News Releases

Connor MacNeil, a PhD student in chemistry at the University of Lethbridge, is headed for Princeton University and a post-doctoral fellowship, thanks to a semester-long foreign study grant. MacNeil, as a recipient of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s (NSERC) Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship, was able to secure the prestigious Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement. That gave him the opportunity to spend last fall working in Paul Chirik’s lab at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.

In the past, many scientific research studies focused on using only male subjects, whether in human or animal experiments. Now researchers like Drs. Jamshid Faraji and Gerlinde Metz at the University of Lethbridge’s Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience are shining a spotlight on biological sex differences and making them an integral part of their research.

In some COVID-19 patients, the immune system goes into overdrive and starts attacking the body itself in what’s called a cytokine storm. When lung tissue is attacked, it can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and the need for a patient to be placed on a ventilator.

The University of Lethbridge’s Early Start Experience (ESE) will be offered online in August, giving new students the opportunity to learn all they need to set them up for success at university.

Residential care homes have been especially hard hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing gaps in the health-care system as both elderly residents and the staff who care for them have contracted the virus. “Even before the pandemic, residential care homes were a setting stretched far too thin,” says Dr. Sienna Caspar, an associate professor in the University of Lethbridge’s Faculty of Health Sciences’ Therapeutic Recreation program. “Individuals who live in long-term care homes are vulnerable and these are not resource-rich environments.”

Some people might look forward to the time when they don’t have to shop, cook and clean house, but it turns out those activities actually support healthy aging. “When you take those kinds of activities away, people have no reason to get up and move,” says Dr. Jennifer Copeland, a University of Lethbridge kinesiology professor. “A lot of the ways most of us get some daily movement around the house, even now during the COVID-19 pandemic, is because we have to cook supper, do the dishes, get groceries and do basic domestic chores.”

University of Lethbridge researchers examining memory processing in the brain have shed light on the mechanisms involved in this complex process — one of the first stages in understanding the basis of memory disorders. This significant work was recently published in the journal eLife and is part of the continuing contributions of the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience (CCBN) in the field of learning and memory.

The University of Lethbridge’s popular PUBlic Professor Series will be more accessible than ever this year as talks from the past six years will be featured on Facebook. Participating faculty members will provide a video recording to update their research, which will appear on Facebook Premiere along with their original talk. Viewers will be able to like, share and comment in real time. They can also submit questions to artsci.communication@uleth.ca for the “5 Questions With” segment taking place the following week.

Campus closures won’t stop these dedicated students! The University of Lethbridge undergraduate and high school iGEM teams are continuing their competition seasons even without access to wet lab space. Using Zoom, shared online drives, and their own ingenuity, the teams have been connecting and are making the best of a bad situation. While they may not be able to get into the lab, teams still have many tasks to complete — writing papers, building a website, creating online workshops, organizing fundraisers and lots of research.

The Southern Alberta Technology Council (SATC), which has organized the Lethbridge Regional Science Fair and Science Olympics since 2002, has decided to virtualize the 2020 Regional Science Fair event. Originally scheduled to take place on March 27 and 28, the science fair had to be postponed due to limitations on public gatherings put in place shortly before the event was scheduled.