Dr. Tito Daodu, a UM medical alum and pediatric surgeon, is featured on the cover as the emcee of last fall’s 140th anniversary gala, attended by 400 supporters of the medical college. A UM fund established to mark the anniversary has raised $96,000 in support of bursaries for medical and graduate students.

The twice-yearly magazine, published in print and online, brings you the latest news and student, faculty and alumni accomplishments from the five colleges of the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences: the Dr. Gerald Niznick College of Dentistry, Max Rady College of Medicine, College of Nursing, College of Pharmacy and College of Rehabilitation Sciences.

Rady researchers profiled in the Winter 2023/24 issue include Dr. Sherif Eltonsy, an assistant professor of pharmacy who studies data on prescription drug use during pregnancy; Dr. Mandy Archibald, an assistant professor of nursing who is passionate about arts-based health research; and Margaret Hart, Ininiw (Cree) scholar in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences, who has researched the Indigenization of post-secondary curricula by Indigenous scholars.

Rady alumni showcased in this issue include Dr. Hoda Hosseini, a periodontist who feels compelled to give back to her profession; Peri Venkatesh, a master’s alum in nursing who became an educator with a special interest in men’s health; Cenzina Caligiuri, a pharmacy alum whose work focuses on pharmacy services in hospitals; and Marnie Courage, an occupational therapy alum who is dedicated to improving the quality of life of people with disabilities.    

Other features highlight the Dr. Gerald Niznick College of Dentistry’s $10-million fundraising campaign to fully equip its future dental clinics, planned for a new building on Bannatyne campus; the appointment of the first endowed chair based in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences; and the wisdom shared by champions for Indigenous health and social justice at an event centred on cultural safety in Indigenous health.

Explore the Awards and Honours earned by faculty members and stay current on recent happenings in the Rady Faculty by checking out the Notable News section.

Read the latest issue of RadyUM now.

Archibald is the 2022 recipient of the Terry G. Falconer Memorial Rh Institute Foundation Emerging Researcher Award in the Health Sciences category, in recognition of her research to improve the care of youth and families with chronic illness and disabilities. UM Today caught up with Archibald to learn more about her and the research she is undertaking.

Can you tell us a bit about you and your research? 

I’m an applied researcher and methodologist, specializing in the experiential complexities of chronic illness and disability. My work primarily focuses on how we can use our understanding of these complexities to improve care and health service delivery. Much of my research intersects health, arts and science, and works across the borders of qualitative and quantitative research. I work with interdisciplinary teams, community partners and those directly affected by the issues I’m studying. This approach allows us to address problems from various angles, fostering creativity and a collective understanding of issues. It also ensures our research findings are relevant and applicable in real-world situations. 

Why is this research important? 

While my research covers a broad range of topics, a key aspect is the development of living labs. These labs are responsive knowledge exchange systems that we develop and test within clinical environments. They bring together various stakeholders like clinicians, organizations and families, with the aim of creating more sustained and systematic ways of conducting family-centered research and sharing our findings in creative ways. This approach recognizes the fast-paced changes in our social world and ensures our research responses are agile.  

I believe our understanding of the world is both liberated and constrained by the research methods we use. That’s why I’m passionate about combining methodological approaches to provide a more complete picture of our world, helping us generate richer, more authentic understandings of experience, which is foundational to person-centered research and care. 

What does the Rh award mean to you? 

Receiving the Rh award is an honour. It’s also encouraging. As academics, we’re accustomed to setbacks. And when you’re working on new research methods and advocating for new approaches, it can feel vulnerable. So, having this work recognized, especially with an award that celebrates innovation, is appreciated. 

What do you hope to achieve in the future? 

I’m passionate about advancing the practice of applied arts-based research and mixed methods in child health. I would love for these approaches to become integral to health science research methodology, especially in studying and applying evidence from lived experiences. 

I’m also working on developing courses that attend to these integrative methodologies. With the living lab work, I aim to create agile research systems that foster long-term, meaningful engagement with participants. I envision a world where health research is meaningful to people in their everyday lives, informs their behaviours and is simultaneously informed by the lives of individuals and communities. 

What might people find surprising about you? 

I have an intense interest in martial arts. I recently earned my red belt in Taekwondo, so that was cool. Like my research, martial arts encompass several disciplines—art, sport, athleticism, mindfulness. 

Do you have any advice for early career researchers and students? 

Do work that aligns with your values, skills and interests. It’s important to embody the values we want to see in our community. Academic work can be challenging, but our values ground and guide us. Also, don’t be afraid of thoughtful risk-taking. Innovation and opportunity are often linked to risk, and embracing this keeps us looking forward to the future. 

