It is important for both individuals and organizations to periodically
take stock of their recent accomplishments and articulate their goals
for the future. UBC requires that faculty members and departments do
this every year, and graduation is always a time for such reflection.
When Ed Koch was mayor of New York City he would walk around the city
asking people “How am I doing?”. By all accounts, M&I is doing
extremely well.
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It has
been our stated goal to create a sense of community in our department
and to establish a highly innovative, supportive, and collaborative
learning environment. We want our students and research trainees to
emerge as lifelong learners, advocates and practitioners of science, and
active contributors to society. To achieve this vision, our
faculty, students, and staff have worked together, demonstrating
exceptional commitment, creativity, and initiative. Hence it is
extremely gratifying that M&I received the Alfred Scow award for
Student Development from UBC this year after being nominated by our
undergraduate majors. This award is presented to 1-2 undergraduate,
graduate, or professional programs per year and it is rare for this
award to go to an established program. The award ceremony at the Cecil
Green House was a great opportunity for me to recognize the
contributions of now-retired Professor of Teaching Dr. Bill Ramey, who
developed the M&I co-op program, the BCIT/M&I joint degree
program, our combined majors programs, and the original version of the
investigative MICB 421 lab course. This award is also a testament to the
exceptional efforts and creativity of our instructors, our outstanding
staff members, and our highly motivated, talented, and community-minded
undergraduate majors, especially the MISA group, who organize
informative workshops and fun activities that enrich the experience for
our students. This is an award to all of us and reflects the efforts and
successes of both past and present department members. Future
department members too, because this award should serve as motivation to
continually improve on how we promote student growth and development.
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One
of our department’s greatest strengths is its tight-knit student
community. The connections students form not only support them socially
during their degrees, but also professionally for years to come. This
year, MISA focused on supporting and expanding this community. Building
on our past successes and through a variety of new initiatives, we
delivered exciting events to students. It’s been a fantastic year, and
I’m thrilled to share some of the highlights.
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Any good
community needs a home – ours is the MISA Lounge in the Wesbrook
building. The lounge is a great place for students to relax, socialize,
and study, but after years of heavy use it was in need of some love.
With fantastic support from department staff, we were able to revitalize
the lounge with repairs to the walls, a fresh coat of paint, and a
couple new pieces of furniture.
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Everything
was completed just in time for the new year, and we were happy to again
have a home to be proud of. Throughout the year the lounge hosted
numerous events for students, including on Valentine’s Day when our
microwave gourmets helped students make instant cake in coffee mugs.
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Food and drink was a persistent theme in many of our events – what better way to attract overtired undergraduates?
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Free hotdogs and hamburgers were plentiful at our always-popular kickoff
barbeque, as well as at the Science Clubs Carnival we hosted in
partnership with the Biology and Combined Major in Science student
associations. We also organized a tour and beer tasting at R&B
Brewing, where students happily worked on a morning buzz in the name of
science.
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Systemic immunity: the missing link between gut microbiome and asthma
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Our
microbiome, the term given to the collective microbial (bacterial,
fungal, and viral) community residing on or inside our bodies, has gone
from being a word unique to a niche research community to a household
name over the last decade, thanks to the explosion of next-generation
sequencing technologies that have allowed us to study it. We now
know that both the presence of unfavorable bacteria or “Missing
Microbes”, as described by Dr. Martin Blaser’s recent best-selling novel
about the microbiome, can have detrimental effects on our health.
Among these are asthma and atopic diseases that have risen tremendously
in infants and children over the last decades. Early-life events
like antibiotic use, caesarean delivery, and increasing cleanliness
likely contribute by changing the microbiome.
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Recently,
Drs., Brett Finlay, Stuart Turvey, and William Mohn led the
investigation of gut microbes of infants in the Canadian Healthy Infant
Longitudinal Development (CHILD) Study, demonstrating a connection
between gut microbiome alterations in the first 100 days of life and an
increased risk to develop asthma. They also found that low levels of
specific intestinal bacteria in asthmatic children are linked to low
levels of microbial products (metabolites) known to regulate essential
immune functions. However, the immune status of those children was not
determined, and the mechanisms by which an altered microbiome and
metabolites functionally link to asthma is unknown. Thus, members
of Dr. Mohn’s group (pictured: Dr. Pedro Dimitriu, PhD students Alissa
Cait and Nelly Amenyogbe with her own CHILD Elie, and Dr. Bill Mohn) are
taking this one step further with a newly-awarded CIHR grant that will
allow them to measure the systemic immune responses to bacterial
products, complete genetic content of gut microbes (the shotgun
metagenome), and metabolome during the first five years of life in a
large subset of CHILD study participants.
This will help us identify both protective and harmful bacteria and
bacterial processes that interact with our immune system, and test some
of these associations in mouse models. Most importantly, it will
help us identify which bacteria, and at what age, we need to expose our
kids for optimal immune development. That’s one way to reclaim some of
our missing microbes.
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One key question now – where do we display this award?
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In 2018, our
undergraduate teaching labs are scheduled to move to a new building
(actually new or renovated wings of the Biosciences Building) where we
will share space with the undergraduate laboratories for the Biology
program, the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and the
Department of Cellular & Physiological Sciences. This will
allow for wonderful teaching synergies but I hope they will have an
award case for us.
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Researchers
in our department are making important advances in new areas that
bridge disciplines, employ exciting new technologies, and address
important global problems. This includes antibiotic resistance,
inflammatory autoimmune diseases, cancer immunotherapy, the epigenomics
of normal and cancer cell development, discovering novel anti-microbial
agents and therapeutic strategies, understanding microbial community
dynamics and the interactions between microbes and their environments,
and understanding how the multi-biome (not just the bacterial
microbiome) impacts almost every physiological process. A common theme
is that biology is now very much a big data science requiring
sophisticated informatics, mathematical and computational analyses, and
new advances in visual representation. So our goals for the future --
preparing ourselves, our research trainees, and our students for
succeeding in this new scientific landscape and being able to
communicate it across disciplines and to the public. It will be exciting
times!
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After
all the food and drink, students needed a way to stay physically fit.
Our intramural sports teams provided a great way for students to meet
new friends, while burning off stress and calories throughout the year.
Competing in soccer, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, and longboat racing,
students played their hearts out and made our department proud!
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Supporting
student’s professional development was another key goal for the year.
We continued our always-successful mentorship program, as well as our
careers information night, during which students met with alumni to
discuss their options after graduation.
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This year, students also had the option to have professional headshots taken at the event, free of charge.
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Beyond
professional development, we also wanted to support student’s awareness
of important issues in our community. In particular, we hosted a panel
discussion on the issues women face in science, featuring students,
faculty, and local leaders in the scientific community. Students also
worked with the local charity Children’s Birthday Miracle to host a
birthday party for children from less-fortunate families, and
contributed to the annual AMS Food Drive.
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As
always, we ended the year with our annual boat cruise. We were blessed
with another year of sun, and after a well-received sing-a-long
performance by David Oliver and Craig Kornak, students, faculty, and
staff celebrated their successes over great food and plenty of drinks.
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It
has been a wonderful year. Our community is stronger than ever, and
students from our department continue to do incredible things both
locally and globally. Special thanks to the MISA team for their hard
work, and to the students, faculty, and staff for their support.
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