Wait times for this diagnostic tool (known as magnetic resonance imaging) can be long, given the high demand. And the test itself is not entirely pleasant—you lie down in a confined space and are told not to move while the machine hammers loudly around you.

It can be anxiety-inducing yet it’s still the preferred imaging option for many diagnoses, and, unlike x-ray and CT, it has no radiation dose.

Physics graduate student and 3MT finalist Kyla Smith wants to help build a better MRI. She’s developing a magnet for a new type of MRI machine, which would spatially encode the body’s signals using radio frequency waves instead of the more traditional (and loud) field gradients.

This new technology is called Transmit Array Spatial Encoding, or TRASE. Smith says it means the machines could run silently and eventually be less expensive to purchase for medical markets that haven’t previously had access to MRI machines.

She is working on this technology under the mentorship of academic supervisors Christopher Bidinosti and Scott King, in partnership with the University of Winnipeg and the National Research Council. Smith says the real-world benefits include greater efficiency, shorter wait times and less patient stress.

“TRASE MRI is an exciting and promising innovation in MRI technology, and contributing to work in this field, in even a small way, feels really good,” says Smith.

Before she was a researcher, Smith followed her childhood dream of becoming an educator. As a high school physics teacher it was her students who inspired her to have the courage and make the leap to return to school.

“When the opportunity for graduate school came up, I realized that the real reason I had never considered it before was because I thought I couldn’t do it. And how could I promote to my physics students that they are capable of learning if I thought there was a limit to my own ability? So here I am, happily proving that my students were right.”

Now she combines her love of teaching with her passion for science and physics by volunteering at the annual Science Rendezvous for school-aged kids hosted by the Faculty of Science.

This carnival-like-event on campus creates a fun environment to introduce children to science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) at an early age.

“Even now, as a researcher, I’m still an educator. I think the work of teachers is very important,” says Smith. “If there are two things I can talk anyone’s ear off about, they are the importance of good teachers and the value and awesomeness of physics.”

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery.

Nivedita’s mind works fast, probably because it knows exactly what it wants to do all the time. Growing up in India she loved watching medical detective shows on TV and her favourite part of the show was when they relied upon molecular biology.

“I just knew I wanted to do those techniques one day!”

She arrived at the U of M in 2012 to do her master’s. Eventually she joined the lab of her current PhD advisory Christine Doucette in the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, but before that they talked about research desires.

“I had an interview with her where she told me about her research program and gave me projects to choose from,” Nivedita, a 3MT finalist, says. “I don’t remember her even going to the second option. I knew I wanted to study a gene that rhythmically oscillates every 12 hours to maintain appropriate functions of the pancreas, which secretes insulin to regulate blood glucose.”

And this is exactly what she does.

Nivedita focuses on a pancreatic clock that controls the amount of insulin being released based on what time of day it is. As each cell in every tissue has an internal clock, the process should, well, run like clockwork. But environmental factors like jet lag and shift work can disrupt our genetic clocks, and that can impact our health on grander scales.

Nivedita found an odd association between the pancreas’ insulin-release process and a specific protein. The protein (uncoupling protein 2) has a straightforward job: During the day when you’re active and eating, levels of this protein go down, allowing for maximum insulin secretion. At night—when we are not supposed to be snacking—levels of the protein go up, suppressing insulin release. Poor sleep habits alter this crucial ebb and flow, potentially causing dangerous blood sugar levels that can lead to type 2 diabetes.

This finding offers many great potential avenues to explore, and Nivedita’s work has a practical application right now.

“We definitely need to keep in mind the time of day we take our drugs to ensure optimal effect,” she says.

As for Nivedita, she continues to sleep well and focus on her research because what she wants to do, and what she does, has never gone out of synch.

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery. 

We asked Slipski to share his ‘Top Five’ for this new UM Today column. Here are his top five every day things we most often do that contribute to antimicrobial resistance.

1. Eat meat products raised with antimicrobials. – 80% of all antimicrobial usage in Canada is in farming and livestock, due to the exposure to antimicrobials from birth, many of the bacterial organisms that colonize these animals end up acquiring resistance genes to those antimicrobials used. By eating these products we too can acquire resistance genes so that the bacteria that colonize us can gain resistance and this can become a problem when we acquire pathogenic infections that require antimicrobial treatment, as the saying goes “we are what we eat”.

