This article is part of a three-part series that will profile the inaugural Killam International Research Award recipients who traveled abroad in 2023.
A Dal doctoral student studying how the human body’s molecular biology can provide insights into disease development is one of the inaugural recipients of a new Dal-based award that provides global research opportunities to scholars at institutions abroad.
Dalhousie launched the Killam International Research Award last year with the support of the Killam Trusts. The award, which is open to all Killam Scholars at Dal, offers as opportunity for young researchers to foster collaboration and gain access to a different set of resources to answer their research questions.
“Most academics are open to discussion and collaboration, so the hardest part is just putting away the imposter syndrome and fear of rejection before you send the email,” says recipient Sabateeshan (Saby) Mathavarajah, a PhD Pathology student supervised by Dr. Graham Dellaire in Dalhousie’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Recipients of the award must arrange a supporting supervisor at their destination institution.
Mathavarajah worked with Dr. Ingo Braasch, an expert in genomics and aquaculture at Michigan State University, his host institution. Mathavarajah and Dr. Braash first met in person at a conference last October.
Mathavarajah’s research centres on how immunity present in an animal’s body from birth can affect the development of tumours and offer insights into how to treat them.
Foundations for further work
The Killam International Research Award set the stage for a more dynamic collaboration, allowing Mathavarajah to travel to the Braasch Lab for two months earlier this year and gain access to equipment, animal samples, and facilities. His goal was to use the lab’s sample species, including a freshwater fish known as a spotted gar, to advance his work on the function of a particular type of gene — the PML gene — in tissue regeneration.
“The Braasch lab is one of the only labs in the world with established, consistent access to the spotted gar and they were the first to sequence the organism,” he says. “Having access and being able to study the role of PML directly in the organism revealed the new insights on its function in tissue regeneration that we would not have known otherwise.”
Mathavarajah’s collaboration with the lab continues now and, when available, the cell lines he helped to develop will be invaluable studies that could enable new insights into the evolution of pathways that impact human health and disease such as innate immunity and tumour suppression.
Work from the collaboration was recently published in The Journal of Experimental Zoology-B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution.
Learn more about the Killam advantage and opportunities at Dalhousie University.
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