Specialists in human health want to formalize links
BY ANDREW VOWLES
An international collaboration intended to help improve research and learning in increasingly critical aspects of human health will group Guelph researchers and students with counterparts at three other leading universities around the world.
A pending formal educational agreement among the four institutions will increase student exchange opportunities and strengthen research ties in studies of exercise physiology, nutrition, metabolism, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, says Prof. Terry Graham, chair of the Department of Human Biology and Nutritional Sciences (HBNS).
He hopes the formal grouping will help establish travel scholarships for students and provide more opportunities for collaborations involving Guelph researchers and their counterparts at the universities of Copenhagen, Maastricht and Deakin in Melbourne, Australia.
Travel scholarships would allow about six graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from Guelph to spend up to a year at a partner institution, says Graham, adding that he expects the agreement will also allow more foreign students to visit U of G.
Currently, two post-doctoral researchers from Australia are studying with HBNS professors Lawrence Spriet and David Dyck while two Guelph graduates are in Melbourne. One of Graham's students is currently in Copenhagen.
He also hopes to involve group members in conferences and summer schools at partner institutions, including Guelph and nearby universities and research institutes in southwestern Ontario.
The partner institutions hope to complete the formal educational agreement this semester.
Members of the so-called 4-University Group began discussions two years ago about striking a more formal research and teaching arrangement. Informally, those ties had existed for decades, says Graham, who did post-doctoral work at the Copenhagen Muscle Research Centre in Denmark in the mid-1970s.
The group includes about 30 faculty and researchers among the four institutions, including the Copenhagen centre and the Nutrition and Toxicology Research Institute at Maastricht in the Netherlands.
Guelph is represented in the group by Graham, Dyck, Spriet and two other HBNS faculty — Profs. Arend Bonen and Lindsay Robinson.
Bonen, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Metabolism and Health and is an associate faculty member at Maastricht, studies fatty acid transporters in muscle cell membranes.
Dyck and Spriet are looking at the regulation of enzymes in fat and carbohydrate metabolism, including diabetes. Both work with researchers in Melbourne.
Graham collaborates with Copenhagen researchers, including medical doctors, on studies of caffeine and insulin resistance. He says U of G students working with their overseas counterparts have access to invasive surgical techniques not available here in Canada. “Instead of small incremental steps, we're making giant leaps.”
One of his former PhD students who went to Denmark not only showed that caffeine causes insulin resistance but also pinpointed where that resistance occurs, leading researchers to improve insulin's effectiveness in cutting blood glucose levels by about half.
Robinson will travel with a student to Copenhagen next year to continue studies of how various dietary fats alter people's risk of developing type-2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease. She recently received a two-year collaborative grant from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food to conduct her study, along with Prof. Alejandro Marangoni, Food Science.
Robinson says her work will help people make better choices in supermarket aisles.
“We eventually hope to educate people on what types of fatty acids are in the food they're buying and how that affects their risk for disease.”
As a post-doc at a summer school held in Denmark in 2002, she worked with a leading researcher in inflammatory aspects of obesity.
Robinson says the group will improve training of students interested in nutrition, metabolic physiology and health, allowing Guelph to attract top students interested in those fields.
“Collaborations are essential in today's research environment in Canada and elsewhere,” she says, “and the establishment of the 4-University group will facilitate this, starting at the undergraduate and graduate student levels.”
Following discussions at a conference in Scandinavia earlier this year, HBNS hopes to host its 4-University counterparts during the planned Canadian Federation of Biological Sciences Conference to be held at Guelph next year.
