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As we age, the brain naturally changes, sometimes making it harder to remember things, stay focused, or think as quickly as we used to. Despite these changes, the aging brain still has an important ability called plasticity: it can adapt and reorganize itself. Harnessing this ability may help us support brain health later in life.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a common and serious illness in which people keep drinking despite major harms. Even with today’s best medications and addiction treatments, relapse is frequent, and severe AUD can shorten life expectancy by many years.

Considering that sleep disturbances brought on by shift work, nighttime light pollution from technology (e.g., TVs, phones, tablets, computers, etc.), and other factors (e.g., stress, anxiety, depression, etc.) are common in modern society, we established a maternal sleep disruption model to study the impact of sleep disturbances on offspring brain development and behaviour.

Circadian rhythms are an adaptation to the daily cycle of night and day on Earth and control when an individual eats, sleeps, or works. One third of Canadians suffer from difficulty sleeping, and circadian disruptions to sleep are often associated with psychiatric diseases. For example, circadian disruptions may predispose patients to disease, or could be symptoms.

The brain relies on precise control of gene expression to support learning, memory, and healthy communication between neurons. One important way cells achieve this control is through chemical marks added to RNA molecules, the messages that tell cells which proteins to make.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease in which the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord. Over time, many people with MS enter a progressive phase marked by steady worsening of disability. This decline is largely driven by the loss of nerve cells and their connections. Unfortunately, most current treatments focus on suppressing the immune system and provide little benefit once the disease becomes progressive. We still do not fully understand why nerve cells become vulnerable and die in progressive MS.

Our DNA contains remnants of ancient viral infections, sequences called endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), that make up roughly 8% of the human genome. Long dismissed as "junk DNA," ERVs are actively expressed in human neurons, yet their role, if any, remains largely unknown.

In each moment, our senses are bombarded by a vast array of stimuli. In order to make sense of this barrage, the brain engages learning processes that filter out irrelevant information, group stimuli into categories based upon their similarity, and associate stimuli based upon the predictive relationship between them (for example, if one stimulus routinely comes before another). Although the latter, ‘associative memories’, are fundamental to survival, they also contribute to devastating mental health conditions like substance use disorder ( SUD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Cellular immunotherapy is an exciting new way of treating disease by using the body’s own immune system to find and destroy cancer cells. This approach has great promise for treating glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive and hardest-to-treat brain cancers.

This ability to predict and synchronize with rhythmic sounds is something most humans do naturally – it underlies music, dance, and even the rhythm of conversation. But scientists have long debated whether this ability is uniquely human or whether other animals have the same capacity hidden in their brains.