Funded Grants

An understanding of emotional information from faces is critical for successful social interactions.

Aggression and agitation are common symptoms among patients with dementia.

This project focuses on how inflammation, without an infection, can alter brain development when a baby was exposed during pregnancy.

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.

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

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.

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. Orlandi’s research seeks to investigate the effectiveness of 3D video-based method in early detection of motor impairment (MI), specifically looking at infants at risk of cerebral palsy (CP). The aims of this project are to: 1) develop a standardized protocol for 3D video recordings; and 2) develop a novel method for the automated General Movement Assessment (GMA) based on 3D video analysis to distinguish aytpical/typical general movements (GMs).

Medulloblastoma is a pediatric cancer of the brain and is the most common solid tumour in children.

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.