Spring 2021 Research Update
Congratulations to Anwaar Hariri who recently, successfully defended her MSc-PT Rehabilitation Research thesis, Investigating the Effect of Aerobic Exercise on corticospinal Excitability: A Scoping Review. (Advisor Dr. Shaun Boe).
Congratulations also goes out to Christopher Friesen (Advisor Dr. Shaun Boe) for the successful defence of his PhD Neuroscience Thesis, Development and Validation of a Portable fNIRS Device to aid in Post-Stroke Motor Recovery (Chris is also Co-founder and CTO of Axem Neurotechnology: https://www.axemneuro.com/
By Dr. Cheryl Kozey, Professor, School of PT Research Coordinator
Our School of Physiotherapy had many research successes to celebrate over the past months.
The School of Physiotherapy Research Committee was established to facilitate and promote research excellence and growth within the School. Its’ Terms of Reference were approved at our Faculty of the Whole Committee in January 2021 and the Committee members include Drs. Shaun Boe and Rebecca Moyer as the two faculty research members and I am the Research Coordinator and Chair of the Committee. The Committee will engage in five main activities to meet its goal and one key activity is to enhance communication related to research successes of School of Physiotherapy researchers, research trainees, and non-research students. Recognizing success is the fun part of this role – I am pleased to relay the abundance of successes over the past few months. I will highlight the collective success as the individual research outcomes are listed at the end of this column.
First, with respect to grant capture, we had nine grants awarded where researchers are both Principal and Co-applicants totalling just under $3.5M. Funding sources include national grants from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) as well as regional and local grants. All are necessary to ensure that the research can be completed. To compliment this funding, we have had two MSc Rehabilitation Research students who were awarded Canada Graduate Scholarships (CGS), an NSERC CGS to Cassidy Klein who is supervised by Dr. Boe and a CIHR CGS plus Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship to Jack Quach who is co supervised by Drs. Kehler and Theou. Great news and congratulations to all!
Importantly is that this research is being disseminated in a variety of ways including 15 peer-reviewed journal articles in highly appropriate journals for ageing, musculoskeletal and neurorehabilitation research. In addition, researchers have presented their work to international, national, and regional audiences including presentations to research communities that are important to advancing knowledge and changing thinking. As well, there have been educational presentations which are vital for mobilizing research evidence to inform knowledge users that can impact health practice and policy. As mentioned above, the research of our students is pivotal to all aspects of our success. We had two successful thesis defences, one in the MSc Rehabilitation Research program (Anwaar Hariri) and the other in the PhD Neurosciences (Chris Friesen), both supervised by Dr. Boe. Furthermore, a former student and post-doctoral trainee are in on the action with Dr. Eric Robitaille’s recent publication (below) based on his post-doctoral work with Dr. Alice Aiken and co-author Marsha MacRae, an alum of Dalhousie (PT’95).
Overall, we have had a pretty good start to 2021 on the research front and look forward to sharing the next update with you!