pursuing a lifelong career of teaching and learning, but also involving that research component. I've had the opportunity to kind of build on those previous experiences. I definitely want to have a good mix of both research and teaching in my future career.” 27
What have been some influential steps in your career so far? “My role as a lead research assistant and my experiences while pursuing my undergraduate honors thesis, ultimately provided me with my first exposure in conducting independent research. The leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills that I obtained were key components for pursuing further education and skill-sets, which I have further built upon throughout my master's research project as well. I was a teaching assistant in biomechanics and I was also involved in several volunteer positions, which provided me with additional teaching experiences. I volunteered with NeoKids, where I had the opportunity to teach children with physical and intellectual limitations how to ride a bike. Aside from research and teaching though, I completed a clinical internship at a cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation center. It provided me with valuable insight pertaining to the clinical aspect of patient care. At the cardiac rehabilitation center, I had the opportunity to help develop patient exercise programs. I believe the clinical opportunities, the teaching and research experiences, and different mentors that I met along way, ultimately led me to pursuing my Master’s in Clinical Anatomy.”
What drove you to research in anatomy and cell biology? “I was first exposed to research throughout my undergrad, when I pursued my undergraduate honors thesis. This was looking at mechanical efficiency and heart rate variability in long distance runners. I was also a lead research assistant investigating a diagnostic tool for concussions in athletes. This is where my passion for research stemmed from, ultimately leading me to pursue my Master’s in Clinical Anatomy. While I was researching different Master’s programs, I discovered the Clinical Anatomy program, and I knew right away that it was the perfect fit for me. It aligned so well with my passion for anatomy, along with my interests in research and teaching. It's nice to have that mix of research, teaching and coursework, especially for me coming out of undergrad. The Clinical Anatomy program provides students with the exposure to multiple different avenues in order to help them determine what they really enjoy doing, which is a really unique aspect of the program.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “There are honestly many things that I love about research. My current research project is in a
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field that I really didn't have much exposure to at all before beginning my Master’s. Although this was a big learning curve for me, I am grateful to have been provided with the amazing opportunity to engage in such meaningful research. That’s probably one of my many favorite things about research. But in addition to that, just being in the lab and running experiments is a ton of fun. Two years ago, I never would have imagined performing immunohistochemistry. Reflecting and realizing the incredible amount of knowledge and skill-sets that I've obtained over the past couple of years is incredible. I've met so many amazing people and feel extremely privileged to be surrounded by such a supportive lab environment. This is what ultimately makes it that much more of an enjoyable experience.” 28
Developmental
Diseases 29
What are you currently working on?
Dr. Michelle Mottola Professor (Joint Appointment with Kinesiology) More about her research https://bit.ly/MottolaInfo Contact Info mmottola@uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 ext. 85480
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“We're looking at the best strategy for preventing excessive pregnancy-related weight gain and gestational diabetes for individuals who are at high risk for getting diabetes during pregnancy. So according to Diabetes Canada, this includes individuals who identify as African, Asian, Hispanic, indigenous, or South Asian. We're trying to devise a methodological template that we can use to assist these high-risk ethno-culturally marginalized populations for gestational diabetes prevention. In order to do that, the strategies are focused on nutrition and physical activity, which are the components which can reduce gestational diabetes risk. The population that we're working with right now is pregnant Arab individuals, and they're going to be assisting us in co-designing participatory research that incorporates their culture, their religious, and spiritual beliefs into a healthy nutrition and physical activity strategy. Once we get this template devised, then we can apply it to other high-risk groups that I mentioned. We’d like to work with other community members in London and hopefully beyond to develop other healthy lifestyle strategies that would also assist in these pregnant high-risk populations to reduce diabetes risk and excessive weight gain during pregnancy.”
“That’s what makes research exciting, because it’s never a dead end.” What are some of your future research goals?
“Our team is in the process of developing an international center for maternal and child lifestyle development and learning. With our core team, we are going to be examining important facilitators and barriers to a healthy lifestyle within the Western research community and affiliates, specifically focusing on pregnant individuals so that we can help them adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle during and after pregnancy. The reason why this is important is because these healthy maternal lifestyles can be passed down through fetal development. What she does during pregnancy is important, but she's also a role model for the infant, the toddler, the child, her family. If we can assist individually within the family to start a healthy lifestyle, then you can see there how there might be kind of a snowball effect with this. It will help to prevent diseases such as diabetes that I've mentioned, but also obesity and heart disease.” 30
What are some steps that were influential to your career? “I think a lot of it was luck. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I applied to the right universities, worked with incredible individuals, but I think the key here is that I took a multidisciplinary approach. To be able to become an individual that was able to marry the two disciplines together into a field is unusual. From my younger self, I think it's always wise to open different doors. That comes back to whatever interests you; don't be afraid to jump into an unfamiliar field because you're always going to learn something new, then maybe you can use what you learned to help you further pursue your interests. You just have to be diligent in pursuing your dreams. For me, I kept wondering whether exercise was safe during pregnancy. I started off with the animal model when I was exercising pregnant rats during my PhD dissertation. Now, my research is community and human-based, but you have to start somewhere.”
