News Releases

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.

In partnership with the University of Lethbridge, Pathway RX, a research company focused on developing custom cannabis therapies, and Swysh, a company focused on cannabinoid research and development, have found that specific Cannabis sativa extracts show promise as an additional treatment for COVID-19.

Here’s the clue: This University of Lethbridge employee recently ticked a big item off of her bucket list by being a contestant on Jeopardy. The Jeopardy episode featuring Sharon Lawson (BEd ’88), who provides administrative support in the Faculty of Health Sciences, is set to air on Wednesday, April 22. On Shaw, the show is available at 4:30 p.m. on Channels 76 and 132, at 5:30 on Channels 83 and 144, and at 8 p.m. on Channels 16 and 114.

Here’s the clue: This University of Lethbridge employee recently ticked a big item off of her bucket list by being a contestant on Jeopardy. The Jeopardy episode featuring Sharon Lawson (BEd ’88), who provides administrative support in the Faculty of Health Sciences, is set to air on Wednesday, April 22. On Shaw, the show is available at 4:30 p.m. on Channel 76, at 5:30 on Channel 83 and at 8 p.m. on Channel 16. “It was probably one of the coolest experiences of my entire life,” says Lawson.

Convocation ceremonies are the highlight of the academic year for both students and staff at the University of Lethbridge and despite this spring’s in-person ceremonies being cancelled, the University is still finding a way to celebrate this monumental occasion with its graduating students.