PRIME – Partnering for Innovation in Mental Health through eHealth Excellence – will be led by Dr. Mandy Archibald, assistant professor at the College of Nursing, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, and Dr. Leslie Roos, assistant professor of psychology, Faculty of Arts.

The project received $450,000 in funding over the next three years from the Sobeys Family of Support in partnership with the Children’s Hospital Foundation of Manitoba.

PRIME is the fourth “research theme” developed by CHRIM. Research themes comprise groups of interdisciplinary researchers to tackle large, complex issues in a variety of projects and studies.

The previously announced themes look at research in breathing disorders, diabetes and neurodevelopment and rehabilitation.

Archibald and Roos have both collaborated in other CHRIM research themes. They said mental health for children and youth has repeatedly come up as an important topic, and they believed it could benefit from having its own research theme. They will engage in outreach with interdisciplinary academics, clinicians, policy makers and members of the community over the next six months to set priorities in the area of technology-enhanced mental health supports.

“In Canada, we know that 70 per cent of mental health problems have their onset in youth and adolescence. We need a responsive infrastructure to help support this. With COVID, we saw these challenges expand exponentially,” Archibald said.

She sees PRIME as an opportunity for researchers to collaborate on multiple eHealth-related projects associated with mental health.

“By generating a comprehensive understanding of needs and priorities, this can provide a roadmap for a lot of access points for people to jump in and lead different sections of that, all under the umbrella of doing better for youth and families in Manitoba,” she said. 

The researchers noted success in electronic solutions like online forums that have already benefited Manitobans.

“We heard a lot from parents early in the pandemic that they were going to online forums for advice on how to support their child’s mental health or how to deal with stresses around the house,” Roos said.

She noted that eHealth therapeutics for mental health have been in development for over a decade, but that there has been an uptick in both innovation and use since the pandemic.

“Families are increasingly going online to look for mental health information and interested in eHealth supports. We need research on how to best use technology to address mental health needs and catch-up with the rapid-pace of the eHealth industry,” Roos said, adding part of her research will involve identifying those who aren’t using electronic models and bringing together blended models of care that provide accessible online information with in-person connections to community agencies.

“We really see an opportunity for PRIME to be home to a lot of fantastic eHealth research that is relevant to child and youth mental health in Manitoba.”

Archibald will focus much of her work in PRIME on living labs, a user-centered platform she has used in some of the other research themes. Living labs, she said, are often used like smart home systems, garnering data from people’s real-life. Her work expands living labs for use as family-centred knowledge exchange systems.

“We have been working with families to create an interactive and inclusive online system that not only includes a registry so we can readily access and work with these individuals long term, but enables timely feedback on the research process and outcomes,” she said. “The vision is to continually gather information from families to help inform the work we are doing and feed back the outputs to them in a timely manner.”

On a previous project under another CHRIM research theme, Archibald was looking at building an in-person lab, but the focus was switched once the pandemic hit.

“We started looking at the virtues of online delivery, which really fits with the PRIME theme as well,” she said. “We may be able to reuse some of that project’s technological infrastructure and streamline the process for PRIME.”

Dr. Hagar Labouta, assistant professor, College of Pharmacy, received $300,000 for her research into nanotherapies to treat pregnancy-associated breast cancer, a challenging clinical condition that currently lacks an efficient treatment option without fetal health concerns.

“I’m trying to develop a safe and effective therapy for pregnant women with challenging diseases, like cancer, without having the nanoparticles cross the placenta, which separates the baby’s organ’s from the mother’s,” Labouta says.

Her team is developing a model called ‘placenta on a chip’ that will mimic human pregnancy in a lab. The goal is to learn how nanoparticles interact with the placenta so drugs can safely be administered without affecting the fetus.

“It’s so different from testing on animals, because the placenta is formed very differently in animals,” she says.

Labouta has a PhD in pharmaceutical nanotechnology from Saarland University in Germany. She completed several postdoctoral fellowships at Helmholtz Institute in Germany and the University of Calgary. She joined UM in 2019.

Dr. Mandy Archibald, assistant professor, College of Nursing, also received nearly $300,000 to co-design a living lab platform and participant registry for youth onset type 2 diabetes. Living labs offer a unique and adaptable way of doing user-centered research and working with stakeholders, like youth and caregivers, to create new solutions to pressing problems.

 “The interactive platform will allow us to embed a registry of youth and then use that registry to generate a robust understanding of youth experiences of comorbid mental health challenges,” Archibald said.