What drove you to your area of research? “I'm an embryologist and an anatomist by training, but I'm also an exercise physiologist. I have a joint position between anatomy and cell biology and kinesiology and health sciences, so you can see that it's kind of a way to marry the two disciplines together. What got me interested in pregnancy and exercise was learning about the exercise physiology component first and then ending with a PhD in anatomy and cell biology. As an embryologist, I've always been interested in the effects of maternal exercise and a healthy lifestyle on the mother, but also in how that affects the developing fetus. How can a healthy lifestyle prevent chronic diseases in both the mother and the baby? I really like the phrase, “the egg that formed you was created when your grandmother was pregnant with your mom”. It shows the importance of the maternal environment for two, even three generations. The downstream epigenetic effects that can happen during pregnancy are important for the developing fetus long-term. That’s what drove me – it was this combination of my embryology training and my exercise physiology training.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “I like to think of it like the brain think tank – interacting with colleagues, with students, and all the brilliant minds to discuss problems in the field, and then trying to determine ways to solve those problems. That’s what makes research fun – deciding on one particular question, generating an experimental design, and then looking at the results and seeing that it may not be what you anticipated. That means that there will be more questions to ask. That’s what makes research exciting, that it's never a dead end. Research is exciting because it's dynamic. Specifically in my field, I get to see pregnant women when they come into the lab and then we follow them through pregnancy. Then, I get to go and measure the baby within six to 18 hours after birth. So, I get to meet the little one at birth and we follow the mom and the baby up to one year after birth. I get to see the results of my work during pregnancy in the babies. I get to see how they reached their developmental milestones. That’s a perk for me because it's a very dynamic lab with a lot of little ones running around.” 31
How has your work changed over the last year? “We are a placental biology lab, and that part of our research has stayed consistent, but over the past year we have looked into interactions between the placenta and other fetal organs. Specifically, interactions between the placenta and the fetal brain, because if the placenta is not functioning properly, then neurodevelopmental problems can arise. We’ve also studied heart development, which I think is fascinating. The heart and the placenta seem to develop in parallel and if one organ is not functioning properly, then it can impact the development of the other. I think we coped okay during COVID. It was certainly challenging because we are a very cohesive group, but we were able to adapt and continue to be productive. Graduate students were still able to go into the lab with limited capacity. But there was less interaction and certainly less collaboration. There were some experiments that we needed to put on hold due to decreased accessibility, which was a bit debilitating. But I think if we didn't have that limitation, we may have not shifted our projects to new areas.”
What does your day-to-day look like as a researcher and a professor?
Dr. Stephen Renaud Assistant Professor More about his research http://bit.ly/RenaudInfo Contact Info srenaud4@uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 88272
“It depends on the month and the day. When not teaching I try to spend my mornings focusing on research and writing. I found that I needed to have some designated time because otherwise I would just be too distracted to accomplish that day’s goals. In the afternoons, I have scheduled times to meet with graduate students and any remaining time I use to catch up on other assignments. Some days are more open but others are really hectic with meeting after meeting. Every day is a new adventure!”
“We need to understand the placenta if we are to understand the development of all other organs.” 32
What are some of the major challenges and barriers to placental biology research? “A significant barrier is that pregnancy is kind of a black box; it is hard to investigate in part because there is no reliable model of human development outside the uterus. So, we're dependent on using cell cultures and animal models and they all have limitations. The past few years have been better in terms of culture systems that have been established – for the longest time there was this magical cell that lives in the placenta that nobody was able to identify and grow in culture. That cell has now been discovered. We’re using those cells and it is opening many doors to better understand placental development. Still, that's just one cell type; all the cell interactions and physiological and hormonal environments in pregnancy cannot be replicated at this point. We’re often asked to justify what the clinical implications are in what we're doing. From a disease perspective, pregnancy may be the most difficult state to try experimenting with a new therapeutic because you have not only the health of the mother and baby to consider but also whether the therapeutic will disrupt the baby’s development. So we are limited to diagnostic approaches and creative solutions that will not jeopardize fetal or maternal health. Are there any specific developmental diseases that you're looking? Yes, our focus is preeclampsia. It is a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy which is incredibly common and very serious for both the mother and the baby.”
Where do you see the field heading in the next 5 to 10 years? “It was five or six years ago that there was a big headline from the Huffington post, saying the placenta is the least understood human organ. Suddenly, there's been a big push to recognize that the placenta is not well understood and should be prioritized. This is the organ that provides the environment for the brain, the heart, the kidney, the liver, and every other organ during the most critical stages of their development. We need to understand the placenta if we are to understand how environmental disruptions affect development of these other organs. Within the next 5-10 years, I think we're going to be able to exploit a lot of new technologies to better grasp placental development. For example, single cell technologies, imaging, and the new cell culture model that we're using in my lab. Another one of the issues I mentioned earlier was the lack of a cure for preeclampsia – the only cure is to deliver the baby. But that often results in preterm birth, which is the source of many problems for the baby because their organ systems are not sufficiently mature. Therefore, new strategies to mitigate symptoms of preeclampsia and prolong the pregnancy are a priority. Alternatively, some scientists are working on an “artificial womb” that provides an environment similar to the one created by the placenta. Therefore, preterm babies can continue to mature and risks associated with prematurity can be reduced. But, having an artificial womb also opens up several ethical issues to debate.”
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What are you currently working on?
