Researchers Under the Scope – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode, we gain insight into Dr. Sarah Forgie, the new Dean of the College of Medicine. She discusses her innovative teaching methods, her career as a pediatric infectious disease specialist, and her vision for advancing Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine.

Dr. Forgie also shares the story behind her decision to learn the ukulele.

Born to family physicians, Dr. Forgie grew up in Lynn Lake, Manitoba, a remote fly-in mining community. Her family later relocated to Winnipeg, where Dr. Forgie credits much of her motivation to her mother, who encouraged her to pursue both medicine and leadership roles.

As a pediatrician and professor at the University of Alberta, Dr. Forgie’s journey into university leadership can be traced back to her willingness to deploy creative teaching methods. Faced with the challenge of teaching infectious diseases to first-year medical students, she re-wrote the Talking Heads hit “Psycho Killer” to reinforce best practices in treating Streptococcal pharyngitis -- with ukulele accompaniment.

It worked. Those who attended her “Take Five” bacteriology lectures at the University of Alberta retained 98% of the key concepts, compared to a 50-60% retention rate among students in standard classes.

Dr. Forgie strived to instill strong clinical reasoning, and challenged her students to present key concepts in their own creative ways.

“With every session, I would do something, they would do something, and it just made it a fun environment,” she said.

Following her appointment as Saskatchewan’s first full-time female Dean of Medicine on July 1, 2024, Dr. Forgie returned to clinical service this fall as a pediatrician at the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital in Saskatoon.

In her role as Dean, she aims to strengthen connections between the College of Medicine and Saskatchewan’s medical practitioners.

“What I would love to see in Saskatchewan is that every physician approaches their work with an academic lens,” Dr. Forgie said. This 'lens' may encompass participating in clinical trials, exploring ways to alleviate physician workloads, or collaborating with learners, she said.

Engagement with Indigenous communities remains a critical component of Dr. Forgie’s vision for wellness.

“I am all about collaboration... with First Nation, Inuit, and Métis communities to better prepare our trainees to work within these communities,” she stated, affirming her commitment to cultural sensitivity in healthcare.

As a lifelong resident of the prairies, Dr. Forgie understands the isolation often experienced in rural medicine. She aims to foster connectivity among healthcare providers and new learners.

“How can we help and how can we reduce some of those feelings that you're having around burnout and frustration?” she asked. “Helping with that leads to a virtuous cycle of how do we make things better in Saskatchewan?”

A behavioural neuroscientist in Saskatoon is uncovering marijuana’s effects on fetal brain development. 

After recently winning a five-year CIHR grant of $960,076 in the spring of 2024, Dr. John Howland’s lab at the University of Saskatchewan is expanding its work examining prenatal exposure to cannabis smoke. Howland’s teams will assess the way cannabis exposure alters higher brain functions like memory and learning in both rats and mice.

Compared to cannabis injections in the past, the professor of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology at the College of Medicine said exposing rodents to high-potency smoke for up to 15 minutes at a time provides a more realistic picture of marijuana's effects on fetal brain development. 

Over their lives, Howland will measure changes in cortical limbic circuitruity, for both rodent mothers and their offspring. 

“The cortex is definitely involved, but we also look at other areas like the hippocampus and the amygdala,” said Howland. “There’s pretty good evidence that they are at least subtly affected after gestational exposure to cannabis.”

Now, it’s a matter of quantifying which circuits cannabis affects in the rodent brain — under circumstances as close to real-life human exposure as Howland's laboratory can create. 

"It's not simple," said Howland. He notes a wide variety of phenotypes of THC and CBD strains are now available at retailers, each with its own characteristics and potential interactions with neurons. 

“These receptors are involved in many discrete events during brain development,” he said. "We're hoping to be more controlled and more specific." 

"It turns out a lot of things that are legal like alcohol and tobacco aren't that safe during pregnancy either," said Howland.

"I think more knowledge has to be helpful as women make these decisions for themselves.”

In this episode, we meet Dr. Stacey Love, Director of Virtual Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation at Saskatchewan's Virtual Health Hub, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan's School of Rehabilitation. She's also involved with the Saskatchewan Centre for Patient Oriented Research.

