Funded Grants

La douleur chronique touche une grande partie de la population et ses effets vont bien au-delà de la sensation de douleur. On sait maintenant qu’elle peut s’accompagner de changements dans le cerveau, mais on connaît encore très peu ses impacts possibles sur la santé des vaisseaux sanguins cérébraux.

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.

L’anorexie mentale (AM) est un trouble de l'alimentation qui apparaît souvent à l’adolescence et touche de façon disproportionnée les filles et les femmes. L’AM entraîne des conséquences importantes sur le à bien-être physique, psychologique et social, et est associée à l’un des taux de mortalité les plus élevés en psychiatrie.

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.

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.

As humans, we are constantly making decisions, and those decisions are heavily influenced by how our environment shapes our thought and behavioral patterns. This process – the ability to adapt your behavioural strategy in the face of changing environmental conditions – is often referred to as cognitive flexibility. In ideal conditions, cognitive flexibility allows us to adapt our behavior in optimal ways.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) incurs staggering harm to individuals, families, healthcare systems, and society. In Ontario (2020), opioids drove 2415 deaths and costs of $2.73 billion. Unfortunately, treatments are severely limited, with a ~70% relapse rate. An untapped approach is deep brain stimulation (DBS), a well-tolerated brain stimulation procedure to focally stimulate dysfunctional neurocircuitry.

Brain activity depends on a delicate balance between excitation and inhibition. When this balance is disrupted, brain cells can become abnormally overactive, a feature shared by many neurological disorders, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). While most research has focused on how neurons themselves control this balance, much less attention has been paid to the environment that surrounds them.

Every year, more than 165,000 Canadians experience a traumatic brain injury (TBI). For many, recovery is incomplete, leading to long-lasting cognitive, and emotional impairments and loss of physical independence. A major contributor to physical disability is damage to neurons in the brain’s cortex that normally connect to the corticospinal tract, the brain’s high-speed wiring system responsible for voluntary movement of the hands, arms, and legs.

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.