Kelly Baines Graduate Student PhD Candidate Contact Info kbaines5@uwo.ca
“I'm in the process of wrapping up my PhD. I will be defending in three weeks. So, I'm not actively in the lab working on anything at the moment. To summarize my research, I looked at the role of the maternal immune system in regulating placental development and fetal development. I work primarily with a rodent model of inflammation. Some days are a lot more hectic in terms of collecting tissue, other days we're giving the pro-inflammatory treatment. Once the tissue is collected, that's when we do our analysis, which is more labor intensive. That includes techniques like RNA sequencing and qPCR, to quantify RNA levels and gene expression. I do a lot of immunohistochemistry, which is tissue sectioning and antibody staining, and Western blots to quantify protein levels within the tissue. I have also recorded wet weights, which is measuring organ and fetal sizes on the benchtop. I've also cultured rat trophoblast stem cells and neural precursor cells by doing isolations of cells from fetal brains. It is kind of intense, but it's really neat.”
What are some of your future goals from here? “My immediate goals are to finish my PhD - I'd like to finish up a couple of things with my project here. But I think I am leaving academia and pursuing an industry-based position. That's definitely a personal choice. I think that both have their pros and both have their cons. The opportunities in industry are quite different and broader than in research. There's not a lot of opportunity to try different roles within academia. Whereas within industry I'm applying very broadly. I've applied for scientific liaison positions, sales positions, research scientist positions. There are so many different opportunities out there and things that you don't even realize exist until you start digging.”
“You can do an experiment 10 times and not have it work. The one time that it does, you get this unique rush that people love.”
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What are key steps you took that you would advise to others? “Getting involved and not limiting yourself is important. In my undergrad, I didn't do a thesis project. So, I didn't really have much research experience. When interviewing, I had to be really forward about that and let them know that most of my experience was through lab-based courses. What I did have the opportunity to do, I loved. If you are in a program that doesn't require a thesis, it’s important to try getting some sort of experience like volunteering in a lab, because research is hard. There's a lot of failure in research and that can be hard to handle. You can do an experiment 10 times and not have it work. That one time that it does, you get this unique rush that people love. I think diversifying yourself is valuable. If you are involved in a biology or a chemistry program, try the other side of things and don't limit yourself to what you know. There are amazing labs out there that could be in a different department but could still hold your interest and create new ones as well.”
What brought you to research in anatomy and cell biology? “For me, it's this inherent love of biology, and trying to understand why things are the way they are and why they go wrong. Problem solving and puzzles have always been something that I've loved. In terms of science, it's just something that I was always drawn to. I ended up in this department and in my lab because it was a good fit. When you're trying to figure out where you want to go for grad school, it's important to find a lab and a supervisor you like. That’s how I ended up in Dr. Renaud’s lab with a project I loved. At the time that I was looking for grad schools, the department was doing in-person recruitment events. I had actually met Dr. Allan earlier at a breast cancer fundraising event and she told me to come to the event and meet other researchers. I got to interview with many different faculty members and see what their projects were like. That’s when I met my supervisor, and I brought some information forward to him about the project that I thought we should try. From there, the pieces just kind of fell together.”
What is your favourite thing about research?
“There’s always something that can be explored or learned and applied to your research.”
“It’s the opportunity to keep learning and keep exploring a topic. I've very often fallen down the research rabbit hole because something piques my interest. This can sometimes be relentless. There’s always something that can be explored or learned and applied to your research. There are so many new techniques coming out that continue to make research really interesting and fun. The other bit would be the positive feeling you get from an experiment working or trying something for the first time and having it be successful. It’s an unparalleled feeling that you get from that kind of success.” 35
What are you currently working on? “My research in Dr. Natalie Bérubé’s lab is currently focused on investigating the role of the chromatin remodeling protein ATRX and how it functions to regulate microRNA expression. When ATRX is deleted in male pediatric patients, it results in Alphathalassemia X-linked intellectual disability syndrome or ATRX syndrome for short. ATRX patients present with severe intellectual disability, craniofacial abnormalities, genital abnormalities, and even autistic-like behaviours. ATRX is on the X chromosome and ATRX syndrome is primarily diagnosed in male pediatric patients because female patients have the benefit of having two X chromosomes; if they inherit a mutated copy of the gene, they can use the unmutated copy to cope. Our lab has created a mouse model where ATRX is deleted specifically in forebrain excitatory neurons, and these mice show long-term memory and spatial learning deficits. I'm investigating how this protein's ability to regulate microRNAs then facilitates the effects that we're seeing. I'm trying to determine which microRNAs are dysregulated and how that then effects the expression of their target mRNAs in vivo. I am hoping to rescue any dysregulated microRNAs by
Julia Brott Graduate Student PhD Candidate Contact Info jbrott@uwo.ca
injecting microRNA sponges into their hippocampi and see whether or not I can actually rescue their long-term spatial learning and memory death.”
“I know that whatever I do, I want to make sure I’m still actively participating in research” What are your future career goals? “Honestly, that's the big question for all students, right? I don't know if I have the exact position nailed down as much as I just know that throughout the years of being in research, I've fallen in love with it. I can't get enough of it. I know that whatever I do, I want to make sure I'm still actively participating in research, whether that's becoming a PI and running my own research lab or working in industry, doing research underneath a pharmaceutical company or a health agency or a hospital. Just as long as I'm actively working towards a research goal, trying to answer these big scientific questions, and then hopefully translating those answers in a way that directly helps patients and people.” 36
What are important things you did in your undergrad that brought you here? “Always stepping out of my comfort zone is probably the biggest thing. I’d done that at every step of my career so far in academia. Going into my undergrad, I had no concept of graduate school. So really taking that leap of faith and being confident that I knew I liked research enough that I would hopefully enjoy graduate school. I really stepped away from that comfort bubble of what I had planned originally for my career after undergrad. I did the same thing again when I moved from Guelph to Western after my masters after the pandemic started in 2020. It was changing cities, changing schools, trusting that everything would work out with a new advisor, a new project, and a new topic in general. It was about always trying the new thing that scares you and having faith that pursuing something you were passionate about would work out.”