2. Abuse therapeutic antimicrobials such as antibiotics. We have all had a tickle in our throat or felt under the weather and have had to go to the doctors office. Many times our infections are viral, which antibiotics have no efficacy in treating, and doctors still have no easy way to tell if an infection is bacterial or viral, so many times antibiotics are demanded or prescribed unnecessarily. Also, when patients are prescribed antibiotics for a specific period of time, they stop taking them early when they feel better, but it is very important to finish the full course of treatment as given by doctors as these are specific to each drug/patient and are required to eliminate infection. When a course of antibiotics is stopped early a few of the infecting bacteria can remain and come back stronger with a newly acquired resistance to that antimicrobial drug making it far more difficult to treat now.

3. Buy and use handsoap containing added antimicrobials. Hand washing is a very important practice in reducing the spread of infections, especially during cold/flu season, but companies who make soap have taken advantage of this practice, and in order to get an edge over competition and to make people feel even more sanitary they add antimicrobial compounds so they can proclaim “kills 99.99% of germs” or “antibacterial/antimicrobial” on their labels. The truth is these antimicrobial compounds have no added benefit in hand soap, but also have no effect on viruses, and plain old soap is extremely effective at removing bacteria and virus from your hands without added chemicals. The more we add these unnecessary compounds to our soaps the more we expose bacteria to them and help them acquire even more resistance to these antimicrobials making them ineffective for when we really need them. The FDA in the United States recognized this fact and banned several antimicrobials including Triclosan from hand soap, but in Canada we are still far behind, and continue to allow these antimicrobials to be added to our soap products. Alcohol hand sanitizers are a great alternative to antimicrobial hand soaps, and do not add to the burden of antimicrobial resistance.

4. Buy and use household cleaners containing added antimicrobials. Another area where antimicrobial compounds have been added with no benefit are in household cleaners. Many of the chemicals we use such as bleach are very effective at killing pathogenic organisms. More recently however, there has been a fear of using “too many chemicals” in our households such as ammonia or bleach driving companies to create “chemical free” or “bleach free” cleaners, which is funny because in place of those chemicals they add even more potent antimicrobial chemicals for the killing action against microorganisms. In this case, the old fashioned cleaners without antimicrobials are safe to use, and just as effective at reducing pathogenic microorganisms in our house, without adding to the burden of antimicrobial resistance.

5. Buy and use everyday products such as makeup and fabric softener containing unnecessary antimicrobials. Manufacturers add antimicrobials to products unnecessarily in order to extend shelf life, but also to make consumers feel safer about the products they are using. Many times, such as in day to day products, these antimicrobials have no added benefit to the consumer, and only serve the company producing them for marketing and longevity of their product. The abuse of antimicrobials in these consumer products drives resistance because microorganisms are constantly being exposed to these compounds on a daily basis, and this drives acquisition of resistance genes, so that in times when we are sick or have an infection certain antimicrobials are no longer effective.

University of Manitoba graduate students are on an unprecedented path to innovation and discovery. Meet the new faces behind the research.

It’s wrong to picture this exploding dot surrounded by anything because nothing exists outside of it. No space. No time.

Theoretical physicist Brad Cownden, 3MT finalist and PhD student in physics and astronomy, works with his advisor, adjunct professor Andrew Frey, to understand these early moments of the universe, especially the plasma created at the beginning.

“My interests in space and astronomy are really what led me to what I study now,” Cownden says. “Starting with the solar system, I kept thinking: what is beyond? In our search to see beyond our galaxy, local group, or supercluster, we are also looking further back in time. At the edge of the observable universe, we see an imprint of the hot, dense plasma that made up the universe 300,000 years after the big bang.”

Large particle accelerators can create plasmas—thick soups made of the innards of protons and neutrons—but we still lack good theories for how they would have behaved, which is important if you want to know how everything around you got there.

Using supercomputers, math, and way-out-there thinking, Cownden is developing a better theory of plasmas by using the holographic principle.

In his research, Cownden imagines a scenario where an easily-solved theory lives inside a sphere, and the hard-to-solve plasma is wrapped around its surface. What’s a theoretical physicist to do? Study the easy part to reveal the difficult part.

In everyday life, holograms are used to encode the information from three dimensions (like that picture of a bird on the back of many credit cards) into only two dimensions.

In physics, the holographic principle stipulates that the information from inside the sphere (three dimensions) must constantly be encoded onto the surface (two dimensions). So Cownden studies how the theory inside the sphere behaves, and uses the holographic principle to translate those results into a description of the plasma.

