Congratulations to Dr. Gillian Goobie (Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Tillie-Louise Hackett’s laboratory) who was awarded a 1 year Canadian Lung Association Post-doctoral Fellowship to support her research project entitled “Air pollution as a modulator of molecular, structural and clinical outcomes in patients with fibrotic interstitial lung disease ”
A lay summary can be found – https://www.lung.ca/recently-funded-researchers
Congratulations to Dr. Gillian Goobie (Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Tillie-Louise Hackett’s laboratory) who was awarded a 3 year Michael Smith Health Research BC Health Fellowship to support her research project entitled “Air pollution as a modulator of molecular, structural and clinical outcomes in patients with fibrotic interstitial lung disease ” A lay summary can be found – https://healthresearchbc.ca/award_researcher/gillian-goobie/
Congratulations to Dr. Matthew Wiens, Assistant Professor who was recently awarded a 5 year Canadian Institutes of Health Project Grant valued at $1,526.175 to support his research project entitled “Smart Discharges in children over 5: Expanding a personalized public health approach to improving discharge care in resource limited settings”
A lay summary:
In resource-limited countries, children who suffer from severe infections remain vulnerable for several months after initial recovery and hospital discharge. During this vulnerable period there is a high risk of recurrent infections, re-admission, and death, and these children may not return to their pre-illness level of functioning and quality of life. Children over five years old may be even more vulnerable during this time compared to younger children. Simple strategies like follow-up visits and healthy practices at home can improve recovery and survival. However, comprehensive strategies that can identify the most vulnerable across all age groups are lacking. To date, our team has developed tools that allow healthcare workers to identify those most at risk of dying after discharge among children under 5 years. Our team has also co-developed, with the Uganda Ministry of Health, a discharge-care program. This ‘Smart Discharges’ program applies a risk-based approach, where the child at highest risk receives the most intense form of discharge and post-discharge care. This care primarily consists of education and follow-up with community health workers. This approach is ideally suited to poor countries where healthcare workers and money are limited. In Uganda, our approach has improved discharge and post-discharge care for children under 5 years. Here, we will begin the process of integrating older children into our care framework by developing the tools that can identify older children who are at the highest risk of dying after discharge. We will also seek to understand how severe illness impacts the quality of life of these school-aged children. Finally, by talking with affected families and health workers, we will learn from their stories and experiences about the challenges and barriers faced in caring for their children.
Video recording can be found here.
James (Jim) Wright obtained his MD from the University of Alberta in 1968, his FRCP(C) in Internal Medicine in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from McGill University in 1976. He is a practicing specialist in Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology. He is also Co-Managing Director of the Therapeutics Initiative, Editor-in-Chief of the Therapeutics Letter and Coordinating Editor of the Cochrane Hypertension Review Group. He sits on the Editorial Boards of PLoS One and the Cochrane Library.
Dr. Wright’s research focuses on issues related to appropriate use of prescription drugs, Clinical Pharmacology, clinical trials, systematic review, meta-analysis and knowledge translation.
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Bernard MacLeod is Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He presently holds the Jean Templeton Hugill Chair in Anesthesia. He is former head of Anesthesiology at the University Hospital on the UBC campus, and is now with the Anesthesiology Group at the British Columbia Cancer Agency. He combines roles as anesthesiologist and medical scientist with directing a laboratory that specializes in the pharmacology of anesthetic and analgesic drugs.
Anesthesia Research
Susan Lee completed her undergraduate studies at Queen’s University (BScH in Biology & Physics) followed by medical school at the University of Toronto. She spent one year at McMaster University as a resident before discovering the joy of anesthesia at the University of Western Ontario, where she completed her anesthesiology training. During her residency, she developed an interest in clinical research and developed a perioperative smoking cessation program, and set out to prove its effectiveness with a randomized controlled trial. After residency, she worked in a small community hospital (Woodstock General Hospital) where she was involved in several patient safety quality improvement initiatives. She continued her research development at the University of California, San Francisco, where she worked as a Clinical Instructor in the Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care while completing a Master’s in Clinical Research in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She continued on as an Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF while conducting research at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She is pleased to join the Department of Anesthesia at Royal Columbian Hospital and the UBC Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology, & Therapeutics, where she will continue her investigations on how best to prepare patients for surgery and optimize their outcomes.