“I really stepped away from that comfort bubble of what I had originally planned before undergrad.” What drove you to research in cell biology? “It all started in civics and careers class in high school, where I found a toxicology program at the University of Guelph. Toxicology is all about different toxins and how they affect different biological systems. The dose ultimately like makes the poison – if you have too much or too little of something, you get all these negative effects. I stuck with the molecular side of that, what happens physiologically when you have too much or too little of a certain biological molecule. I did a master’s, and realized I love research and picking apart questions. From there, I knew I wanted more, but I wanted to change up my environment and push myself. That's when I found Dr. Bérubé’s lab here at Western.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “It comes down to always wanting to learn. My parents have always teased me about staying in school forever. I just love learning, that's what it really comes down to. Even when you get close to an answer for one question, the research tends to generate hundreds of other questions. It’s always a constant pursuit of questions and answers with learning along the way. It definitely keeps me busy.”
37
“It’s always a constant pursuit of questions and answers with learning along the way”
Neurological
Diseases 38
How has your work evolved over the last year? “It's been a challenging couple of years. I think the biggest way that our work has evolved is by getting more mechanistic. We are trying to understand why inflammatory cells are being activated in aging and understanding what they are doing in response to stress. How does this directly contribute to cognitive impairment? This kind of work has required us to bring in new techniques and new people with different skill sets. It's involved new collaborations. The plus side of being in this post-COVID situation is that collaboration is getting easier. The idea of getting on the phone back in the day may have been a little bit intimidating or daunting, but now through Zoom meetings, I talk every week talk to people all over the world about some really interesting ideas and some potential collaborations. The other area that I think our lab is really starting to take off in involves looking at liquid biopsies of inflammation. We’re looking at microparticles that circulate in the blood that we can identify and track based on their cell of origin. We can look at these biomarkers and plasma and know that they came from inflammatory cells specifically in the brain. It’s really been a dedicated effort from a core group of students who have learned these techniques and learn these approaches from the ground up.”
Where do you see the field headed in the next 5-10 years? “I think that the biggest barrier for neurodegenerative research or research in general is accurate diagnostics. We know that by the time patients are diagnosed, there's really very little you can do in virtually any neurodegenerative disorder. You can't reverse it. You can slow it down sometimes, and even that’s variable depending on the disease. So, it’s about early diagnosis. In order to improve early diagnostics, you need to know about the early fundamental processes to intervene. The field is really starting to learn that you need to go after different metabolic targets at different times. The second area we’re headed towards is personalized medicine. It’s about understanding that everybody responds differently to drugs and that everybody has different metabolic signatures. The technology has really evolved to drive personalized medicine approaches or personalized intervention approaches.”
39
Dr. Shawn Whitehead Associate Professor More about his research http://bit.ly/WhiteheadLab
Contact Info shawn.whitehead@uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 80440
What does your day-to-day look like in this job? “Well, I have four kids, so it depends on if they're going to school. My day-to-day looks fundamentally different if they're in a classroom or not. I’ve started to become very good at being able to do much of what I do away from the office. That comes from being fortunate enough to have some strong senior research associates and technicians that can look after the day-to-day and the lab. I've really changed the focus of my recruiting strategy to students who are interested in doing PhDs, because that's the length of time that it takes to do some of the sophisticated projects that we do. Fundamentally, I usually start the day at 5 A.M.. I'm doing some reading before any of the kids get up, because I find that's my most productive time. If I'm coming into the office, then most of my day is actually spent in meetings. I have admissions responsibilities, I'm on Senate, I'm the department’s grad chair, and there are many committees that end up chewing up a lot of my ‘nine to five’. I'm almost never in the lab and I don't personally run experiments anymore. I leave that to the people that know what they're doing, which are the students and the technicians. So for me, it’s a mix of administrative work, writing, reading, planning, data analysis with students, and then training them how to write and read and analyze.”
“To get funding, you have to be doing relevant research, but you also have to be doing innovative and, in some ways, risky research.” What are some barriers to your research? “There are two barriers. Number one is prioritizing a limited amount of time. There are a million amazing ideas, but which one do you want to tackle first? Which one's feasible to tackle? Do you have the expertise in the lab to carry it out? Do you have the money in the lab? It’s about balancing the needs versus the wants. Another major barrier is funding. We're fortunate that we’ve had pretty stable funding. But a lot of that comes from planning out like three, five years down the road – making sure that your students are publishing so you can demonstrate productivity so that you can continue to get funding and then staying like relevant. To get funding, you have to be doing relevant research, but you also have to be doing innovative and, in some ways, risky research.” 40
What are you currently working on?
