Canada is experiencing an unprecedented demographic shift with the aging of the population. Older adults face major stressors and life transitions (e.g., retirement, bereavement, caregiving), in addition to accumulated biological wear-and-tear due to a lifetime of exposure to stress.
Yet, the impacts of stress vary between people and across situations. It is therefore important to identify protective factors that may promote more adaptive stress responses, particularly in midlife and late adulthood when risks increase for aging-related diseases.
The proposed program of research will focus on stress resilience factors in daily life (positive events and sleep) that may mitigate the impacts of stress on health and aging. Research studies will examine the stress-buffering effects of daily positive events and sleep, positive events as protective factors for aging and health disparities, and the development of a mobile intervention to cope with stress as it unfolds.
This research will contribute to a better understanding of stress resilience and health in the context of adult development and aging. Findings will inform strategies to reduce stress-related health conditions and to promote optimal aging among Canadians.
Feeling down or worried happens to everyone, but for some people these feelings are very strong, long-lasting, and can be damaging to them and their families. Mental illnesses, such as depression or anxiety, may include feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, guilt, or even suicide. Worldwide, mental illness affects one in five people aged 60+.
However, problems faced by older adults impacting their mental health are often overlooked, such as loneliness, loss of a spouse, or ill-health. We need to change the way we treat mental health, with services that consider older adults' specific needs and situations.
To this end, we will bring together an advisory board of older adults to help inform the project, providing insights into what contributes to their mental health and what sorts of technologies promote better mental health. Using these insights we will identify factors that contribute to older adults’ poor mental health.
Additionally, we will work with older adults to test technology-driven interventions, for example mobile apps, that best suit the needs of older adults in improving their mental health.
British Columbia, Canada, continues to grapple with an overdose epidemic. Substantial gaps remain in the implementation and scale up of overdose prevention strategies, including attention to gender equity. Little has been said regarding how marginalized women (trans inclusive) are impacted by the crisis, or how they might be differently navigating overdose risk environments or access to life-saving health services.
The ultimate goal is to generate new evidence to reduce overdose-related harms among women who use drugs and increase the responsiveness of existing and emerging overdose interventions to gender inequities. The objectives of this research program are to:
- Identify how women’s overdose risk is shaped by evolving individual, social, structural, and environmental factors;
- Investigate factors that create barriers to (or that facilitate) women’s engagement with existing, novel and emerging overdose prevention interventions; and
- Document perspectives, experiences, and impact of women who use drugs working in overdose-related interventions to inform how best to optimize their engagement in ongoing and future initiatives.
Rural and northern areas in BC cover large areas and support more and more older adults. Older adults may face unique challenges due to the geography, population, and resource availability. These places commonly lag behind urban centers in accessibility to healthcare services, and face healthcare workforce shortages. Innovative solutions are urgently required to support older adults to age safely with quality healthcare services. Technology solutions to support older adults exist and continue to be developed. However, there is a gap between technology development and its implementation and sustained use, especially for older adults in rural and northern areas.
My research program builds upon existing partnerships to address this gap through the creation of the Centre for Technology Adoption for Aging in the North (CTAAN)-A collaborating center for innovations in technology development and implementation to support older adults in rural and northern communities.
Through a range of technology focussed projects, my role as the academic lead of CTAAN is to enhance uptake of technologies supporting adaptation, piloting, and implementation of existing technologies from Canada and beyond and to support older persons to age gracefully.
Human cells are fascinating and complex: they reproduce, break down food to create energy and communicate with each other. The ‘skin’ of the cell, the cell membrane, plays a crucial role in choreographing interactions between a cell and the outside environment, for example by allowing or prohibiting the access of drugs from the cell exterior to the cell interior.
I design and build lab-on-a-chip devices, which are plastic chips the size of a postage stamp inside of which I can manipulate tiny amounts of liquids. I use these lab-on-a-chip devices to create artificial cells to be able to study how the cell membrane regulates access to the cell interior. Human cell membranes have lots of different components that are used to transport drugs into and out of the cell.
Since the cell membrane is complex, we do not always know exactly which component is interacting with the drug molecule, and what effect it has. The cost of developing a new drug is around 2.6 billion USD and a significant proportion of drug candidates fail because we cannot predict how they interact with cells.
My research will help design drugs that can interact with cells more efficiently, so that they can get inside the cell in order to work properly.
In the next 20 years, the percentage of adults aged ≥65 in Canada is projected to increase by nearly 60%, and among all Provinces British Columbia is aging the fastest. As our population ages, identifying factors that foster healthy aging is crucial for improving the health of older adults, and containing healthcare costs. One way to cultivate healthy aging is by increasing preventive service use (e.g., flu shots, screening for chronic conditions). Yet, <50% of adults aged ≥65 are up-to-date with them.
Thus, a central challenge is to identify modifiable factors that increase their use. The objective of this proposal is to identify key psychosocial well-being factors that are associated with increased preventive service use and begin piloting interventions. Building on prior work, the central hypothesis is that several hypothesized psychosocial well-being factors are associated with increased use of preventive services.
Regarding outcomes, this research is expected to have knowledge translation value as study results will identify psychosocial factors that might emerge as novel targets for interventions aiming to increase preventive service use; further, we will pilot test scalable interventions that target identified factors.
Problem: British Columbia is being increasingly impacted by climate change and therefore the health and wellbeing of children in this region are at risk, and will be throughout their lives unless action is taken.
Overview: Conducted for, by and with children, this research will answer 2 questions: How is children’s health being impacted by climate change? Can taking action on climate change through community projects, strengthen and build resilience in children, even in the age of climate change? A central focus of this work will be on mental health and wellbeing.
Outcomes: After filling a significant scientific knowledge gap about the public health impacts of climate change on children in BC, evidence gathered will be used to help develop community projects that tackle a local impact of climate change.
Impacts: This research will identify why and how certain community projects on climate change protect, and even improve, the mental health and wellbeing of children and make recommendations for how other communities can use this information to build their own healthy children, healthy community projects. These successes will be shared with decision makers to support the choices they make around climate change and health.
Development of robust models of COVID-19 spread in BC that can be used on an ongoing basis to inform public health decisions in our province. This modeling work, which will provide key data such as informing where services will be needed in advance of problematic need, is essential to fulsome contingency planning for BC health services.
The time-sensitive collection of anonymized sera for the purposes of investigation to establish baseline susceptibility and cross-reactivity, and subsequent population level changes in sero-susceptibility/sero-prevalence to derive infection attack rates by age. i.e., screening blood samples to see if the virus is showing up in the BC population.
We are making a blood test that will tell us a lot of information about the body’s response to the COVID-19, including whether a person is likely to get really sick or will easily fight off the virus. The blood test is will be easy to take, using only a drop of blood from the tip of the finger. The test is run using cutting-edge technology so that we can test a lot of people, at low cost, while getting the right results. The test will help prevent people from getting severely sick from COVID-19 by letting doctors know BEFORE things get worse that their patient may need additional care to help fight off the virus. For our citizens most at risk, like the elderly and those with other medical conditions, the results can be used to direct resources and support where they are needed most.