And the plasma behaves oddly.

Imagine heating a pot of plasma on the stove. Contrary to how a pot of water would boil, a plasma would have some parts that heat up while other parts stay cold.

“The whole thing may never become the same temperature. Pretty weird, right?,” Cownden says. “I’ve always been amazed with how—and why—the universe works the way it does. I hope that my research using the holographic principle will help us better understand the strange behaviour of the early universe.”

Cownden shares his passion in science, math, and computers with inner-city youth through coding camps. There he hopes to spark an interest in in the next generation of stargazers.

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery. 

When he was eight years old he opened a microscope on Christmas day. Unenthused, he gave it a try and quickly learned he loved it. Shortly after, he watched the movie Outbreak about a fictional Ebola epidemic.

“From that moment I knew I wanted to work in science, and more specifically in microbiology,” the graduate student and 3MT finalist in Rady Faculty of Health Sciences says.

Slipski, working with his advisors Denice Bay and George Zhanel in the department of medical microbiology and infectious diseases, studies ways we can avoid, or at least curb, bacteria developing resistance to our antimicrobials such as antibiotics.

Since the late 1980s we’ve struggled to find or build new weapons to fight bacterial infections and now bacteria are developing resistance at an alarming rate to the drugs we have due to constant widespread abuse. By 2050, if left unchecked, antibiotic-resistant bacteria will kill 10 million people annually across the globe. For those keeping score, that’s two million more than cancer. If we fail to prevent this future, a small cut could once again lead to death, and elective surgeries will become extinct.

“Antimicrobial resistance does keep me up some nights, especially when I read stories about the first signs of untreatable infections in hospitals that were once easily treatable, such as gonorrhea,” he says.

For 2 billion years, bacteria were the only living organisms on Earth. They developed an impressive array of tools to stay alive, one of which is called an efflux pump. A folded bit of material nestled in the cellular wall of the microbe, it detects with stunning accuracy agents intending to enter its body to kill or maim it. The pump spews it out before any damage is done. Our drugs have to sneak past this system, and if they do, success does not last long because bacteria are really good at “learning” how not to die.

This pump system is what Slipski focuses on. He studies the composition of the bacterium’s cell wall and the pump’s structure to better understand how they work. The goal is to use this knowledge to find exploitable weaknesses in their armours so we can make (in the lab) or find (in nature) new antimicrobials that can evade this defense.

“There are amazing ideas in the pipeline,” Slipski says. “When I hear talks from researchers in my department I feel more at ease knowing that some of the most dedicated and bright minds in the world are working on this problem—not everyone realizes that Winnipeg is a hub for the study of infectious diseases, and that our expertise and resources are world renowned.”

Slipski has received the University of Manitoba Graduate Fellowship award (UMGF), which has allowed him to pursue this important research.

“The stress of finding funding is always the dark cloud that can hang over researcher’s heads, and while science is very expensive, it is also very worthwhile leading to amazing discoveries that can benefit our everyday lives. However, sometimes these benefits can take decades to come to fruition, so it is very difficult to convey the importance of this type of research to investors and donors when many expect to show immediate results from their hard-earned contributions.”

Of course, now that we know the blessings of antimicrobials, it’s clear that any positive result is worth the wait.

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery. 
 

We asked Boreskie to share his ‘Top Five’ for this new UM Today column. Here are his Top Five lifestyle changes to lower your blood pressure.

1. Exercise: Typically, most guidelines currently recommend around an hour of moderate-intensity continuous exercise per week, but promising new research is also looking at doing short, short repeated bouts of hard exercise (high-intensity interval training) as well as strength training (isometric resistance training) to help lower blood pressure. Our lab’s study found that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) reduced blood pressure the same amount as moderate-intensity continuous exercise (MICE), but these reductions lasted for a longer period of time.

2. Make healthy diet choices: Research has developed what is known as the DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stopping Hypertension). This dietary approach suggests increasing intake of vegetables, fruit, low-fat dairy products, and reducing saturated fat, total fat and cholesterol intake. Additionally, greater reductions in sodium intake have been linked to greater reductions in blood pressure.

3. Quit smoking: Smoking can cause temporary increases in blood pressure. Quitting smoking can prevent these induced increases as well as reduced risk for cardiovascular disease and mortality.