Dr. Steven Laviolette Professor More about his research https://bit.ly/LavioletteLab
Contact Info steven.laviolette@schulich.uwo.ca
(519) 661-2111 ext. 80302
“Our lab does a lot of different translational research into mental health, mostly focusing on addiction-related issues. We also look at disorders like schizophrenia, mood and anxiety disorders, oftentimes in the context of addiction. For example, we look at how exposure to certain drugs during developmental windows of brain maturation can increase your risk of mental health disorders. We've recently been studying the effects of cannabinoid exposure on the developing brain, looking at both the adolescent brain and the prenatal brain. How do psychoactive compounds in cannabis increase the risk of certain mental health problems? In addition to that, we're also looking at nicotine, which is becoming a hot topic again, with the increased rates of vaping and e-cigarettes. There’s a resurgent epidemic of nicotine dependence among young people. We’ve been studying how exposure to nicotine during adolescent brain development can increase the risk of specifically mood and anxiety disorders.”
What are some of your future research goals? “We've been moving in some interesting new directions recently with more translational work. I'm cross-appointed in psychiatry, so I work with clinicians as well. We just recently started a study with magnetic resonance and spectroscopy imaging in the brains of patients from the mood and anxiety disorder clinic. We're looking at subjects that had a history of nicotine use during adolescence. We’re trying to look at how the resulting brain abnormalities from adolescent nicotine use ties into what we're
“it really is the most stimulating career you can have in terms of satisfying curiosity”
seeing in the animal models. Also, we’ve also started an exciting new project looking at brain organoids. You might've heard of this idea of ‘mini brains’. You can take stem cells from patient populations to recapitulate their brain developments in vitro. You're basically regrowing a miniature brain from that patient based on an IPSC cell that we get from patient samples with our collaborators. How does early exposure to drugs of abuse modulate different molecular and genetic markers for these mental health disorders?”
41
What were key influences on your career? “I went to the University of Toronto for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees, and I actually started at U of T in international relations. I wanted to work in the foreign service, and I was taking classes like French, Russian, philosophy, and political science. I also took an introductory psychology course called Psych 101. Within the course, there was a two-week section on neuroscience. It just blew my mind. I was just so fascinated by neurons, and this was the first I'd ever heard of them. So, I completely changed my degree. I went into the psychology program, and I did a double major in psychology and physiology. I volunteered over the summers with a professor named Dr. John Yeomans, and I worked with him all throughout my undergraduate career in the summers doing neuroscience research. I absolutely loved it. I got a couple of publications out of that. I always tell people when they're starting, especially in the first year, to not have a set goal in mind. Just take the courses you like and see what you really want to follow. Being open-minded is exactly why I am where I am now. I was exposed to a two-week lecture series on neuroscience, and I let it completely change the course of my career. You never know how things are going to turn out.”
What brought you to this area of research? “I've had family members that have suffered from addiction. I lost a cousin to an opioid overdose. I also lost a good friend to schizophrenia, who ironically died of an opioid overdose. It is personal to me. At the same time, when I was working with John Yeomans – he was a schizophrenia researcher at the time – I was fascinated by digging into the underlying mechanisms that are causing these disorders. It's a combination of both scientific curiosity and personal impacts in my life as well. You need be passionate about research because it's not the easiest career path.”
“I was exposed to a two-week lecture series on neuroscience, and I let it completely change the course of my career.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “I can go into the lab and see something that nobody on the planet has ever seen before. There's something fundamentally new and remarkable to be seen every single day. There's the old saying, ‘if you find do a job that you love, you'll never work a day in your life’. With research, there's a lot of work involved, but there’s also that constant intellectual stimulation, a constant satisfaction of curiosity, that's always going on. You also get to work with really great people as well. You get to mentor a lot and watch students and trainees evolve in their careers. It's a very collaborative process and you're never by yourself. I think it really is the most stimulating career you can have in terms of satisfying curiosity.” 42
What are you currently working on? “I'm currently co-supervised by Dr. Brian Allman and Dr. Shawn r Whitehead focusing on the relationship between noise-induced hearing loss and how that relates to age-related cognitive decline. To investigate this, we use animal models and a variety of methodology such as cognitive behavioral testing, electrophysiology, and immunohistochemistry to see what's going on in the brain.” You're completing your MD/PhD currently, right? “Yes, I'm in the PhD portion of my degree, and there are two main structures of the program. The first way is you can keep the two degrees completely separate, which is what I did. First, you complete an accelerated PhD (PhDs are normally four years to six years depending on the program). For us, it's three years. This will be followed by the traditional four of years of medical school. Other people can also choose to do the first two years of pre-clerkship, then a three-year PhD in the middle, and then finally move on to clerkship.”
What does the path ahead look like for you?
Salonee Patel Graduate Student MD/PhD Candidate Contact Info spate382@uwo.ca
“The MD/PhD program at Western has ultimately solidified my passion in both research and medicine. Individuals in this program are normally trained to be clinician scientists, which is what I want to be. However, I’m not so sure what that looks like. There are some individuals that are mainly researchers with a smaller component of clinical work, and vice versa. I know I want to do both, I’m just not sure what the combination will look like. Hopefully, in finishing my training, I will see more examples of clinician scientist careers in various specialties. Overall, I do know in a broad sense that I would like to do both.”
“You get to work with so many like-minded individuals that are passionate about the exact same thing that you are.”
43
What led you to research in anatomy and cell biology? “My research is not necessarily directly anatomy and cell biology (ACB) related. The research that I do could be done in various departments such as ACB, physiology and pharmacology, neuroscience, psychology, etc. The journey that got me here specifically started in my undergraduate degree at Western in physiology. I was volunteering for a lab in ACB that also investigates neurological disorders and their behavioral and molecular underpinnings. During this experience, I knew that I really enjoyed the research and wanted to continue it. After getting accepted into the MD/PhD program at Western, I knew I wanted to remain in a similar lab. This led me Shawn and Brian’s research program. On top of that, with having to do an accelerated three-year PhD, I didn’t want to leave the close-knit group of ACB. It's not just specifically the anatomy and cell biology department, it's more of a combination of my experiences combined with a lot of advice from mentors.”