You can see more of her recent publications here, along with links to her labs:

Musculoskeletal Health and Access to Care: https://cchsa-ccssma.usask.ca/mhac/

Virtual Care and Remote Presence: https://research-groups.usask.ca/remote-presence/index.php#Healthcare

Stacey Lovo remembers the bitterly cold day in December 2012, when two Indigenous women from northern Saskatchewan stepped off the bus in Saskatoon. One had traveled 12 hours, the other seven, both to see physiotherapist Stacey Lovo for back pain.

“It was a big undertaking for them,” said Lovo. She said one woman was forced cut her appointment short, to catch the last bus returning north.

The other woman stayed in Saskatoon to treat spinal pain stemming from what Lovo characterized as a ‘very difficult and scary problem.’

“This was devastating for many reasons,” said Lovo who remembered her patient was distraught, unable to return home to care for her young children.

That glaring disparity in healthcare access propelled Dr. Lovo into action. She returned to the classroom, and earned her PhD in Rehabilitation Science, specializing in low back disorders.

“If you're rural and remote resident or if you're Indigenous, your chances of having back pain are 30 percent higher than an urban person who's non-Indigenous,” said Lovo.

Lovo said long waits for care and spending up to twelve hours in a vehicle to attend a one-hour physiotherapy consultation often aggravate spinal damage — rather than healing it.

“When we're traveling that distance, we're undoing everything that's done in the session,” she said.

Working closely with people in Pelican Narrows and the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, Dr. Lovo began testing virtual consultations and in-person treatments, advocating for a hybrid model of healthcare.

"These projects are all community driven,” she said. “They’re led and driven by the strengths and knowledges from the communities."

Her team’s innovative use of Remote Presence Robotics in partnership with local nurse practitioners  in Pelican Narrows demonstrated a successful model of team-based virtual physiotherapy, connecting patients hundreds of kilometres away from health providers with care.

Local health providers are the key, Lovo said.

“Taking reflexes and testing for sensation and muscle strength are done by the nurse on the other side,” said Lovo.  “They have incredible rapport with the patients. They know their families.”

When the pandemic amplified the need for virtual care, Dr. Lovo, Dr. Brenna Bath  and Dr. Lovo's graduate students met the challenge with innovation.

Participants in her back pain study reported their outcomes were noticeably better. Many asked to continue with more treatments.

Dr. Lovo's work goes beyond healthcare delivery; it is a commitment to fulfilling treaty obligations and ensuring equitable healthcare access for Indigenous Peoples.

“Canada's promise to First Nations peoples was that medical care would be taken care of, and so we are  working with communities to try things out that will allow us to provide it,” she said.

Dr. Angelica Lang knows most of the people she sees have to keep working, even if they have shoulder pain.

As an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan and director of the Musculoskeletal and Ergonomics Lab at the Canadian Centre for Rural and Agricultural Health, Lang’s goal is to reduce that pain — keeping patients on the job.

“A lot of daily life has to be done with your hands,” she said. “The base of that is your shoulder. It allows you to position your hand in all these different ways.”

Lang knows the importance of movement. She grew up in Melfort, Sask., playing hockey, soccer, volleyball, along with track and field. A Huskies track athlete, she found her calling in kinesiology, leading her to a specialization in the clinical biomechanics of the shoulder.

Her passion for understanding the shoulder, a joint unique in its movement and demands, drove her towards an MSc in Biomechanics under Dr. Clark Dickerson, a shoulder expert.

"This combines math, which I already liked, with movement, which I'm really getting into," she said. “How you perform your work, how you get injured at work, or how a different disorder might influence your movement, and then cause a functional problem.”

Lang said at least 40 per cent of people who suffer from a rotator cuff injury still endure shoulder pain up to a year later. That pain can cause sleep issues, and eventually it becomes unsustainable.

“My question is, does it matter how long you’ve had pain?” she said. “Is it the way that they move that’s setting them up to not necessarily get better?”

Her laboratory is one of the first to look at the time elapsed since an initial injury, and the role of ongoing shoulder pain as a confounding or influencing factor in that patient’s recovery.