“We know that mental health is a priority for youth, is affecting self-management, and is implicated in youth not meeting their treatment targets. However, we are lacking an in-depth understanding of youth mental health experiences and care priorities.”

The project will begin with a 12-month data collection phase, with approximately 50 youth sharing their needs and experiences. Youth mental health priorities will be identified, and Archibald, with a team of youth co-researchers, will collaborate to create knowledge translation resources to communicate these findings.

“We intend to use creative methods and arts-based approaches, like storytelling or video, but that will be determined by the youth we’re working with,” Archibald said.

Archibald received her PhD from the University of Alberta with fellowship support from the Canadian Child Health Clinician Scientist program, and completed a three-year Canadian Institutes of Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship at Flinders University in South Australia. She also joined UM in 2019.

The grants will support their research for up to three years.

The projects reflect the broad range of investigation being carried out across the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, said Peter Nickerson [B.Sc.(Med.)/86, MD/86], vice-dean research of the Rady Faculty.

“One of these studies will harness nearly 50 years’ worth of health data, one will take a leading-edge approach to involving young patients and their families in research and knowledge-sharing, and the third will use the latest techniques in epigenomics, transcriptomics and proteomics to decode a rare genetic disorder,” Nickerson said.

The Rady Innovation Fund has allocated a total of $1 million over three years, supporting 10 projects. The fund was made possible by the gift of $30 million by philanthropists Ernest and Evelyn Rady.

The one-year grants have provided seed funding for collaborative projects that bring together researchers from various departments and colleges.

“We’re very grateful for the Rady investment,” Nickerson said. “All 10 of the Rady Innovation grants have fostered multidisciplinary teams to undertake truly novel research projects that can lead to transformative change in health care.”

Here are the three projects selected for funding in 2020:

Mining data to reveal inherited health risks

A cutting-edge “big data” study will link Manitobans’ electronic health records with those of their adult children. The aim is to measure, across a population, how much having a parent with a chronic disease raises a person’s risk for that disease, or related illnesses.

Manitoba is one of the few places in the world where longitudinal health records are complete enough to allow for this kind of family study.         

The researchers will mine anonymized health records stored at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) for every Manitoba adult who saw a doctor from 1970 to 2018.

They will use machine-learning algorithms to construct lifetime health histories for parents and their grown children, then use these histories to predict the risk of diabetes, heart disease and asthma in offspring.

Lisa Lix [M.Sc./91, PhD/95], professor of community health sciences, Canada Research Chair in methods for electronic health data quality and senior scientist at MCHP, leads the study.

Team members represent the departments of community health sciences, biochemistry/medical genetics and internal medicine, as well as the department of statistics in the Faculty of Science, and the College of Pharmacy.

Developing a living lab for rehabilitation research

Dr. Mandy Archibald, assistant professor of nursing, leads a team that will explore the concept of a “living laboratory” where research on pediatric rehabilitation could be carried out and communicated in innovative ways.

The proposed lab would be located at Specialized Services for Children and Youth, a Winnipeg facility that serves children with disabilities and special needs.

First, the researchers will identify research priorities through interviews and gather survey data from patients, siblings, caregivers and clinicians. Then three prototypes for the lab will be co-designed for public engagement and voting.

The aims of the lab include responding to the lived experience, needs and research priorities of children, families and clinicians; getting research findings into practice quickly; and using engaging techniques, such as arts-based methods, to gather and share knowledge.

Once the lab is established, the researchers believe it will be one of the world’s first clinically embedded living laboratories.

Archibald’s team includes a community member, as well as faculty members from the College of Nursing, College of Rehabilitation Sciences and department of pediatrics and child health.

Uncovering the mechanism of Rett syndrome

A team led by Dr. Mojgan Rastegar, associate professor of biochemistry and medical genetics, will investigate how deficiencies at the cellular level cause impaired brain function in patients with Rett syndrome.

The syndrome, which has no cure, is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder in girls, caused by the mutation of a single gene. Symptoms, which include loss of speech, mental disability and seizures, start to appear when a child is six to 18 months old.

Rastegar, a leading Rett syndrome researcher, has studied mouse models of the disorder and made progress in understanding the role of a protein, MeCP2, in the brains of those affected.

Her lab is unique in Canada in receiving donated post-mortem brain tissue from individuals with Rett syndrome. Rastegar’s study team will use leading-edge techniques to conduct a genome-wide study of DNA, RNA and proteins in this tissue, comparing it with brain samples from controls who did not have the syndrome. The goal is to identify potential target genes for treatment.

Team members are from the departments of pathology and physiology/pathophysiology.

Read more about the funded projects