Funded Grants

Amblyopia (commonly known as “lazy eye”) is a common developmental visual disorder, caused by eye misalignment, unequal refractive error between two eyes, or visual deprivation, with lifelong consequences on learning and academic achievements that we do not fully understand. It affects 4.7% of Canadian children, and 22-41% of children do not respond to conventional treatment.

Dr. Eid will test the hypothesis that the Trio gene is a central regulator of the development and maturation of cortical interneurons (INs) and that its loss underlies some genetic forms of epileptic encephalopathies (EE) by disrupting cortical network development and function.

Dr. Sasaki research aims to (1) determine the mechanisms by which maternal synthetic glucocorticoids (sGC) modifies gene networks in a preclinical guinea pig model and (2) determine the mechanism by which a single maternal treatment of sGC modifies gene networks in human cord blood at term deliveries.

Adolescence is a time of rapid brain maturation that is partly influenced by sex hormones. In this project, magnetic resonance imaging will be used to assess the influence of sex hormones on brain structure and function.

The primary objective of Ms. Shea’s research is to investigate an optimized integration of event related potentials (ERPs) as a means to augment assistive communication devices.

Ms. Zeinab Mohanna’s research will test the hypothesis that CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing can increase the expression of PAX6 protein, improve the function of the neural and other tissues of the eye, and ultimately rescue the mutant phenotype in the mouse model of aniridia.

Ms. Shearer’s study is the first to address the knowledge gap related to multiple short-term pain fluctuations, the temporal association of pain trajectories on well-being, and the experiential assessment and data triangulation of pain trajectories and their impact, all using self-reported data.

The objectives of Ms. Siddiqua’s project are: (1) to examine the association between neighbourhood socioeconomic status (SES) and prevalence of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across jurisdictions; (2) to examine the association between neighbourhood SES and health service use among children with ASD across jurisdictions; (3) to examine the association between neighbourhood SES and developmental outcomes of children with ASD across jurisdictions.

Many women experience depression during pregnancy, and are often faced with challenging decisions surrounding antidepressant use during this critical time for their developing child.

Ms. Decker will test the hypothesis that myelin damage impairs episodic memory by disrupting neural communication between two memory relevant brain regions, namely, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Accordingly, she will examine neural synchrony, (a measure of neural communication), during an associative encoding and retrieval task in pediatric brain tumor survivors (PBTS) and age-matched healthy controls.