What have been of the major influences on your career so far? “Mentorship is the biggest one. The second major influence in starting this program would have been experiences in coursework. During an undergraduate degree, it is easy to get lost in the stress of deadlines, exams, and GPA, but it’s equally important to discover what you’re passionate about. Everything that you’re learning right now, is it just to get a good grade or is it because you like learning about it? What fuels you? At the end of the day, you're not going to like where you're going if you don't actually know if you like doing it. Personally, I was able to take a variety of systems-level courses in my physiology degree and was able to narrow my excitement down to the field of neuroscience. Overall, I would really encourage introspection self-awareness in this sense. I know there's often not a lot of time to sit down and think, but it does help in making long-term decisions.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “It's really the fact that I get to work with my friends. I go in every day, and we can get to work on a lot of different aspects of research projects together. Even during our lunch breaks, you can often find us spit-balling new project ideas or discussing new research articles. Perhaps the broad umbrella term for my favourite thing would be collaboration. You get to work with so many like-minded individuals that are passionate about the exact same thing you are. On a bigger scale, PIs do the same thing. In a very basic sense, they go, ‘Hey, your research program does this technique which that could really help us in discovering the answer to this scientific question. Do you want to collaborate?’ This happens across research programs within and between institutions. My second favourite thing about research would be the day to day,44continuous learning. What I find these days is that we just don't know what the truth is. Every time a paper comes out, the ‘truth’
What are you currently working on?
Sarah Myers Graduate Student MD/PhD Candidate Contact Info smyers33@uwo.ca
“I’m currently a third year PhD student; I started as a master’s r student and then transferred over to a PhD in my 2nd year. My work right now is focusing on aging and Alzheimer's disease. Broadly, I’m looking at the relationship between cognitive impairment and microglia activation in the white matter of the brain. To assess this relationship, we have a longitudinal animal study in progress. We are assessing cognition at 3, 9, or 15 months of age in three different strains of rats: a wildtype control and two different transgenic rat models of Alzheimer’s disease (TgAPP and TgAPP/PS1). The TgAPP rat overexpresses a human form of APP and acts as a prodromal model of Alzheimer's disease without amyloid plaque deposition. The second rat model, TgAPP/PS1, overexpresses human forms of both APP and PS1 and develops age-dependent amyloid plaques, reflecting a more advanced stage in disease progression. We are testing their cognition to assess deficits in executive function, learning, and memory. Executive function is an umbrella term for mental processes required for goal directed behaviours such as working memory and cognitive flexibility. After testing for cognitive deficits, we're assessing pathological changes, including microglia activation, using immunohistochemistry.”
“I’m really looking forward to seeing how that all comes together, because right now I only have bits and pieces of the story.” What are some of your future goals? “Short-term, I’m focused on my thesis and starting to get pieces written/published. Long-term, I think my mind changes frequently on what I want to do. I have really enjoyed my PhD thus far and would like to do a post-doc after I finish. From there, we’ll see if my interests lead me more towards industry or academia. What about research-wise? I started working on this longitudinal aging/Alzheimer’s study about a year ago, and still have about another year until I’ll be done with all the cognitive testing. It is going to be very exciting to see the whole dataset and how that fits in with the immunohistochemistry results. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that all comes together, because right now I only have bits and pieces of the story.” 45
What led you to neuroscience research? “When I started my undergraduate degree, I had no idea what I wanted to do post-grad or even what I wanted to major in. I ended up taking a neuroscience course and loved it and I went on to join a research lab working with Alzheimer's disease rat models. I really enjoyed it and knew I wanted to continue with research. I took a year off between undergraduate and graduate school to figure out where I wanted to be. I did a lot of research into what labs I might be interested in, and Dr. Whitehead's lab really stuck out to me. Do you see yourself sticking with neuroscience and Alzheimer’s Disease? At this point I really don’t know; I’m staying open to lots of different possibilities for where I might end up post-PhD. However, I do really enjoy what I’m working on and could see myself sticking in this area or somewhere closely related.”
“I think the main thing for me was I kept trying different things and then choosing to continue with what I enjoyed.”
What were important steps you took to end up here? “I think the main thing for me was I kept trying different things and then choosing to continue with what I enjoyed. For example, I did my undergraduate degree in the U.S., and I did not have to pick a major immediately. I took a bunch of completely different courses and neuroscience stuck out to me, and I ended up majoring in it. Contrary to most sciences students, I knew quickly that I did not want to go to med school. Instead, I tried research, really enjoyed it, and have stayed with it since. It was about not being so stuck in the idea that I’m a science student and I need to follow a certain path or pursue specific things. It was also helpful for me to talk to people that were involved in different areas of science and expose myself to different environments. That helped me figure out what interested me the most.”