“Once the pain happens, there's some sort of compensation to avoid these painful positions,” said Lang, whose research team is studying 60 people from Saskatoon and rural Saskatchewan, to assess differences in shoulder pain.

A significant part of Lang's work involves the musculoskeletal health of breast cancer survivors, particularly those who’ve undergone mastectomies and reconstructions.

"It's fairly well documented that breast cancer survivors have upper limb dysfunction after their treatment,” Lang said. “I’m interested in what that means for their functional abilities.”

Participants in those studies often make periodic trips to Saskatoon, for assessments at the Musculoskeletal and Ergonomics Lab at the Canadian Centre for Rural and Agricultural Health.

In this episode, Lang shows us the “Rotopod” farm equipment simulator, designed to simulate the seated position farmers often stay in for long hours during seeding, spraying and harvest.

Her team examines movement and biomechanics in agricultural settings, particularly how whole body vibrations from machinery affect farmers. They use advanced motion tracking systems, like the Vicon motion capture system and Inertial Measurement Units, to study body movement in various scenarios, both in the lab and when research crews drive to farms and mines across Saskatchewan, to observe work duties in the field.

Last summer, her team visited farmers on the job near Aylesbury, Biggar, Clavet, and Debden, Saskatchewan. They tracked their movement as they performed five tasks, including using an overhead drill, lifting a shovel, climbing and dumping a heavy bag, and pruning a shrub. Lang and a pair of graduate students watched farmers put cattle through a squeeze chute — a task that can be challenging for both the operator and the animal.

“It’s something we never would have been able to measure had we only had them come to the lab,” said Lang. “By being able to be specific to their job and make the recommendations specific to farming demands, hopefully that will help.”

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Lang credited her team and colleagues for their contributions and stressed the significance of combining different fields of study to advance understanding and treatment of musculoskeletal disorders.

“That’s motivating to me as a researcher," said Lang. "The people that we're working with, they see the value in what we're doing, they support us."

Dr. Munier Nour said osteoporosis is often seen as a disease that affects older adults. But compared to their peers, kids with Type 1 diabetes grow into adults eight times as likely to suffer bone fractures.

“Osteoporosis may actually have its origins during pediatric years,” he said. “Because Type 1 diabetes occurs so early in life ….. it influences that bone development that occurs during your peak growth.”

Now, Nour is a co-lead on a national team trying to figure out why.

The pediatric endocrinologist has always taken a logical approach to problem-solving. When he first enrolled at the University of Calgary, he took engineering courses, in case medicine didn’t work out.

Nour was accepted to medical school, where he found himself drawn to both pediatric intensive care and internal medicine, until one last-minute elective.

In this episode, Nour credits his supervisor, retired University of Calgary professor Dr. David Stephure, with changing his mind.

“It certainly wasn’t on my radar at all,” said Nour. “He was just a wonderful mentor. I think he really kind of sparked quite an interest and passion to pursue pediatric endocrinology.”

Nour completed his fellowship at the University of Calgary, along with his medical doctorate and master's degree in biomedical sciences. He completed his pediatric residency at Queen’s University, then joined the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine in 2014. He spent his first year as the province’s lone pediatric endocrinologist.

Since then, the associate professor has embarked on a mission to understand why children with Type 1 diabetes exhibit a higher risk of impaired bone health and osteoporosis than their peers.

Nour said although it’s often overlooked as an endocrine organ, bone is ‘quite dynamic’, playing a crucial role in hormonal regulation.

“Some hormones produced by bone include things like fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF23), which has a lot to do with our phosphate metabolism. As well, there's another hormone called osteocalcin, which actually has quite a role in diabetes as well,” said Nour.

Today, he and Dr. Saija Kontulainen are overseeing the Canadian Bone Strength Development in Children with Type 1 Diabetes Study: a national longitudinal study.

Using a grant of $1,352,140 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and with help from Diabetes Canada, they’re evaluating differences in bone development between children with Type 1 diabetes and their peers.

Dr. Nour said they’ll recruit up to 210 boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 12, tracking them over three years with annual bone health assessments. The study includes Saskatchewan patients, along with pre-teens in Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa.

