UTM receives over $2.7 million in NSERC grant funding
Researchers from five departments at UTM have received awards to fund topics ranging from lake ice in Canada to sexual selection in the wild to mother-offspring dynamics.
Professor Iva Zovkic, from the Department of Psychology, is one of 16 faculty members at UTM to have received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and says it will go a long way to support her neuroscience research in learning and memory.
So she was even more delighted to hear that on top of the five-year, $165,000 Discovery Grant she received, she was also awarded the Discovery Accelerator Supplement that will provide her with $120,000 over three years. “This is just a wonderful step in getting my research established and allowing me to utilize innovative approaches to answer long-standing questions in gene regulation and neural plasticity,” says Zovkic, who says that financial support is critical to conducting her laboratory experiments.
Zovkic’s work is focused on histone variant exchange in memory formation and gene regulation in the brain. Histones are proteins inside the cell nucleus that package DNA. They are involved in turning memory-related genes on and off in response to learning.
Zovkic has found that the histone-variant H2A.Z, which is typically studied in relation to development and cancer, is also involved in regulating cognitive function, meaning that it could ultimately be used to treat memory-related disorders. She says that since histone variants are found across species, there are profound implications for this research in a variety of disciplines, such as aging, disease and mental health.
Along with Zovkic , the following UTM researchers received Discovery Grants:
- Laura Brown (Geography) Monitoring and Modeling Lake Ice in Canada
- Craig Chambers (Psychology) Integrative mechanisms in real-time spoken language processing
- Ingo Ensminger (Biology) How will Global Change Affect Function Of Future Trees and Forests
- Ted Erclik (Biology)Genetic mechanisms underlying neuronal migration in the developing Drosophila brain
- George Espie (Biology) Physiological and Molecular Analysis of the Cyanobacterial CO2 Concentrating Mechanism
- Norm Farb (Psychology) Neural Mechanisms of Interoceptive Representation and Regulation
- Alison Fleming (Psychology) Not all rat pups are treated equally: Behavioral, neural, and (epi)genetic mechanisms mediating mother-offspring dynamics
- Ian Graham (Mathematical and Computational Sciences) Loewner theory and holomorphic mappings in several variables
- Darryl Gwynne (Biology) Sexual Selection and Viability in the Wild: the Evolution of Sex Differences
- Voula Kanelis (Chemical & Physical Sciences) Studies of the effects of phosphorylation and protein interactions on ATP-binding casette transporter activity
- Igor Lehnherr (Geography) Climate Change Impacts on Mercury and Methylmercury Sources to Arctic Ecosystems
- Lindsay Schoenbohm (Chemical & Physical Sciences) How do Continental Plateaus Grow? Mantle to Surface Dynamics of the Anatolian and Andean Plateaus
- Robert Reisz (Biology) Patterns of diversification in terrestrial vertebrate evolution
Additionally, Zovkic and Schoenbohm each received a Discovery Accelerator Supplement, and Marc Johnson from the Department of Biology and Joshua Milstein from the Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences each received a Research Tools and Instruments Grant, which will equip their individual labs with a high capacity freeze dryer and a super-resolution microscope, respectively.
"The total funding is a significant influx of research support for U of T Mississauga," says Bryan Stewart, UTM's vice-principal, research. "We are very appreciative for this NSERC funding of basic, investigator-driven research."
Across the entire University of Toronto, the total amount of scholarship and research funding was $48.7 million. In total, more than 3,800 researchers across 70 universities in Canada will receive a boost of over $340 million from NSERC’s Discovery Grants program. For the full list of recipients, please see NSERC’s website.