$3.5 million in NSERC funding supports research and discovery at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry
Schulich Medicine & Dentistry researchers will receive more than $3.5 million in funding during the next five years through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s (NSERC) Discovery Grants program.
Minister of Science and Technology, Ed Holder, was at Western University to announce the more than $340 million in funding across Canada, including more than $15 million for Western University researchers and trainees.
“By supporting 3,500 researchers and students in Canada, our Government is providing the right kind of help to push the frontiers of knowledge in science and engineering,” said Holder. “In so doing, we are developing, attracting and retaining the world’s most talented researchers who carry out the scientific research that creates jobs and prosperity and improves the quality of life of Canadians.”
This round of funding represented a banner year for the Department of Biochemistry at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry; five researchers in the Department received grants from NSERC for the first time this year including David Litchfield, PhD, who resumes his position as chair of the Department on July 1.
Litchfield will receive $180,000 over five years to design a chemical biology toolkit to monitor the role of protein kinases in live cancer cells. “This funding is important to be able to do fundamental discovery-based research,” he said. “In our lab, the funding will allow us to develop novel strategies to monitor the transmission of regulatory signals in living cells.”
Litchfield was one of almost 30 researchers at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry who were funded in this round:
Donglin Bai –Physiology & Pharmacology
Ismail Ben Ayed –Medical Biophysics
Jeffrey Carson –Medical Biophysics
Yun-Hee Choi – Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Wing-Yiu Choy – Biochemistry
Blaine Chronik – Medical Biophysics, Physics & Astronomy
Lina Dagnino – Physiology & Pharmacology
Christopher Ellis – Medical Biophysics
Daniel Goldman – Medical Biophysics
S.M. Mansour Haeryfar – Microbiology and Immunology
Douglas Hamilton – Anatomy and Cell Biology
Ilka Heinemann – Biochemistry
Dwayne Jackson – Medical Biophysics
Shuo Li – Medical Biophysics
Hong Ling – Biochemistry
David Litchfield – Biochemistry
Stephen Lomber – Physiology & Pharmacology
Penny MacDonald – Clinical Neurological Sciences
John McCormick – Microbiology and Immunology
Patrick O’Donoghue - Biochemistry
Adrian Owen – Brain & Mind Institute
Terry Peters – Robarts Research Institute
Michael Poulter – Physiology and Pharmacology and Robarts Research Institute
Frank Prato – Medical Biophysics
Abbas Samani – Medical Biophysics, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Peter Stathopulos – Physiology and Pharmacology
Xiufien Zheng - Pathology