Congratulations to Drs. Sara Mostafavi (Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia), Nadine Provençal (Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University), and Maria Aristizabal (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia and University of Toronto) for receiving funding from the Jacobs Foundation's Young Scholar program for research projects focused on improving child health and development! The Jacobs Foundation funds global research on learning and child development, supporting innovative scientists and implementing practical projects in early childhood and rural livelihoods.
To this end, The Jacob's Foundation funded two collaborative projects that involve Social Exposome Research Cluster members. First, Drs. Mostafavi and Provençal, along with colleagues from Columbia and McGill Universities, will receive over $200,000 CAD during the next two years for their research project titled “Developing epigenetic measurements to forecast long-term benefits of early-life interventions”. The primary objective of this research is to develop two DNA methylation-based measures that together will allow molecular-level testing of how early-life interventions shape human development and protect against age-related disease. Their research will validate measures in two multi-ethnic longitudinal studies and use measures to conduct a test of the long-term effects of the Nurse Family Partnership, an established early-life intervention. This research could provide a way to test whether early-life interventions prevent or reduce the damaging effects of early-life adversity. Ultimately, this could result in the scaling up of these programs to serve entire populations, thereby enhancing child health and developmental outcomes on a large scale.
Dr. Aristizabal, along with colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital, The Jackson Laboratory, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will receive over $250,000 during the next two years for their project tiled "Establishing bi-directional, translational models of dysregulated plasticity across development". This research project will conduct an innovative, cross-species (flies, mice, and humans), collaborative study to understand how early gene by environment interactions shape behaviour and contribute to the etiology of depression throughout the lifespan. By identifying the genetic, molecular, and circuit mechanisms by which the environment re-wires neural circuitry and impacts behaviour throughout life, this study will increase our understanding of how mental health disorders develop and may identify novel therapeutic targets.