Gerstein is the 2021 recipient of the Terry G. Falconer Memorial Rh Institute Foundation Emerging Researcher Award in the Interdisciplinary category, in recognition of her leadership in the research of chronic conditions that affects many women. UM Today caught up with her recently to learn more about her and the research she is undertaking.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your research.

I was born in Winnipeg, but I left to pursue my education for 17 years before I came back to start my faculty position in 2018. In my time away from Winnipeg, I began studying fungal microbes. Microbes are great because we can literally evolve populations in days, weeks, or months in the lab to study how they evolve in the environments that we’re interested in.

In Graduate School, I started getting interested in applying this method to looking at human pathogens and the acquisition of drug resistance. In my lab, we’re trying to take this one step further by collaborating with local clinicians. I’ve been really fortunate to have a great collaborator who’s an OBGYN, and we are able to do more applied research examining recurrent yeast infections – which is essentially evolution in action in the human body.

Why is this research important?

At my lab we are searching for the root causes of recurrence, which is still a mystery in many cases. There is often a focus in the scientific world on illnesses that kill people, but non-lethal conditions that are chronic can also severely affect people’s quality of life.

For example, Vulvovaginal Candidiasis, or yeast infections, affect three-quarters of all women at some point in their lives. In many cases these infections re-occur and there is no known reason why. Diseases that affect only women are consistently understudied. So, I feel very passionately about this research program. Many women silently suffer silently, and I think it’s time we acknowledge and invest resources into studying these kinds of infections.

What does the Rh Award mean to you?

I’m cross appointed between two departments, microbiology and statistics, and my training is very much biology. Being interdisciplinary, my research program doesn’t fit well into many funding categories. So, receiving this award in the interdisciplinary category is very affirming of the full scope of my work and collaborators. It shows that our unconventional methods and research questions are worthy of funding and acknowledgment, without needing to restrict ourselves to just one facet of our work.

What do you hope to achieve in the future?

Ultimately, we hope to someday see fewer women having recurrent infections.

Another long-term project in my lab is experimental evolution. We’re currently evolving fungal populations to different levels of drugs used to treat them and we see what happens at the genetic level. We can determine the rate that drug resistance and the mutations involved are influenced by different drug dosages and environments that hold lots of nutrients versus very little nutrients, or at different pH levels.
Eventually, we will gain a better understanding of how organisms evolve resistance to drugs, and about microbial adaptation in general. We are already starting to see new fungal pathogens emerge on the planet, potentially linked to climate change. Understanding the factors that drive adaptation gives us have a chance to develop new drugs to treat them. It is very difficult and time consuming to develop new antimicrobial drugs, and without them we could be powerless to fight these new types of infection.

What about you would people find surprising?

If you look at my CV, it looks like I’ve had a linear trajectory to my research career. But I think for a lot of us, you feel like a duck, paddling like crazy underneath the surface, although, all anyone sees is the calm above the water.

I love my job, but before I got here, I went through a lot of questioning of whether I would pursue an academic job at all – whether that was the best way for me to contribute to society. So, my advice would be, that there isn’t only one career that will make you happy or fulfilled. There are many potential paths that any of us could walk down. Remember that things may look linear or easy for those around you, but that perception isn’t always the reality.

Any advice for early career researchers and students?

There is nothing more important than having passion for what you do. You, want to wake up every morning with a sense of excitement, because research is a fundamentally hard path. Most of what we do is fail. That’s the scientific method. We try things, they don’t work, we try something else.

I think it’s important to go into grad school with eyes wide open. Take it from an elder millennial, there isn’t one right path to success. We’re still living lives as researchers, and academia can be a great career, but it’s not for everyone.
I have personally found at each step of my career that community has been essential, especially in grad school – you cannot do it alone. Being a part of a community and working actively to build that community is where I’ve found comfort and happiness in my work and in my life. Seek out your people actively and build the community around you. That’s where I found my passion.

Kuss is the 2021 recipient of the Terry G. Falconer Memorial Rh Institute Foundation Emerging Researcher Award in the Applied Sciences category in recognition of her team’s discoveries and developments in rapid, accurate and cost-efficient point-of-care biosensor devices, which aims to save time, health care costs and, most importantly, lives. UM Today caught up with her recently to learn more about her and the research she is undertaking.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your research.

My research team is the laboratory for bioanalytics and electrochemical sensing, and we combine several disciplines – chemistry, biology, microbiology, and a little bit of physics and engineering. It’s highly interdisciplinary and collaborative. I find it so intriguing to approach questions in medical research from a new angle.