Using high-resolution peripheral quantitative CT scans (HR-pQCT), hormonal measurements, muscle strength testing, bone density scans, and force plate tests, his team will assess key markers and differences in bone micro-architecture as the preteens’ radius and tibia grow.

“There's even fairly advanced engineering techniques that can be used to kind of simulate a fracture load and see when that bone would actually fail," said Nour.

Dr. Nour hopes this research will lead to interventions for children with type 1 diabetes that potentially strengthen their long-term bone health.

“So little is understood right now about what is different and why,” said Nour. “What can we do to prevent it?”

In the heart of the Health Sciences Building, Dr. Amanda Hall studies a tray of organoids under a microscope.

“They do need a lot of attention and a lot of feeding,” she said, pointing to dot-like points in a gel solution. 

The pediatric surgeon and assistant professor of pediatric general surgery will use those dots to identify factors that help infants overcome short gut syndrome.

The rare condition affects roughly 24 in every 100,000 babies born in Canada, presenting a profound challenge for infants born with insufficient intestinal length or compromised absorptive capacity.

“It’s a very, very long, difficult road,” said Hall. “Often they’re stuck in hospital and there’s no progress happening, so definitely [families] want another option.”

Hall’s interest in medicine dates back to the late 1990s in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, and a family TV with three channels. In elementary school, she remembered faithfully recording the reality show Life’s Little Miracles, where a camera crew followed patients at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.

“They’d actually go into the operating room and film the surgeries, which was amazing,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

After she was accepted to the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine, Hall met Dr. Grant Miller and Dr. Gordon Zello during her second year of residency. To become a pediatric surgeon, she had to earn her master’s degree, and Miller took the graduate student under his wing, focusing on parenteral nutrition-associated liver disease in infants.

“I just loved research,” said Hall. “I loved the struggle, the unending nights of work, then finally that amazing feeling when you see numbers that make sense.”

It was the beginning of Hall’s deep-dive into the intricacies of the human gut.

Right now, half of infants diagnosed with short gut syndrome get better on their own, with the help of intravenous nutrition. A few undergo complex bowel transplants, but close to 38 per cent succumb to the disease.

“They would have what we call failure to thrive,” said Hall. “They don’t gain weight, they have uncontrollable diarrhea, they might have vomiting.”

In this episode, Hall takes us inside her lab to meet her miniature, spherical organs, cultivated from stem cells, mimicking the intricate structure of the human intestine.

“Definitely you become attached to them. They require a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of expense,” Hall said.

Hall is exploring the potential benefits of breast milk and probiotics in encouraging growth inside these mini intestines. From there, she hopes to identify specific components that could accelerate the recovery of infants suffering from short gut syndrome.

“We know that breast milk …. helps with our immune function, helps with the actual integrity of the bowel. I’m curious to know does it actually help the bowel grow faster?”

For families grappling with the challenges of short gut syndrome, Hall's work offers a beacon of hope.

“The idea of finding a universal cure is not very realistic,” said Hall. “But if we can start identifying different factors to help and improve the process, that’ll be very important.”

She says a multitude of factors affect short gut syndrome, and some drugs are already in development.

“There’s definitely hope on the horizon,” she said.

Valerie Verge was in her early twenties when she landed her first job, doing neuroscience research and she loved it. But 43 years ago, her research journey began to take a twist.

"I developed an allergy to rats and mice,” she said. “I was using a box of Kleenex a day.”

She reluctantly had to admit that this may not be her career path, and spent her evenings earning a ‘back-up plan’ degree in computer programming at McGill. She refused to give up laboratory work, and went on with her colleagues to code and create an in house computerized image analysis system that was not readily available commercially or affordable.

“That was huge back then,” she said. “It came in very, very handy because we were able to integrate images on our microscope with computers and quantitatively analyze them.”

As her allergies gradually lessened, Verge stayed in the lab and earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill in 1990, then moved to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for post-doctoral studies. By 1992, she followed her heart to the prairies, and found ‘wonderful opportunities’ for research at University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine and soon after in a new UofS MS focussed research centre in Saskatoon City Hospital. 