What is your favourite thing about research? “I don't think that this is true of every research environment, but I really love the collaborative nature of the anatomy and cell biology department. Having the opportunity to talk about different ideas, get help in areas you aren’t familiar with, and work in a team-focused environment is a special aspect of this department/our lab. Beyond this, I have always loved learning and in a research environment you’re going to be learning something new every day. I don’t just mean from project results, but also from reading papers and interacting with other students and PIs.” 46
Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning 47
What are you currently working on? “One of the projects that I'm working on is a continuation of a r project with Andrew Horne and Dr. Tyler Beveridge about students' grade perceptions. Many educators view that students earn grades – they start from zero, whereas students often see that they begin at a hundred and then lose grades. This creates a tension about grades between educators and students. I also know that students have concerns about their GPA and how it can oftentimes be a gatekeeper to future career paths and professional programs – this tension can result in students engaging in various grade negotiation behaviours. In Andrew’s project asked if we could change grade negotiation behaviour by changing whether students have grades presented such that they earn grades instead of lose grades. The short answer is no, we couldn’t change it. Building off this research, Dr. Beveridge and I and our graduate student, Jenna Yuen, are looking at if those grade perceptions still persist in dentistry students. Yes, they do. In terms of grades, there's not going to be a perfect solution, but we wanted to disentangle this as much as we can. The other major project I'm working on right now is in collaboration with Dr. Anita Woods and our Clinical Anatomy graduate student, Nicole Setterington. This research supports my role as Director of SEED, the Schulich Education Enhancement Division. We wanted to investigate a way to give students the ability to give timely feedback on tech issues as they arose after the switch to fully online learning with the pandemic. But what we found is that many students didn’t know that this existed and so we came up with a new solution using Padlet, allowing students to post and upvote/downvote feedback. We had some initial success with this approach and Dr. Woods decided to
Dr. Sarah McLean Associate Professor More about her research https://bit.ly/McLeanInfo Contact Info sarah.mclean@schulich.uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 88587
expand the feedback system to a few undergraduate physiology courses. Now we’re developing a 3.0 version and are excited as to what that might look like.”
What are some of your future goals? “I'm really passionate about experiential and active learning. I have a few different projects that I'm working on – one is MASCOT, the Medical Sciences Community Outreach Team, in collaboration with Dr. Jeff Frisbee, Jenn Devlin, and our experiential learning coordinator, Jedd Sardido. We've partnered with a number of different community organizations that primarily help to enact change in marginalized, equity-seeking groups and underserved populations in London. So, if students want to gain these opportunities, then connect them to those volunteer organizations. That’s my ultimate goal, to help students with expanding the boundaries of where they see their education taking them.” 48
What important steps did you take to kickstart your career? “When I was in high school, I remember taking a physics course and getting the highest grade in the class, despite being told that it was a ‘boys’ science’. I liked helping people and was good at science, so my parents were suggested I become a doctor, and I agreed. I started my degree at the University of Waterloo in Pre-Health Pre Optometry, basically pre-med. I was very stuck on this path. Then, when I was in my first year, my mom got diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that I knew little about and that there was little research on. As I was accompanying her to different medical appointments and hearing about her experiences with physicians and like her rheumatologist, they very much turned me off from medicine. I was frustrated and disappointed about the level of care and the lack of insight that existed into autoimmune diseases. She passed away when I was at the end of my third year and that totally changed my perception of what I wanted to do. I instead looked into research, motivated by the gap in knowledge and my troubling experience.”
“Seeing the acceptance of that type of scholarly work and being able to work with highquality Clinical Anatomy students has been really influential for my career path.”
“I later started working with Dr. John Di Guglielmo here at Western. I was really supported in his mentorship – he gave good insight as to how to think like a scientist and he treated me like a scientist. I also had numerous teaching opportunities throughout my academic training. I was an undergrad teaching assistant, and I got my hands wet in teaching all sorts of different courses – microbiology, the biology of aging, histology, vertebrate zoology. I started working with in the third-year lab course for physiology, and Dr. Anita Woods suggested that I try in the second year one, because that would give me a little bit more opportunity to teach. There came a time when a faculty member that was going on sabbatical. I put myself out there and offered to teach. As a PhD candidate, I was able to teach fundamental physiology to a large class and helped prove that I could do that work.”
“Once I was coming to the end of my PhD, there was a position posted and IMS and one of my great mentors, Professor Tom Stavraky, saw the posting encouraged me to apply. I read a statistic that women will only apply for jobs if they have 100% of the qualifications, whereas men will apply if they have 60% of the qualifications. I felt like I was taking a bit of a leap, but I ended up getting the position. With this position I was expected to develop a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research stream, and engage in e-learning. So, I completed my Master’s of Education last June to help with that. My research program is within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Medical Sciences disciplines. Anatomy & Cell Biology is a great department that values this type of research, so I feel like I'm in a really good place. Seeing the acceptance of that type of scholarly work and being able to work with high quality students through the Clinical Anatomy program has been really influential for my career path.” 49
What steps were influential to getting you to where you are now? “I think for me, it was pushing outside of my comfort zone and taking risks, even when I doubted myself. People in academia experience a lot of imposter syndrome, especially women more than male colleagues. The encouragement from my mentors pushed me to throw my hat in the ring. Getting those positions, even when I felt underqualified, lined me up for future collaborations with the Center for Teaching and Learning. I also signed up to be the faculty lead for Alternative Spring Break. It really opened my eyes to the needs of the community and that launched me into becoming passionate about community engaged learning. In my spare time, I work with an outreach group helping people deprived of housing and created strong partnerships with several different community partners as well and has instilled in me the importance of bringing lived experience into the classroom. We can talk a lot about what we read in textbooks, but we'd be remiss if we forgot about the human aspect of it.”
