3 minute read
Dr. Patrick Lajoie
Associate Professor
More about his research https://bit.ly/LajoieLab
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Contact Info
plajoie3@uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 88220
What are you currently working on?
“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.”
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.”
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 yourjob, you're likely going to be miserable for the rest of your life. Aside fromthat, 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. ”
“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 understandingthe basic mechanisms of the cellularworld, 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 moregenetics, trying to merge bothinterests 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 fiveor tenyears from now. The job always new challenges. That's what drove me into this career.”
What drove you into this career?
What is your favourite thing about research?
“I think my favorite thing is thatthere arenever 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.”
