CBB is always welcoming new, innovative members who contribute to the incredible research happening at the University of Waterloo. The Centre is proud to have over 180 researchers from all six faculties engaged in interdisciplinary efforts to tackle challenges in human health.
It can be hard to keep up with our growing membership, so we decided to summarize the research of our most recent additions and share where they find value in the CBB community. Each section has a call to action.
Meet our new members:
Jordan Cannon - Kinesiology and Health Sciences
Professor Jordan Cannon’s research program is interested in muscle skeletal function and the ways in which different components influence and interact with one another. The first part of his research looks to understand how individual muscles function within a coordinated network during movement, and how they collaborate to control whole-body and multi-joint actions in complex tasks. His second area of research focuses on how all the joints work together to produce whole body movements, with a particular interest in hip joint function and dysfunction of a newer disorder called femoroacetabular impingement syndrome (FAIS). FAIS occurs during teen years when an individual develops an abnormal bone in morphology causing the growth plates to open up at the bones of the hip joint resulting in a vicious cycle of inflammation and changes in the muscles surrounding the joint. Professor Cannon aims to understand how FAIS develops and how best to screen for it in order to predict and prevent it.
After hearing from several colleagues that CBB excels in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations with both campus researchers and industry partners, Professor Cannon was drawn to join the Centre. Another major draw for Professor Cannon was the opportunity to connect with clinicians who could offer valuable insights into his work. He was the first researcher to participate in the Clinical Council’s inaugural round of Engagement Sessions.
Having had the opportunity to collaborate with a multitude of different experts, Professor Cannon’s partnerships have consistently enhanced his work, making it more impactful.
"Sometimes you're doing something in an area that another field has figured out in some way, and if you don't go to those conferences, or if you don't interact with those people, you never find out. You never realize that they've maybe solved a problem that you haven't."
Professor Cannon hopes to foster long-lasting collaborations that lead to impactful work.
Annemarie Dedek - School of Pharmacy
Not only new to CBB, but also to the University of Waterloo, Professor Annemarie Dedek’s research program aims to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie chronic pain, addressing two major problems in the field. Until 2015, foundational pain research primarily used male or unsexed rodents, despite women making up 51% of the population and two-thirds of pain patients being female. Additionally, scientists spend years creating pain medication that works well on mice and rats, but when those same findings are tried on humans, there’s an overwhelming translational gap.
Through a collaboration with the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, Professor Dedek will be collecting tissue from dogs that have naturally developed arthritis, live out their lives and are humanely put down by their owners. Rather than developing a lab model of pain, this tissue will have undergone pain organically resulting in a much more clinically representative model.
A more specific project her lab is tackling looks at how sex hormones relate to both the development of pain-sensing parts of the body, and how they affect how easily the cells can communicate with each other.
When attempting to find potential collaborators on campus became overwhelming, she became aware of CBB and felt like she fit the Centre’s vision. Being part of a satellite campus, she was eager to meet other researchers and establish herself at the University beyond Pharmacy. So far, the centre has been a huge help in forging these outside connections.
“There’s too much knowledge out there for one person to know everything. I think that we could all strive to be good at what we do but being able to learn from others and respect where other people are experts, is going to be what’s going to get us as a society to solve the problems that we have.”
Professor Dedek is excited to connect with colleagues who are interested in her field of study, or related fields, to work on projects, share data or even supervise students together in the future.
Sheereen Harris - Kinesiology and Health Sciences
Professor Sheereen Harris's research examines decision-making between high-effort and low-effort options, focusing on physical activity versus competing tasks or sedentary behaviors. She is especially interested in how mental fatigue influences motivation and the choices people make about engaging in physical activity. Professor Harris’s goal is to design interventions that encourage people to engage in physical activity, even despite the common feelings we all experience.
After hearing from the Centre’s previous Executive Director Clark Dickerson, Professor Harris learned that the breadth of CBB is much more than Bioengineering and Biotechnology. She joined with the hopes of connecting with colleagues, allowing them to get to know her and her research, while also building her own network.
Professor Harris is open to learning from as many people in as many different areas as possible. She is particularly interested in physical activity but wants to hear from and work with researchers who may be interested in other behaviours.
“I know for a fact that there are so many people, faculty, staff and students across this university who can teach me a lot about things I didn’t even know existed, so when it comes to interdisciplinary research, I get excited about the possibility to look at questions I didn’t even have.”
Professor Harris would love to apply for funding on an interdisciplinary project in the future with someone she met through the Centre.
Yue Hu - Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering
Professor Yue Hu’s research focuses on human-robot interactions with two main directions. First, Professor Hu is researching how people want to interact with robots and how they are perceived from a social standpoint. For example, based on the environment, what type of social behaviour should the robot have so it is perceived as socially acceptable. Second, she is focusing on how robots can help with physical tasks in a health care setting to assist patients and their providers. It was through collaborating with a CBB member on social robot aspects for older adults in health monitoring and companionship that Professor Hu decided to join the Centre.
Working with social scientists to come up with insights she never would have thought of, Professor Hu believes in the importance of reaching out to researchers in other domains and has found that CBB has already been very helpful for making those connections
“I think my own research is pretty interdisciplinary. Without that interdisciplinarity, I think it wouldn’t work out because I talk a lot about how to use robots in health care and how we care about the social aspects of robots as well. Just taking these two aspects alone, they are not your standard topics in Engineering.”