4. Reduce stress: While additional research is needed in this area, ongoing stress can cause blood pressure to increase. Stress is also associated with unhealthy lifestyle factors that may in turn increase risk for hypertension, such as poor dietary intake and increased alcohol intake.

5. Limiting alcohol intake: Heavier alcohol intake has been associated with increased blood pressure and increased risk of developing hypertension. As with reducing stress, further research is needed in this area due to the confounding lifestyle variables that are commonly associated with increased alcohol intake.

While we have now developed effective pharmacological interventions for hypertension, lifestyle modification is seen as a first-line treatment for high blood pressure because of the wide-ranging benefits associated with these kinds of changes beyond just reducing blood pressure and their cost-effectiveness.

University of Manitoba graduate students are on an unprecedented path to innovation and discovery. Meet the new faces behind the research.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

To clarify, general health and vigor decreases with age but everyone experiences this decline differently: some are more vulnerable to stressors and thus age faster.

Graduate student Kevin Boreskie views aging in terms of frailty, and used a simple, three-part plot: not frail, pre-frail, and frail. Pre-frailty is what policy-makers and doctors should home in on—it’s where exercise-based interventions can curb health decline and even restore health before the onset of chronic illnesses.  

Boreskie is a 3MT finalist and master’s student in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management working with professor Todd Duhamel. Under his leadership, in 2017 Boreskie led the largest clinical study in St. Boniface Hospital’s history in order to better understand cardiovascular disease and frailty, and what arrests their advance.

Current efforts to identify people at higher risk for cardiovascular disease focus on traditional risk factors, such as age, sex, smoking habits, blood pressure and cholesterol. That’s fine, but these assessments may miss prime heart attack candidates. Boreskie, therefore, developed a new paradigm.

He examined the links between pre-frailty and cardiovascular disease risk factors in 850 women aged 55 and older. Through a simple walking test, a handgrip strength test, and a questionnaire, Boreskie discovered novel associations between Pre-frailty and cardiovascular disease risk factors – ones current tests overlooked. What’s more, the simplicity of his test means clinics can easily adopt it to identify which patients are candidates for interventions.

Our healthcare system, Boreskie argues, is based on treating individual diseases as they appear. This approach will become less feasible with our aging population as more than 30 per cent of older adults in Canada live with more than one chronic disease. Boreskie’s goal is to prevent the onset of chronic illness where possible and his screening method will allow our health care system to do this through targeted interventions.

“When I was a kid I always wanted to be involved in sport somehow,” he says. “Through the courses I was taking at U of M I learned more about the variety of ways that physical activity could help people and what kind of role I could play in that area…. Physical activity is an effective means of improving so many facets of health, and in a cost-effective manner, yet it is still being under-utilized.”

Indeed, we’ve been arguing for exercise for a while: In the 18th century Scottish physician Dr. William Buchan wrote, “Of all the causes which conspire to render the life of a man short and miserable, none have greater influence than the want of proper exercise.”

To be sure, exercise will not lead us to the fountain of youth, but it will put us on the path to vitality. And Boreskie is helping people get back on that path.

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery. 

Graduate student Mohammad Reza Kazemian has found a way to banish bacteria from cooking surfaces. You’d be hard pressed to find research that positively impacts the general populace to such a degree. Food poisoning (i.e. ingesting harmful microbes) causes $77 billion in economic loses every year in the U.S. alone. Cancer—“The Emperor of All Maladies”—results in $80 billion.

“Foodborne illnesses and food contamination has become a big issue all around the world,” Kazemian says. “So I decided to do something about it.”

Preventing harmful bacteria from infesting our food is critical to our health and prosperity, especially in the face of growing legions of antibiotic-resistance strands of bacteria. Thankfully, Kazemian, a master’s student in biomedical engineering and 3MT finalist, has produced some good news working with his advisor Song Liu in the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences.

They have created a surface microbes cannot colonize. Current efforts in food plants, industrial and commercial kitchens involve using bleach to sanitize stainless steel counters and equipment. That works. But once cleaned, how do you guarantee bacteria do not find their way back to the surface through dust particles, an errant cloth, or a bit of spittle?

Kazemian has engineered an ingenious solution.

All bacteria hold a negative charge, so he created a stainless steel surface that has coating with positive charge and chlorine atoms. Since opposites attract, the chlorine attaches to any bacterium and kills it. It gives sanitation efforts staying power, and Kazemian’s surface can be recharged with a wash of diluted bleach.

