Faculty of Medicine

Maternal weight gain is closely monitored during pregnancy, because as pregnancy weight gain increases, so does the risk of maternal postpartum weight retention, diabetes, and high blood pressure. While lower weight gain may prevent these health outcomes, it may also increase risk of fetal growth restriction and perinatal death. Thus, public health recommendations on optimal pregnancy weight gain that balances these risks are important, especially in countries as Canada, where the proportion of overweight and obesity among women and children has been increasing.

Modelling return on investment for women's health research in Canada.
Women’s health research has been historically neglected and remains underfunded in Canada. We are aiming to investigate the impact of increasing research funding for women’s health research by simulating effects on individual outcomes.

My research focuses on (1) identifying early signs of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) with the goal of facilitating earlier diagnosis and intervention and (2) understanding the neural basis of DCD through MRI, in order to better characterize the brain mechanisms underlying motor difficulties in children with DCD.

Our DNA contains genes that provide instructions for making proteins essential for life. However, genes alone aren't enough – they need switches that control when and where they turn on or off. These switches, called regulatory elements, are scattered throughout our DNA, often far from the genes they control. About 650 000 potential regulatory elements have been identified in human DNA. However, we don't understand how they choose which genes to control or how they work. This is important because genetic changes in regulatory elements can lead to diseases, including cancer.

My broad scientific interests include fetal/developmental origins of disease and social determinants of heath, with a particular focus on intergenerational transmission of disease risks. The overaching goal is to enhance knowledge about how parental socioeconomic and health disadvantages before childbirth influence health and developmental outcomes in children during childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and across the life course. My postdoctoral project aims to investigate the role of maternal chronic diseases in the fetal origins of long-term offspring health outcomes.

1. Integrin alpha6 mediates the invasion and metastasis of breast cancer cells.
2. Using chick embryo models to study breast cancer cell invasion and metastasis.
 

Huntington disease (HD) is a dominantly inherited neurodegenerative disorder caused by an expansion of a polyglutamine encoding CAG repeat in the huntingtin (HTT) gene. Disease severity in HD has been found to be best predicted by the number of pure CAG repeats, rather than the total number of glutamines encoded. However, there is still significant additional variation observed, which is heritable. Among the factors that modify the age of onset of HD, there are synonymous variants that either add or remove interruptions to the HTT CAG and CCG repeats.

Using multiomics, flow cytometry, and functional studies, I discovered a T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) subtype dependent on MYCN. Building upon preliminary results that suggest an important role of H3K4 methylation in controlling MYCN gene expression in these leukemias, my present research seeks to identify the key epigenetic modifiers responsible for establishing or maintaining H3K4 methylation in the context of T-ALL development. Ultimately, this investigation may unveil novel pharmacological targets for better combating specific subtypes of T-ALL.

One of the most urgent crises of this century is the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We are rapidly heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which treatable infections would once again be able to kill. Antibiotic-resistant infections are on track to cause ~10 million deaths annually by 2050. A currently underutilized tool to address AMR is vaccination. For my Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Vaccine Evaluation Center at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, I am working Dr. Manish Sadarangani’s laboratory. I am running the Klebsiella pneumoniae research program. K.

The Intelligent Care Platform (formerly, TrustSphere) is an integrative and collaborative platform for the management of type 1 diabetes. Co-created with end users, the platform is currently undergoing further development to be tested in a pragmatic, effectiveness-implementation trial at BC Children's Hospital. The platform will allow users to easily and securely share confidential information through online health-care services, in compliance with rigorous health-care industry and public standards of privacy protection.