Funded Grants

Mental health disorders impact one in four Canadians, yet our understanding of the brain and its relationship to mental illness is dwarfed by what we do not know.

Systems neuroscience owes much of its success to an empirical tradition of using simplified laboratory settings that carefully control sensory stimuli, motor responses, or other task-relevant variables in order to identify the neural mechanisms underlying different behavioral functions.

Epilepsy is a common brain disorder that causes repeated seizures and can significantly affect a person’s daily life.

Challenge: Current DRE standard of care is either DBS (Medtronic, Boston Scientific), Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS – Livanova) or Responsive Nerve Stimulation (RNS – NeuroPace).

The Challenge: Current therapies for treating a number of mental health disorders – depression, anxiety,
and PTSD, among them – adequately treat only a small fraction of afflicted patients.

We discovered that approximately one fifth of people with the deadly brain tumour glioblastoma show age-related genetic changes in their blood cells called ‘clonal hematopoiesis’, or CHIP.

The International Spinal Cord Injury Biobank (ISCIB) is a multi-user biorepository with the mission of accelerating therapeutic development in traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) through improved biological understanding of human injury, and the vision of serving as a global research resource where human SCI biospecimens are shared with researchers around the world.

There is an urgent need for research that deepens our understanding of human brain function and uses this knowledge to accelerate therapeutic breakthroughs related to brain dysfunction.

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and deadly adult brain cancer.

Optogenetics, defined as a technique where light-sensitive genes are introduced into brain cells to control their activity with light, allows researchers to precisely control nerve cell communication thereby, transforming brain research.