Grad Students STRIDE into Health Research Excellence
When Sam Coleborn applied for a master’s degree in experimental psychology at the University of Victoria (UVic), she did not imagine herself leading a peer-reviewed neuroscience paper within her first year of study.
Yet this is what happened, thanks to an innovative mentorship initiative for graduate students run by the Institute for Aging and Lifelong Health (IALH) at UVic, funded by a community donor.
- The competitive 10-month program—Student Training for Research and Interdisciplinary Development and Experience (STRIDE)—offered nine students the opportunity to expand their research skills and gain mentorship from leading researchers in the field of aging and lifelong health.
“We created this initiative as an interdisciplinary training opportunity for students,” says Jodie Gawryluk, interim director of IALH. “Our campus is just the right size for experts to connect and tackle health-care issues with an interdisciplinary lens. And this allows for new ways of understanding health and generating out-of-the-box solutions.
“Thanks to the generous donor funding, we were also able to offer each of the students a stipend of $1,200, and to cover the fees for each team to publish in open access journals. I have been so excited about the resulting projects and interdisciplinary collaborations!”
Sex, lifestyle and your brain’s immune cells
Coleborn’s project researched the impact of lifestyle factors—exercise, diet and social isolation— on the brain’s immune cells (known as microglia) during aging. She worked in a team with computer science student Yunyong Guo, and clinical psychology student Zoë Gilson, under the mentorship of Marie-Ève Tremblay, professor of medical sciences at UVic.
The team also investigated how sex interacts with these lifestyle factors, during aging. Their resulting “mini review” identified critical gaps in the research literature and was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
“We were surprised to find limited research on the effects of exercise, diet, and social isolation on microglial activities, in both males and females, and in the context of cognitive aging,” says Tremblay, who holds a new Tier 1 Canada Research Chair of Neurobiology of Healthy Cognitive Aging at UVic.
“There is a huge need to develop live imaging tools to study microglia in humans…so we can understand how to promote the beneficial microglial activities needed for healthy brain aging.”
“I feel so lucky,” says Coleborn, of her STRIDE experience. “It’s been unbelievable to collaborate with people who look at health and aging through such different lenses.”
Generous mentorship, a tour of the Tremblay lab, and a sense of community all contributed to Coleborn’s rich experience. As did the ability to contribute something of genuine use to health research, and further her career aspirations.
“I really want to go to medical school and practice as a physician here in Canada. There are just so many layers to health and aging, and the STRIDE experience has given me a more holistic perspective.”
—Sam Coleborn, master’s student in experimental psychology
Real life impact for dementia caregivers
For Haley Keenan, a second-year master’s student in clinical neuropsychology, STRIDE offered a unique opportunity to collaborate with partners from Island Health.
“When someone has dementia,” says Keenan, “one of the changes we see is difficulty sleeping at night, and more activity during the night. They might touch the stove or go wandering outside the house.”
For caregivers, this can cause a lot of anxiety, and severely impact sleep quality, leading to burnout. This, in turn, can lead to early admission to long-term care, when caregivers can no longer cope at home.
“Program leads at Island Health were wondering if they might be able to trial some type of night program in the Courtney-Comox area,” says Mariko Sakomoto, assistant professor of nursing and Keenan’s mentor during the STRIDE program. “They asked us to do a scoping review of night programs.”
The team found no examples of night programs to review, so in dialogue with Island Health, they pivoted to produce a literature review of resources and interventions that do exist for dementia patients who struggle at night. Among their findings, they discovered something quite interesting: “individuals who go to day programs actually sleep better at night,” says Keenan.
There are improvements for their caregivers too. “Everyone sleeps a little bit better,” says Sakamoto, who is director of the Dementia Action Co-Lab at UVic. Her team is now preparing to present all the findings to Island Health.
Understanding diabetes and menopause
How might Type 2 diabetes impact the timing of menopause onset and other aspects of reproductive aging? This was the topic of inquiry for a third STRIDE team.
“We were interested in this question because the incidence of Type 2 diabetes is escalating in younger populations, and the health repercussions of this are significant,” says team mentor, Nicole Templeman, assistant professor of biology and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Metabolic Determinants of Reproduction and Aging.
“A diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes before menopause may have consequences for the age-related decline of the female reproductive system. We wanted to identify what is known about those potential consequences.
“The STRIDE program provided us with an amazing opportunity to come together and embark on a stand-alone research project and compelled us to think about investigative approaches and resources that were distinct from any of our ‘usual’ research techniques.
“I’m incredibly impressed by the dedication and hard work that the students in my group put towards completing this project, on top of their own ongoing doctoral research.”
—Nicole Templeman, assistant professor of biology
Developing project management skills
A PhD student in neuroscience, Justin Brand is one of these dedicated mentees. Usually, Brand studies the biomarkers of traumatic brain injury, within the Christie Lab at UVic.
He was drawn to apply for the STRIDE program because of a longstanding interest in longevity and aging, stimulated by the writings and podcasts of Dr. Peter Attia. He worked with Tabitha Brown, a PhD student from exercise science, to develop a scoping review under Templeman’s guidance.
“It was my first scoping review,” says Brand, “and that was a huge learning curve. It was great to go through that together, bounce ideas off each other, and also learn from the librarians. It was nice to work with people from other departments and get a different perspective on how they do research, and to experience a new leadership style.”
Time management, accountability, and goal setting were also areas of growth for Brand during the project.
“Adding this scoping review to my existing project, it forced me to, you know, set some hard deadlines for myself, and stay on task. And it was nice to have semi-regular meetings with the three of us to set goals. “It has motivated me to set more hard deadlines for things. I am putting this into practice now, in my own research project.”
The secret to resilient brains
“We need reference values for brain blood flow,” says Kurt Smith, associate professor of exercise science, and the fourth STRIDE team mentor. Smith’s team completed a cross-sectional analysis of cerebral blood flow over the lifespan.
“When you look at the health of any organ, you have its resting health and then you have its stressed-out health,” says Smith. With heart failure, we get patients to exercise, to stress their heart to see if the heart is at risk.”
“So, we are trying to find this healthy reference range for brain blood flow, over the lifespan.”
“And what’s interesting, at least from my perspective, is the largest increase in brain blood flow occurs from the age zero to eight. Then from age eight to 15 or 16, we see the largest decline in brain blood flow, probably due to synaptic pruning — trimming of areas we don’t use, as we find what we like and dislike during puberty.
“We also know that fitter, healthier people maintain higher brain blood flow over the lifespan, and that generational trauma or depression can cause the brain to shrink and atrophy.”
The motivation for this project was, “to create a longitudinal dataset, so we can start to do studies where we try to improve brain blood flow.”
The interdisciplinary backgrounds of Smith’s students, Heather Kwan and Jasmine Chen, were integral to the success of the project. Heather brought knowledge of the brain from psychology; Jasmine brought her experience of working with large data sets in public health.
The team is now writing up the outputs of the research, for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.
A second iteration of STRIDE will be hosted by IALH during 2025-2026, with students mentored by Leigh Ann Swayne (neuroscience), Megan Ames (clinical psychology) and Claudia Lai (health information sciences).
Original source here.