Lauren Forgrave is studying the value of core Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers in assisting with medical decision making and early and accurate diagnosis for frontotemporal dementia. She will use her travel fellowship to attend and present a poster at the International Conference on Frontotem…
Mina Mirjalili is conducting research on deficits in working memory capacity which has been shown to be common in mild cognitive impairment. Her investigations are focused on the association between frontal theta event-related synchronization and parietal alpha event-related desynchronizati…
Stephanie Mouchbahani-Constance is conducting research to determine and better understand the molecular mechanism for the pain caused by lionfish venom. She will use her travel fellowship to virtually attend and present a poster at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago, Illinoi…
Sylvie Lesuis is a postdoctoral fellow who is conducting research to decipher the key pathways that underlie stress-induced overgeneralization of memory at the behavioural, network dynamics and cellular level. She used her travel fellowship to attend the European Brain and Behaviour Soc…
Neurological and psychiatric diseases and disorders affect more than half the population. These disorders of the nervous system can span a range of illnesses, including generalized anxiety disorders, mood disorders, autism, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. Together these illnesses c…
Ependymal cells are a largely understudied barrier cell type in the brain that provide a wall between brain tissue and brain fluid (cerebral spinal fluid, CSF), playing an important role in regulating fluid balance. These cells become dysfunctional in many brain diseases and this dysfunction contrib…
Decades of dance research have demonstrated the positive benefits of dance in terms of improving quality of life and reducing symptomatology for diverse groups of participants. Dance may improve mood, body image, self-esteem, and support healing processes for persons suffering from physical, cogniti…
The high and potentially increasing prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is taking a significant emotional and economic toll on patients, their families and Canadian society. Although progress has been made in identifying genes associated with ASD, the underlying mechanism of this disorder r…
Traumatic brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability in children and young adults in Canada. Despite huge developments in basic neuroscience, no new therapies or diagnostic tests have been introduced in clinical care over the past 30 years. In the acute setting, neither clinicians nor…
New approaches in neurodevelopmental research increasingly seek to integrate enormous amounts of data through sophisticated informatics so as to determine the relationship between genotype and phenotypes, both structural and functional, as they change over time during development. Such approaches dw…
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital
Motor neurons are extremely complex cells. Not only do they have an intricate set of inner workings, but they have a long wire-like portion called an axon that connects the central nervous system to muscles called an axon. Understanding all of the aspects of how axons are guided through the body is …
Epilepsy is a common neurological condition that affects 1-2% of the population. Despite dozens of anticonvulsant medications, over a third of patients remain refractory to drugs and our goal is to uncover novel therapies for this patient population. Here, we propose to create a national platform fo…
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) are two of the most common and devastating neurodegenerative diseases, affecting more than 2% of the population over the age of 65. However, a major hindrance in developing therapies for disorders of the brain has been limited access…
One of the greatest advancements in science over the past 10 years is the development of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells make it possible to create essentially any cell type in the body using any other as a starting point. In ALS, iPSCs provide the opportunity to take skin or blo…
This project is a Phase II study involving 100 participants across 8 ALS clinics across Canada. The trial, led by the Principal Investigator of the Canadian Neuromuscular Disease Registry (CNDR) and the Chair of the Canadian ALS Research Network (CALS) will examine whether pimozide, a drug already a…
By 2050, over 1 million Canadians will suffer from depression; many of whom will not respond to traditional antidepressant medication, known to as treatment resistant depression (TRD). The significant social, health, and economic burden of depression reflects, to a large degree, the limited success …
Neurological diseases including neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental, and psychiatric disorders are collectively one of the leading causes of disability to the Canadian population. This poses a significant emotional and economic burden to patients, and a major strain to the Canadian healthcare syst…
Aberrant tRNA processing and function has the capacity to exacerbate misfolding of ALS-associated proteins and the ensuing toxicity. tRNAs mainly function to recruit amino acids to ribosomes, allowing faithful translation of mRNA molecules. Metabolites of processed tRNAs also function in cellular st…
Most mental disorders begin in adolescence; however, there are many gaps in our understanding of youth mental health. Clinical and policy gaps arise from our current inability to predict, from amongst all youth who experience mild behavioural disturbances, who will go on to develop an illness, what …
Need for project: Choroidal tumors present clinicians with many challenges. The overlap between clinical and imaging findings combined with the difficulty of performing choroidal biopsies can create diagnostic dilemmas. Obtaining a diagnosis is paramount in optimizing patient outcomes, minimizing sy…