Specifically, we look into the development of diseases and infections, and how cancer is initiated and progresses using electrochemical methods. So, for example, we develop sensors the size of a human hair which we can use to track the transport of molecules from living cells or bacteria. These molecules then provide us with information about what pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, or chemotherapeutics would work to treat a certain disease or illness.

Why is this research important?

Imagine if we had a tool that could predict within minutes which antibiotic or cancer treatment would be most effective. Normally, if someone has an infection, doctors prescribe an antibiotic blindly, and oftentimes patients must go through several rounds of treatments. This can lead to chemotherapeutic and antibiotic resistance. I think there is not a single pathogen that has not developed resistance to at least one drug.

By attacking problems from different perspectives, through interdisciplinary collaboration, we hope to be able to solve questions where standard practices are not able to give a complete diagnosis. This could ultimately save costs in the healthcare system and will also save many lives.

What does the Rh Award mean to you?

A recognition like the Falconer award is a huge encouragement. In the work of experimentation, we face many setbacks, and failures. We shouldn’t get discouraged by failure because learning from our mistakes is how we make progress. This award reminds it all adds up to something bigger.

What do you hope to achieve in the future?

The goal is really to provide diagnostic tools and technology that can be distributed to physicians in Canada and beyond. In the next years, I also want to incorporate this technology and this knowledge into teaching. I’m planning to develop courses that connect or expose undergraduate students to these state-of-the-art technologies. Our interdisciplinary approach has great potential in classrooms, and we need more people that can think outside the box, and beyond their own discipline.

What about you would people find surprising?

Probably that my career in Canada started out as an immigrant working as dishwasher in a sports bar, and that I used to live in a van for a few weeks. At least before I started studying. I came to Canada in 2008 after my undergraduate studies in biology.

I was a little bit bored by the techniques that we were taught in the German system in natural sciences – it’s based a lot on repetition, and memorization. I was not exposed to the real fun stuff until I got connected with the right people when I came to Canada. I met a chemistry professor who used electrochemistry to study biological samples, and I knew what I wanted to do.

Any advice for early career researchers and students?

Perseverance is everything. Don’t let little roadblocks discourage you. Hang on to the people that trust in you and that support you. Of course, it’s also important to listen to constructive criticism, but don’t get discouraged by failure or by research that doesn’t work. Hard work usually pays off.

Clouâtre is the 2021 recipient of the Terry G. Falconer Memorial Rh Institute Foundation Emerging Researcher Award in the Natural Sciences category, in recognition of his theories underlying recent developments in operator algebras and operator theory. UM Today caught up with him to learn more about him and the research he is undertaking.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your research.

I grew up in Montreal and did my undergrad and masters there as well, then I went to Indiana for my PhD and Waterloo for postdoc in pure mathematics. My area of expertise is called operator algebras. Operators are infinite matrices used in the mathematical description of small-scale physics.

A familiar peculiarity of quantum mechanics is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  Simply put, this says that the order in which one makes measurements matters. Mathematicians recognized that operators could be used to model such phenomena, and that their structure was more efficiently studied by analyzing not just individual operators, but rather collections of such objects, along with their interactions. This is what an operator algebra is.

Why is this research important?

This is a fair question, and it is often difficult for a pure mathematician to give a satisfactory answer. I do fundamental research, so the relative importance of my research is not something that can be measured or felt in the short term.

I do not work in a lab trying to cure cancer or design airplanes. Nevertheless, my research does have some connections to more applied sciences. For instance, there is a big push right now in science to develop quantum computers, which would hopefully be able to do things normal computers can’t. The theoretical underpinnings of such computers borrow mathematical tools from my field of research.

What does the Rh Award mean to you?

When directly compared with other more applied scientists, pure mathematicians are less frequently recognized, partly because their contributions are theoretical and thus leave it to scientists in other fields to find applications for their tools and theories. I find it meaningful that this award is recognizing fundamental research, which is equally deserving of celebration and support as its more applied counterparts.

What do you hope to achieve in the future?

I’m inspired by recent spectacular developments in operator algebras related to the so-called classification program. In the future, I aim to adapt ideas from this program to more general objects that lack a standard symmetry property.

This would be accomplished using “Non-Commutative Function Theory”, which involves a mix of calculus and algebra. The resulting deeper understanding would be helpful in furthering theoretical advances in quantum information theory, for instance.

Any advice for early career researchers and students?

Do not overlook fundamental research in mathematics. It is an exciting and rewarding field, and we have many great researchers doing ground-breaking work at the U of M. There are lots of undergraduate opportunities for research in pure and applied mathematics. Go ask your favourite mathematics professor about their work and how you can get involved!