Professor Hu is excited to bridge the gap between faculties and meet new collaborators.
Krista Kelly - Optometry & Vision Science
Professor Krista Kelly conducts her research studying children that have been diagnosed with eye conditions that can cause amblyopia (lazy eye). Despite being treated with surgery or eye patches, many children still struggle with poor vision, depth perception, slower or abnormal eye movements and other complications. Because of this, Professor Kelly works to uncover how all the different aspects associated with this eye condition impact how children live in their everyday life.
Currently, Professor Kelly is focused on tracking eye movements and how any ocular motor dysfunction impacts how children read and move. Specifically focusing on balance, Professor Kelly is using eye-tracking to monitor how children walk, using a pressure-sensitive mat to track their footsteps. By comparing their eye movements and gait during increasingly complex tasks, she aims to determine whether issues with eye movement or walking patterns are causing performance differences compared to controls. With the help of the Centre’s Seed program, Professor Kelly was able to have a pressure-sensitive staircase built to sync with the eye-tracker to delve even deeper with her research.
Ultimately, Professor Kelly wants to develop programs to help children with amblyopia improve their reading speed and coordination, so these challenges do not impact their confidence, social life, or potentially hold them back from other aspects of their life.
Professor Kelly joined CBB because she wanted to be a part of a space that allowed her to work with all different fields and expertise to get the best possible results from her research.
“Being able to have that interdisciplinary environment helps you gather skills from other people so that you can accelerate the research that you do.”
Professor Kelly hopes to build lasting collaborations to expand her skills and bring in expertise from other departments, so she can tackle new challenges and keep growing.
Yilan Liu - Chemical Engineering
Professor Yilan Liu’s lab research ways to harness synthetic biology to solve problems in order to create a more sustainable future. Synthetic biology is an emerging field that involves modifying organisms that don’t typically produce a specific product to enable them to generate the desired outcome. Her lab is currently focused on developing functional probiotics to provide affordable, preventive health solutions, as well as engineering bacteria to transform mixed solid waste into valuable products. Certain plastics take more time and money to break down, so many plastics still wind up in landfills. Professor Liu’s goal is to reduce this expense using synthetic biology to degrade a mix of plastics.
As a new faculty member, Professor Liu found it hard to build connections on campus outside of Engineering but recognized the importance of collaboration for her research, which led her to join CBB. Recognizing that no one person can solve a problem alone, she is eager to collaborate with researchers across all areas of her field to ensure her work is thorough and accurate.
“If we don’t have deeper collaborations on site, it will make our research much slower, so I hope we can make it faster because life is short. There are so many things that we want to do. Let’s get them done one by one!”
Professor Liu aims to collaborate with colleagues in Health to advance her probiotic research, with researchers in Biology for gene sequencing and synthesis, and with experts in Environmental studies due to the broader implications of her work.
Sean Meehan - Kinesiology and Health Sciences
Professor Sean Meehan’s research focuses on understanding how the brain uses sensory information to accomplish skilled movements (movements that have a specific goal with a desire to be achieved with precision). More specifically, Professor Meehan is interested in discovering how practice and the choices we make while moving affect how the brain uses sensory information to control our movements in order to make predictions based on what happens to a specific area, or areas, of the brain when an injury occurs.
Seeing the role CBB was taking in setting researchers up to successfully produce solutions based on the needs of health care professionals is what motivated Professor Meehan to become a member. With the launch of the Centre’s pilot Clinical Council program, Meehan saw the opportunity to bridge the gap between clinicians and researchers and open himself up to deeper partnerships and new interdisciplinary connections.
“Our goals are all the same: to really enhance quality of life. We can all operate in our own silos and kind of move towards that, but I think when you start having this interdisciplinary approach, you can get more than just the sum of the individual parts. You can get that super additive benefit of everyone’s expertise towards that kind of long-term goal of improving health and quality of life.”
Professor Meehan is eager to connect with colleagues in Biomed to help with the mechanistic basic science aspect of his lab.
Be sure to check out his recent study on the lasting effects of individuals who have a history with concussions.
Ewa Niechwiej-Szwedo - Kinesiology and Health Sciences
Professor Ewa Niechwiej-Szwedo’s area of research is visual motor control, with specific interest in how the brain is using sensory information to achieve goal-directed movement. She is focused on understanding the underlying mechanisms for hand-eye coordination in 3D using eye tracking motion capture systems while trying to harness newer tech that is more portable and commercially available.
More recently, Professor Niechwiej-Szwedo is researching hand-eye coordination in children, especially those with neurodevelopmental disorders. By assessing and understanding how coordination develops, she aims to create tools for diagnosing and improving motor control issues. Professor Niechwiej-Szwedo received seed funding from the Centre that was instrumental in allowing her to develop probes that assess hand-eye coordination to help implement more technology.
Another avenue of her research program involves looking at visual motor control in pilots to discover how gaze behaviour changes as they become more proficient. Working with researchers in the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics (WISA) using their flight simulator and applying eye-tracking tech, the goal is to gain a better understanding of the learning trajectory and uncover potential opportunities to accelerate training.
“You can develop whatever you want. Even me, I can develop and think whatever great things, and clinicians will not use it because they didn’t have a seat at the table at the beginning. So, all of my research right now is about connecting with the people who are important for the project.”
Professor Niechwiej-Szwedo is hoping to connect with more researchers who work on children’s development, and anyone researching gaze patterns using a hidden Markov model.