Today, she’s a professor of anatomy, physiology and pharmacology, and the director of the Cameco MS Neuroscience Research Centre, with expertise converging on a singular goal — finding innovative ways to repair the nervous system.

Her recent peripheral nerve repair collaboration with Dr. Ming Chan from the University of Alberta Department of Medicine and Dr. Gillian Muir, Dean of the UofS Western College of Veterinary Medicine  explores acute intermittent hypoxia (AIH) This non-invasive therapy involves breathing controlled alternating cycles of regular air and air with reduced oxygen levels.

"It sounds horrible! But it’s not like having a stroke, where you can have zero oxygen,” said Verge. “This is more like just taking it down by a percentage to a level that induces a beneficial stress response.”

The rationale behind AIH lies in its ability to trigger repair responses. By subjecting the body to a mild, controlled stressor, the therapy aims to activate repair mechanisms that can be beneficial for nervous system repair. Dr. Verge's work involves investigating the impact of AIH on repairing peripheral nerves, outside of the brain and spinal cord and more recently, extending this therapy to investigate repair and neuroprotection in a model of multiple sclerosis.

In a female mouse model of progressive multiple sclerosis, Verge said graduate student Nataliya Tokarska observed an 80 per cent reduction in inflammation levels after just once daily treatment with the AIH protocol for one week

“They’re supposed to only get worse. Even two weeks after ending treatment, they’re still showing improvement,” said Dr. Verge, noting regions with lesions transitioned to a state of ‘advanced’ myelin repair; axons were being remyelinated and the immune response was dramatically decreased and shifted to a pro-repair state .

“It’s an extremely robust repair response like I’ve never seen in my 43 years of doing research.”

Verge said the technique has already helped patients with spinal cord injuries. In humans it does  not raise their blood pressure or heart rate or induce memory loss.

Unlike invasive procedures, such as electrical nerve stimulation (ES), the entire body is exposed to AIH. Verge and her team are now building on previous ES findings, showing intermittent low oxygen therapy behaves in a similar favourable manner repairing damaged and severed nerves in animal models.

Grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and MS Canada allow the research team to transition from pre-clinical rat work to human trials in carpal tunnel syndrome, and one day even multiple sclerosis patients. This marks a crucial step toward validating the efficacy of AIH in repairing the nervous system.

“It’s a pleasure to see things come full circle,” said Verge, who said her role now is to inspire and share insight with the next generation of neuroscientists.

“We’re very, very hopeful for the future.”

Dr. Evyn Peters has created pivotal changes for patients arriving at Royal University Hospital's mental health short stay unit, and its emergency department.

With 33 publications and interests spanning psychiatry, psychopharmacology and mood disorders, Peters is often one of the first physicians patients see when they’re experiencing a mental health crisis.

Peters was finishing his residency at RUH and the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine in 2017, when he and his colleagues first proposed ketamine for short-stay patients who had tried multiple antidepressants without success.

After studying best practices in other centres, Peters and his colleagues developed a protocol to treat patients with a ketamine nasal spray. His patients stay conscious, and don’t need an intravenous catheter or intensive cardiorespiratory monitoring.

“Not only does it work very quickly but it is twice as effective roughly as your conventional anti-depressants. And what’s more impressive is that it’s being used for patients typically who’ve failed to respond to anti-depressants in the past,” Peters said.

“It certainly is a cost-effective treatment.”

Until 2020, the only other option for hospitalized patients who didn’t respond to other drugs was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Hospitals in Saskatchewan sometimes struggle with backlogs, with patients waiting weeks for ECT. A psychiatrist and anesthetist and nurses must oversee the procedures, including treatments which typically stretch over another four weeks.

“That’s a long time in hospital,” said Peters. “You can get a similar response rate with one or three or four ketamine treatments every second day in about a week in hospital here.”

Peters was the lead author on the 2023 article Intranasal racemic ketamine for patients hospitalized with treatment-resistant depression: A retrospective analysis, published earlier this year in the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, together with his University of Saskatchewan psychiatry colleagues Dr. Katelyn Halpape, Dr. Isaac Cheveldae and Dr. Annabelle Wanson.

