Earth’s water resources are increasingly threatened by climate change, industry, development and pollution. But the water governance approaches we currently rely on-that is, the political, social, economic and administrative systems that influence how we use and manage water-are proving inadequate to address these threats. An emerging “water resilience” approach to governance is increasingly seen as a solution.

As Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Human Dimensions of Water Resources and Water Resilience, Dr. Julia Baird is studying the human dimensions of water resilience. She and her research team are focusing on decision-making at two interacting levels: the group level (to address governance collaboration and effectiveness) and the individual level (to investigate worldviews, how to shape them, and how doing so could lead to system-level governance changes). Ultimately, Baird and her team hope to find the most effective way forward to collectively navigate future water crises.

Bringing the Aging Brain into Focus

As we grow older, many of us worry about the state of our memory. But several aspects of memory are actually preserved with age. The real issue is our ability to stay focused and tune out distractions. Dr. Karen Campbell, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience OF Aging, believes this is what we should be aiming to improve.

Distracting information can affect our daily functioning in many ways. It throws us off when we drive, slows down our reading, and gets in the way of our ability to remember the things we want to remember. While people of all ages can get distracted, our ability to ignore distracting sights and sounds tends to worsen with age.

Campbell is looking at why this happens. She is examining the neural bases of older adults’ increased distractibility and the implications for memory and other cognitive functions.

Campbell and her research team use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan younger and older adults’ brains while they perform a variety of cognitive tasks. Then they compare brain activity among the two groups to determine how the brain networks critical for controlling attention differ with age.

Campbell’s research will not only contribute to our understanding of how age affects the brain and cognition, but may also point the way to new interventions to help us to stay focused as we age.

Learning and experience reshape the adult brain throughout its lifetime. In the hippocampus (a region important for learning and memory and the regulation of stress and anxiety), remodelling includes the addition of entirely new neurons. But much is still unknown about how these neurons affect our behaviour as we age.

Dr. Paula Duarte-Guterman, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Neuroscience, aims to shed light on the role these new neurons in the hippocampus play in our behaviour. To do this, she and her research team are using a new animal model, the common degu, a small rodent native to Chile. By adopting an approach that uses natural variations in the production of new neurons-due to sex, aging and parental experience-they hope to improve our understanding of how the hippocampus is shaped over a person’s lifetime and how it affects our behaviour.

As Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Tissue Remodelling and Plasticity Throughout the Lifespan, Dr. Val Andrew Fajardo is looking for ways to promote physiological remodelling to help people live better and longer lives. In particular, Fajardo and his research team are focusing on inhibiting glycogen synthase kinase 3 (a protein implicated in several diseases) and promoting the function of a calcium pump in muscle called SERCA. His lab focuses on these targets using genetic and pharmacological approaches with the hopes of influencing adaptive changes in muscle that can be useful in the fight against obesity, aging and disease, as well as for spaceflight.

Musculoskeletal disorders are the single most common reason why people miss work. Even though we have gained a better understanding over the years of how work can contribute to injuries, work-related upper-extremity musculoskeletal disorders are still common. But our ability to understand what causes them is hindered by the complexity of the biomechanical and neural circuitry that underlie human movement.

Dr. Michael Holmes, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Neuromuscular Mechanics and Ergonomics, is trying to gain insights into these issues. He and his research team are using an interdisciplinary approach to understand how the muscular and nervous systems accomplish workplace demands. Their research will enhance our understanding of how upper-extremity injuries develop. It will also lead to safer work practices.

Despite the health benefits associated with regular physical activity, most young Canadians don’t get enough exercise. Even fewer young people meet the 24-hour movement guidelines, which consider not only physical activity, but also how much we sit and sleep. For a variety of reasons, efforts to intervene have largely failed to get youth moving more.

Dr. Matthew Kwan, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health and Performance, aims to understand the factors that lead to increased physical activity and other health-promoting behaviours, and how these behaviours affect youths’ mental health and well-being. Kwan and his research team are integrating new theoretical and methodological approaches and using emerging technologies to better understand how we can increase the activity levels of Canadian youth.

Bioinformatics-where biology and computer science meet-has emerged as a relatively new scientific field that can unlock mysteries at the molecular level about how we analyze and treat health conditions. Bioinformatics seeks to discover within datasets the “hidden” information needed to solve challenges in biological data science.

As Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning for Biomedical Data Science, Dr. Yifeng Li is looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to support society’s health and well-being. He and his research team are developing new machine learning approaches that can teach AI to better interpret complex biological data, solve design problems in biotechnology more efficiently, and fill the gaps created by insufficient biological data. By creating new computer models and methods that address data science challenges in a variety of real-life applications, their work will help bioinformatics to improve Canadians’ well-being.

In today’s world, more and more young people are striving to be “perfect”-and this is putting them under a lot of pressure. As Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Adjustment and Well-Being in Children and Youth, Dr. Danielle Sirianni Molnar is examining the role that perfectionism plays in young people’s stress levels and the effect this stress has on them.

She and her research team are working to better understand the experiences of young perfectionists and their parents. They are examining how perfectionism affects chronic stress and the impact of this stress on young people’s well-being and ability to adjust. They are also determining how parent-adolescent relationships can moderate the links between perfectionism, stress, adjustment and well-being to better understand just how useful perfectionism really is.

Every day, humans face extreme environments that affect their body temperatures. Some are external environments, such as increasingly hot and humid weather due to global warming, or the heat you create when running or cross-country skiing. But they can also be caused by internal factors, such as fasting or changes in hormones during pregnancy and menopause.

As Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Extreme Human Environments, Dr. Toby Mündel’s aim is to better understand what regulates body temperature and how this occurs when people are faced with extreme internal and external environments. He and his research team are identifying the mechanisms and modulators of human temperature regulation across a person’s lifespan. They hope to discover the molecular signature of heat stress and provide innovative solutions to accurately predict body temperature. Their work will also provide a foundation for guidelines and policies on how people can work safely and adapt to physical activity during heat stress.

Dr. Karen Patte, well known for her long-running national research on youth health, is Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Child Health Equity and Inclusion.

For almost a decade, the Associate Professor of Health Sciences has been playing key leadership roles in Canada-wide studies identifying and assessing factors affecting mental and physical health in adolescents. Patte aims to expand the research through the creation of a new Brock-based national research centre.

“Brock has some exciting strengths in the areas of child and youth health, including leading-edge research focused on health equity and childhood adversity, employing varied disciplines and methods,” says Patte. “My hope is to establish a centre that would enhance our impact by building on these collaborations at Brock and outside the University.”

Patte co-leads the national COMPASS study along with Scott Leatherdale at the University of Waterloo. Each year, the study collects health survey data from students and secondary schools in Ontario, Alberta, Quebec, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island. Last school year, about 84,000 students at 185 schools participated. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is funding the project until 2027.

The project studies how individual, social and environmental factors, including policies and programs at the school and government levels, interact to affect youth health and behaviours, such as mental health, substance use, sleep, physical activity, screen use and bullying.

As people live longer, rates of age-related diseases-such as atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and Alzheimer’s disease-are steadily increasing. A common feature of these illnesses is damage to the blood vessel lining in body tissues and organs. For years, we haven’t had the right tools to understand this problem. But as Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Mechanisms of Health and Disease, Dr. Newman Sze is trying to change that.

Sze has already invented new ways to investigate how the blood vessel lining degrades over time. Now, he and his research team are testing whether lifestyle and dietary changes can reduce damage to the blood vessel lining and, ultimately, whether drugs that target this damage can prevent many common diseases linked to age.

Dr. Larissa Zwar

Given the increased need for informal care due to aging populations, stigma (stereotypes, attitudes and discrimination) aimed at informal caregiving for older adults is a significant, but rarely analyzed, concern. As Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Social Psychology of Aging, Dr. Zwar aims to close this research gap by exploring the concept of care stigma and its role and impact on well-being and decision-making in the context of informal long-term care for older adults (60+ years) via a series of studies.

The findings will expand our current understanding of informal long-term care for older adults with regard to the role of public, perceived and internalized care stigma as possible risk, resilience and (de)motivating factors. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to modify informal care beliefs and care concepts to improve caregivers’ well-being and ability to access and integrate support. Moreover, these findings will help to develop care concepts that are sensitive to cultural needs, including those of systematically marginalized and minoritized groups.