3 minute read
Dr. Steven Laviolette
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'mdoing some reading before any of the kids get up, because I find that's my most productive time. IfI'm coming into the office, then mostof 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.”
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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 thatwe’ve hadpretty 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.”
Professor
More about his research https://bit.ly/LavioletteLab
Contact Info
steven.laviolette@schulich.uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 ext. 80302
What are you currently working on?
“Our lab does a lot of different translational research into mental health, mostlyfocusingon addiction-related issues. Wealso 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 windowsof 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.”
“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 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?”