His patients, on average, were taking 3.5 psychiatric medications when they were admitted. His team made a point of not requiring patients to wean themselves off other anti-depressants during their treatment with ketamine. 

“We have a response rate in the hospital here of about 65 per cent, which is what you see in other treatment centres” said Peters. “The vast majority of those patients, about 75-80% get discharged immediately after that treatment.”

He said the rest of his patients often face other health and life circumstances complicating their discharge, such as homelessness. On top of that, ketamine is not suitable for anyone who’s recently had a heart attack, stroke, blood pressure issues, or who has schizophrenia.

“The goal was just to get it in use, because it was needed,” said Peters. “Now we can answer some of these questions about why does it work, and for whom does it work the best?”

By the end of her Grade Eight year in Saskatoon, Wendie Marks was sure about one thing: she knew she wanted to study health and the way early-life development affected the human body.

“I spent a lot of time in the library reading books,” Marks said. “I was always kind of the nerdy type.”

Marks enrolled at the University of Saskatchewan and thrived, earning her PhD in psychology. Her interests evolved towards behavioural neuroscience, focusing on the mechanisms behind behaviour, stress, and their effects on mental and physical health.

“I wanted to make new knowledge. I wanted to be on the cutting edge of finding new pathways that might be involved in anxiety, or depression,” she said.

Under the direction of Dr. Lisa Kalanchuk, Marks looked at stress and depression, during her graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan. From there, her post-doctoral research veered into epilepsy models at the University of Calgary. Still, Marks’ passion for understanding stress and its intergenerational effects never wavered.

When she returned to the University of Saskatchewan last year as an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Marks steered her research toward investigating stress's effects on health and chronic disease.

This summer, she was appointed as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Origins of Health and Disease in Indigenous People. Over the next five years, she plans to study the way life experiences, particularly stress and nutrition during pregnancy and early years, can have long-term effects on an individual's health and well-being. 

This research isn't just academic for Dr. Marks; it's deeply personal. 

Marks is a member of the Asnishinabe of Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation, near Lake of the Woods, Ontario, but she was born and raised in Saskatoon. Her mother and her siblings survived both residential school and the “60s Scoop”.

“The whole family was split up. There are aunts and uncles I’ve never even met,” said Marks.  "I've seen within my family firsthand the effects that those stressors have played on people, and the effects those things can have on families.”

Today, Marks credits her academic and research career to her mother’s unwavering support, encouragement and resilience.

 "She's one of the strongest people I know,” said Marks.

In this episode, Marks explained she’ll study stress in two different ways. First, she plans to use a multi-generational rat model to study the consequences of early-life stress by separating mothers from their pups. She’ll also model malnutrition by reducing the mother’s protein intake. 

Her goal is to measure each set of stressors separately, then assess whether they have a deeper effect combined. 

“Being hungry or exposed to stress when you're younger, chronically, it's possible that it can rewire your stress circuitry,” said Marks, who noted that is the case in numerous animal models. 

Her team will investigate how these factors can lead to physiological and cognitive changes, particularly in obesity and brain circuitry. 

In the second stage of her research, Marks will observe health conditions in those rats’ descendants, and propose potential treatments.

‘There's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that stress and the gut microbiome are linked together and affect our health later on in life,” Marks said. 

Ultimately, Marks hopes to apply the findings from animal studies to real-world situations within Indigenous communities, and help them come up with preventive strategies.

She hopes to bridge the gap between knowledge and action, ultimately improving the health and well-being of Indigenous communities for generations to come.

"Knowledge itself is powerful," Marks said. “The hope is that with this research we begin to find some of the answers and some of the solutions to decolonize Indigenous communities.”

Her work is a testament to resilience, hope, and the profound impact of science in healing intergenerational trauma.

“It’s a significant motivator for my research,” Marks said. “What can I contribute to try to make our world a better place?”This summer, she was appointed as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Origins of Health and Disease in Indigenous People. Over the next five years, she plans to study the way life experiences, particularly stress and nutrition during pregnancy and early years, can have long-term effects on an individual's health and well-being. 