Growing up in Iran, he didn’t imagine pursuing a life devoted to curbing microbes, but he was passionate about something that is as bountiful: the stars.

“I loved to look at the sky and stars and had this question in my mind of how things in the sky work. But things always change in life, and now I am looking at bacteria. Well, at least the principle is the same—I am always questioning!”

For two billion years, bacteria were the only forms of life. Earth, author Bill Bryson notes, is their planet, “and we are on it only because they allow us to be.” But Kazemian has found a way to keep a surface of it just for us.

Bon appétit.

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery. 

Yang Xin Zi (Cindy) Xu, a PhD student and 3MT finalist, has answers to both of these monumental questions. Her research with her advisor Suresh Mishra in the Max Rady College of Medicine is at a tipping point.

Xu has zeroed in on a particular protein named prohibitin, which she suspects is key to managing many diseases. She is the first person to discover that this protein, though identical in all humans, acts differently in men and women.

“Human knowledge,” Xu says, “is like a circle. PhD students extend the circle. We’re doing something that no one has ever looked at. We’re helping to expand human knowledge.”

To understand her work, Xu asks that you imagine a video game controller inside every cell in your body, directing the mind-boggling amount of actions constantly required to keep you alive and healthy. Women have their own unique controller, as do men. But one key component of this controller is identical in every body, regardless of sex: the joystick, i.e. prohibitin.

Here’s the curious part: Xu found that male and female sex hormones change how the joystick functions. Here’s the remarkable part: She can manipulate the joystick in animal models.

Compared to women, men are more likely to die from cancer of the stomach, liver and kidneys; they also succumb to more infectious diseases and have weaker responses to vaccines. Women, compared to men, have more autoimmune sicknesses and their heart attacks prove more fatal.

In other words, male and female bodies take unique paths in developing diseases, and prohibitin opens an opportunity to manipulate these pathways—to move the joystick one way or the other and change the way the game plays out.

“By understanding a protective outcome in one sex, we can utilize that to correct a vulnerable outcome in the other sex,” Xu says.

All of this excites Xu, who has a passion for learning and teaching. Indeed, when she’s not tutoring or researching or studying, she volunteers with Diabetes Canada, teaching others about the condition.

“I’ve made a habit out of giving back to my community through volunteerism, she says. “I am passionate about education.”

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery. 

Cook, a master’s student in psychology and 3MT finalist at the University of Manitoba, does cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence (A.I.) and mental health alongside his advisor Randy Jamieson.

Growing up in Winnipeg, Cook never felt pulled toward any particular career field but in his second year of undergrad at the U of M he enrolled in one of professor Jamieson’s courses. He fell in love with cognitive psychology, specifically the computational modelling approach, which is odd because it requires a lot of math and he distinctly remembers disliking math throughout his life. (“As a graduate student now developing artificial intelligence, I’ve realized A.I. has less to do with The Terminator and more to do with Pythagorean’s Theorem.”)

“I went into cognitive psychology because I want to understand the processes that allow us to do all the amazing things we do that also come so naturally—perceiving, remembering, using language and more,” Cooks says. “I want to understand these processes and install similar processes in machines to develop artificial intelligences that take human cognition as their inspiration.”

This is a daunting task, one corporate giants like Google and Facebook are grappling with. But whereas they attempt to engineer a brain from scratch, Cook took a different route, borrowing our brain’s processing tricks and inserting them into software with a goal of helping people with undiagnosed mental health needs.

Psychological diagnosis relies upon understanding and interpreting language people use to describe thoughts and emotions. Cook designed and developed A.I. technology to diagnose mental health by examining the language people use—not just key words, but abstract representations too. His system identifies key passages of speech or text that offer diagnostic windows into the health of a patient’s mind.

His software doesn’t counsel; it identifies those who have fallen, or are sliding into depression. It can provide mental health diagnostic services to people in remote locations, where mental health workers are scarce or nonexistent yet the need is great: The Manitoba Government has noted that one in four Manitobans had a mental illness diagnosed between 2001 and 2006. Likewise, The Manitoba Centre for Health Policy at the U of M reports that 14 per cent of Manitoba’s children are living with at least one mental disorder.

The social, emotional and economic costs of mental illness are staggering, and the United Nations projects them to only grow. The situation seems bleak, and dark.

But Cook has created an emergency flare, one that casts light onto those who need it, so we know where to send help.

Meet the other new faces of innovation and discovery.