Broadly, my research interests include investigating how best to prepare patients for surgery to obtain the best postoperative outcomes. Specifically, I have enjoyed investigating perioperative smoking cessation and perioperative medication management. My current projects involve investigating how e-cigarettes can be used as a smoking cessation aid in the perioperative period (The END Perioperative Smoking Study), how simple interventions for perioperative smoking cessation perform in the real-world, and how better timing of these interventions may improve postoperative outcomes (The BuTT Out Study). I am also the anesthesia site liaison for the REGAIN study, an international multi-center study to investigate regional versus general anesthesia for hip fracture patients.
My research methods of interest range from small interventional randomized clinical trials to large database observational research using administrative data. While I love the elegance of a well-designed randomized trial, I also enjoy the depth of understanding gained from qualitative research, and my long-term vision for the future at Royal Columbian Hospital is to develop a comprehensive database that can be used to study real-world perioperative outcomes on a larger scale.
Research Awards:
Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society Richard Knill Research Competition June 2014 Finalist (top 5)
Lee S, Landry J, Jones P, Burrhman O, and Morley-Forster P. Long-term Outcomes after a Perioperative Smoking Cessation RCT.
McMaster-Western University Resident Research Day June 2012 1st Prize
Lee S, Landry J, Jones P, Morley-Forster P, and Burrhman O. Effectiveness of a Perioperative Smoking Cessation Program: an RCT.
Grants:
2016-2017 Royal Columbian Hospital Foundation Surgical Quality Improvement Grant awarded to implement a perioperative smoking cessation quality improvement program.
2016 San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center Patient-Centered Mini-Grant for the Stop Smoking for Safer Surgery program and Stop Smoking Challenge Coins
2015 University of California, San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center Support Grant of the National Institutes of Health for the END Perioperative Smoking Pilot Study.
2014-2015 UCSF Department of Anesthesia & Perioperative Care internal research award to conduct a pilot study of e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation aid for veterans presenting for surgery.
2009-2012 University of Western Ontario Department of Anesthesia & Perioperative Medicine internal research award to conduct a perioperative smoking cessation randomized controlled trial.
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Mitra Esfandiarei, PhD, is an associate professor of Biomedical Sciences at Midwestern University in Arizona, USA, and an adjunct professor of Pharmacology at the UBC Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology & Therapeutics. She obtained her BSc in Microbiology with High Distinction from Tehran University and a Masters in Medical Microbiology from Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute in Iran, and a PhD degree in Pathology & Laboratory Medicine from the University of British Columbia in Canada. She then completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Pharmacology at the Child & Family Research Institute, before taking a full time faculty position in USA. Her research has a focus on understanding the underlying mechanisms contributing to the progression of Marfan syndrome associated aortic aneurysm, and the protective effects that exercise may have on the disease process in both laboratory animal models and human patients. Another area of her research focuses on the regulation of calcium signaling during the endoplasmic reticulum stress response in the context of vascular diseases. Dr. Esfandiarei’s research has been supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Rare disease foundation, and the Marfan Foundation.
Marfan syndrome
Aortic Aneurysm
Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Response
Calcium Signaling
Marfan Syndrome Associated Aortic Aneurysm
Effects of Mild Exercise on the Aortic Aneurysm Progression
My laboratory studies the roles of microglial-mediated inflammatory responses in health and disease using in vitro and in vivo methodologies. For the former, we use electrophysiology, calcium imaging and molecular biology to examine effects of stimuli such as amyloid-beta peptide on microglial functional responses. For the latter, immunohistochemical analysis is applied to characterize the mechanisms by which activated microglia cause perturbations to blood brain barrier and alter neuronal viability in animal models of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. We are also interested in pharmacological modulation of microglial responses as a strategy for neuroprotection in diseased brain.