“We can talk a lot about what we read in textbooks, but we’d be remiss if we forgot about the human aspect of it.”
What’s your favourite thing about research? “I really enjoy the reciprocal relationship of mentorship, especially when my students and trainees come back with even better ideas than I do. They are becoming the experts. I have an experiential learning grant with Dr. Nicole Campbell and experiential learning with two of my former students related to experiential learning. One is working on a research project looking at barriers for STEM faculty when it comes to implementing community engaged learning, and the other student is working on the value of perspective-taking in STEM. Seeing their growth and their commitment to this is just awesome. The faculty collaboration too, like those with Dr. Beveridge, Dr. Woods, and Dr. Campbell makes research that much better. The relationships you form are the best part of research.”
“The relationships you form are the best part of research.” 50
How has your work evolved over the last year? “There are two sides to my professorial life that have evolved, research and teaching. Teaching is where COVID made us change the way we do things very rapidly. For a person like me, who derives much energy from young people interacting scholastically, it was
Dr. Tim Wilson Associate Professor More about his research https://bit.ly/TheCriptLab Contact Info tim.wilson@schulich.uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 81587
draining. There were upsides, I learned how to be a better teacher online, this exercise augmented my teaching toolbox. I'm happy that we're coming back together, but I will not abandon my new methodologies within the digital environment. In research, a group of us in anatomy in Early 2021 wrote a review paper in anatomical sciences education, talking about impacts of COVID on how we teach and how people learn anatomy. It changed the way I looked at teaching in COVID times. In my field, anatomy teaching labs are about touching “stuff,” creating an understanding of how this stuff fits together, and that informs us how it then works in a natural environment. However, during COVID this all screeched to a halt. There are no digital environments that can offer rich haptic feedback, heck, we are still working on the visuals. The latest research in my lab investigates how learners with varying spatial abilities get an advantage in STEM (science, technology, engineering, meds) disciplines. Essentially, we are studying how ‘Olympians’ and ‘couch potatoes’ of spatial ability interact with the environmental “stuff” mentioned earlier. In multimedia we can only take in information with our eyes and ears. Much human understanding of our environment come from what we can touch, that occurs in the anatomy lab. In our experiments, adding haptics to the perceptual mix, we start to break the spatial ability advantage. That points further to the fact that digital environments for learning still have a lot of evolving to do just like we had to do when COVID started.”
Generally, what does your day-to-day look like? “In my other life, I'm a farmer. The seasonal changes push activities accordingly. In a way, my academia life is also seasonal. Most of my teaching is in September - February. My fall is thunderously busy teaching in two faculties, Anatomy and Cell Biology and Dentistry. After the shock of an initial fall burp in activity, then it starts to hit a different pace. It's a complex environment for me, trying to balance things that we do in the department in addition to teaching. Many of us balance the needs of our labs with different services that we offer to the school, like sitting on committees, editing for journals, doing the unseen work. “There is no syllabus for being a professor, this is sometimes one of the challenges we love, because we're curious people who want to dive in and explore or find out what makes stuff work.” 51
What are some of the major barriers to your research? “Every researcher you've interviewed thus far is maybe going to say this, but it comes down to great people and the funds to pay them. Writing grants and acquiring the money that then pays graduate students to undertake the research that you've proposed is really challenging. For me, the biggest challenges down the road will be to try to reign in my various interests. I don't think I can link sleep apnea (another research avenue) and spatial ability in a grant. Keeping them apart and figuring out which avenue to pursue is something professors do as part of their job. A very local barrier is the continual need for body bequeathal here in ACB. The gift of leaving your body to science helps those who are still here in many ways. For example, in another line of research I a treatment for sleep apnea and undertake surgeries on the cadavers. There are inclusion criteria for the cadavers that we are using to study sleep apnea. Many of the criteria cannot be met so for me and the graduate students working on that project it has been challenging. That's been a challenge since COVID has made it hard to not only get people to the university, but cadavers as well.”
“COVID has made it hard to not only get people to the university but cadavers as well”
How do you envision the field in the next 5-10 years? “Well, the world's getting older, we sit around with screens all day, and we're getting fatter. At a conference recently keynote speaker made the important link to the amount of sugar going in people's faces is unprecedented and it has immense impacts on our global oral and overall health. I think better public understanding of our health will control how we deal with our lives, whether that's snoring at night or understanding how that affects your quality of life. At the same time, we are still witnessing how the world adapted to a global pandemic. The way we've learned to deal with it has really polarized us. There are those that adopt a scientific approach and use peer review to understand a problem and there are those that do not: this is a new frontier. Scientists need to learn how to communicate and teach others better. Applying my modus operandi, I would love to see the bigger picture of my field lead better public knowledge. Can we help people learn more, in less time, with less effort to use knowledge effectively? In a sense, help themselves because the world pushes all sorts of opinion and different information towards us. If we can sift out misinformation better, we raise the quality of our own lives, whether it be physically, mentally, or spiritually, it comes at least partially through knowledge acquisition.”
“I would love to see the bigger picture of my field lead better public knowledge.” 52
Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the Science Student Council’s Communications team, in particular Crystal Lee and Julia Ao, as well as the Undergraduate Anatomy and Cell Biology’s Communication team, in particular David Susman, for their help in the publishing process. Most of all, I would like to thank the department’s willingness to participate and share their stories. This project has meant so much to me over the last two years and it wouldn’t be possible without the incredible faculty and graduate students.
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