Research Location: University of British Columbia - Vancouver Campus

Uncertainty about how to ethically provide healthcare services can create barriers to care, as access to care is slowed or stopped while ethical concerns are addressed. These barriers to care can affect the health of members of equity-deserving groups, such as people who use drugs and Two-Spirit, transgender, and nonbinary people. This research focuses on gaps in knowledge about unresolved ethical issues affecting equity-deserving groups in British Columbia. Ethical issues will be addressed by: designing and testing strategies to enhance ethical reasoning skills among health professionals; working with members of equity-deserving groups and health professionals to resolve ethical dilemmas; developing a new method for ethical analysis; and openly sharing resources and resolutions. It is anticipated that the ability of health professionals to respond to ethical dilemmas will be enhanced and access to care will improve for members of equity-deserving groups. Enhanced ethical reasoning and expanded access to ethical resolutions will change practice through reducing barriers to care and support evidence-based policy, while developing a participatory empirical ethical analysis method will support future research in healthcare ethics.

In health care, knowledge translation (KT) is the process of moving knowledge into action to improve health systems, health services and health outcomes. KT is a social process that connects people to knowledge and supports. My area of expertise, implementation science, examines the factors that influence the use of knowledge from research and lived experience. My research program focuses on the importance of connections between people and organizations that can support KT. I use theories and evidence to design strategies to improve the use of best practices by health care providers, leaders and patients. I apply this research in health care centres, research institutes, community organizations, government, rehabilitation, and other settings. Our team is identifying and then testing a range of socially based strategies to strengthen connections between researchers, health care providers and families that can help move knowledge into action. This work will confirm the best approaches to use in different health care and research settings to improve care. The impact of this research will be to improve access to the safest, most effective health care for children and their families.

Microglia, the resident macrophages and phagocytic immune cells of the brain, play an important role in neurodevelopment—yet a fundamental question is whether these same roles have evolved in other regions of the fetus. My research is targeted at addressing this question by studying the contribution of macrophages to processes that shape the development of the skull and face (i.e., craniofacial morphogenesis), and whether distinct populations of these immune cells signal locally to contribute to normal development. During pregnancy, disrupting macrophage functions results in craniofacial and dental abnormalities. To explore the developmental contribution of these immune cells to the craniofacial region, we will use our established pharmacological mouse model alongside state-of-the-art expression profiling and imaging technologies. By studying how macrophages contribute to normal development of craniofacial tissues, this research will lead to advancements in our understanding of how maternal insults like maternal periodontal infection—a prevalent condition associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes—disrupts developmental programs. Overall, this research will broaden our knowledge of maternal-fetal interactions to benefit Canadians.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the deadliest breast cancer subtype, in part due to lack of targeted therapy. Therefore, there is a need to improve methods that determine if treatment is effective and to develop targeted therapies. Cancer cells reprogram their metabolism to enable tumour growth. In doing so, they release metabolites into blood and urine that can act as signals of tumour and treatment status, known as biomarkers. Rather than assessing treatment effectiveness months after therapy, measuring metabolite biomarkers may allow clinicians to determine response to therapy in real-time and early during treatment. Moreover, metabolite biomarkers can also indicate if a tumour is susceptible to specific treatment, thereby tailoring effective therapy to the individual patient. The proposed research program will determine how tumour metabolite biomarkers can indicate effective response and susceptibility to TNBC treatment. Ultimately, this work will contribute to validating metabolite biomarkers that can be used by clinicians to make informed patient care decisions and improve TNBC treatment.