This research isn't just academic for Dr. Marks; it's deeply personal. 

Marks is a member of the Asnishinabe of Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation, near Lake of the Woods, Ontario, but she was born and raised in Saskatoon. Her mother and her siblings survived both residential school and the “60s Scoop”.

“The whole family was split up. There are aunts and uncles I’ve never even met,” said Marks.  "I've seen within my family firsthand the effects that those stressors have played on people, and the effects those things can have on families.”

Today, Marks credits her academic and research career to her mother’s unwavering support, encouragement and resilience.

 "She's one of the strongest people I know,” said Marks.

In this episode, Marks explained she’ll study stress in two different ways. First, she plans to use a multi-generational rat model to study the consequences of early-life stress by separating mothers from their pups. She’ll also model malnutrition by reducing the mother’s protein intake. 

Her goal is to measure each set of stressors separately, then assess whether they have a deeper effect combined. 

“Being hungry or exposed to stress when you're younger, chronically, it's possible that it can rewire your stress circuitry,” said Marks, who noted that is the case in numerous animal models. 

Her team will investigate how these factors can lead to physiological and cognitive changes, particularly in obesity and brain circuitry. 

In the second stage of her research, Marks will observe health conditions in those rats’ descendants, and propose potential treatments.

‘There's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that stress and the gut microbiome are linked together and affect our health later on in life,” Marks said. 

Ultimately, Marks hopes to apply the findings from animal studies to real-world situations within Indigenous communities, and help them come up with preventive strategies.

She hopes to bridge the gap between knowledge and action, ultimately improving the health and well-being of Indigenous communities for generations to come.

"Knowledge itself is powerful," Marks said. “The hope is that with this research we begin to find some of the answers and some of the solutions to decolonize Indigenous communities.”

Her work is a testament to resilience, hope, and the profound impact of science in healing intergenerational trauma.

“It’s a significant motivator for my research,” Marks said. “What can I contribute to try to make our world a better place?”

When Justin Botterill first arrived at the University of Saskatchewan, he took what he described as a 'shotgun approach' to choosing classes.

Midway through his second year, his psychology professors introduced him to neuropsychology, and to psychiatric and neurological disorders.

He was hooked.

Botterill soon began working with rodent models, later focusing on the hippocampus and pathways involved in forming memories and spatial navigation.

"The hippocampus is widely implicated in a variety of neurological as well as psychiatric disorders," said Botterill. "It's a really important and critical structure."

After completing his PhD in cognition and neuroscience at the University of Saskatchewan, Botterill went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Dementia Research at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in New York, then at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

In January, he was hired as an assistant professor at Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine.

Today, he's setting up his laboratory and hiring researchers to help examine the dentate gyrus, its granule cells and the diverse roles mossy cells play across the hippocampus. 

"Several lines of research over the last five or ten years have really shown that [mossy cells] contribute to a lot of important functions. That's why they're very exciting to study," said Botterill. "It's a really interesting feedback loop."

He said mossy cells are not a single homogenous group of neurons.

"Although historically mossy cells have been treated as a single class of neurons in the hippocampus, several lines of research suggest they differ in their gene expression,  morphology, physiological properties, and anatomy," he said.

"No one's really investigated these potential subcategories of mossy cells at a deep level yet."

In this episode, Botterill explains the role mossy cells in the dorsal hippocampus play in spatial and cognitive functions. He said those in the ventral hippocampus show strong links to emotions such as anxiety. 

He also is looking at the role these excitatory cells play in Temporal lobe epilepsy, a disease characterized by seizures, along with debilitating cognitive and behavioural effects.

"One in three people with epilepsy don't respond to medication," said Botterill, who said he's hoping to focus on translational research in this area.

Botterill hopes to better identify the cells, circuits and proteins inside the dentate gyrus that generate seizures. Alongside researchers including John Howland and Robert Laprairie, he's hoping to eventually test new therapeutics on these target areas, to see which ones best prevent or reduce seizure activity.

"Can we develop treatments that would improve care for individuals, reduce the severity of their seizures, and allow them to lead healthier lives?"