Headway news

Shortcomings in the way researchers interpret pre-clinical studies may be creating inflated expectations about new drugs

On September 23, 2009, Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology), announced that 19 McGill researchers were among the 181 newly appointed or renewed Canada Research Chairs. McGill received nine Tier 1 and 10 Tier 2 Chairs worth a total of $17,600,000.

Catherine Bradley has made and designed costumes for theatre companies across Canada, including the Stratford Festival, the National Arts Centre, the Montreal Opera and the National Ballet. Since 1988, she's also taught the art of costuming, and its history, in McGill's Department of English.

The McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building is taking rights-based community practices out of the social work textbooks and putting them to work in the streets of Israel, Palestine and Jordan.

If you can’t eat it, it’s not food: Growing crops is one thing, but the real trick is getting those crops from field to market with minimal spoilage. Learn about bioresource engineering professor Vijaya Raghavan’s decades-long effort to bring post-harvest innovations to Indian farms.

Every two years, the Junior Nanotech Network brings together PhD students from McGill and Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität. Nanoscience may be measured in billionths of metres, but innovation means reaching out around the planet.

The third edition of the Junior Nanotech Network, to be held in 2010, promises to continue the student exchange’s tradition of cutting-edge research.

In 1992, researchers at the Montreal Children’s Hospital and six U.S. institutions began a long-term study of treatment for ADHD. The project builds on a previous collaboration between Dr. Lily Hechtman, a McGill professor of psychiatry and pediatrics based at the MCH, and New York University psychiatry professor Howard Abikoff, this time expanding their research to a much broader population.

In 1969, nursing research in Canada was so young that it didn’t have its own scholarly journal. Moyra F. Allen, director of the graduate program at McGill’s School of Nursing, took issue with this omission—so she filled the gap with the first in what would become an erratically published, yet trailblazing, series of slim volumes called Nursing Papers.

We need food. We need fuel. The Green Crop Network is working on ways we can have both. (Hold the greenhouse gases.)

Complex problems require complex solutions. That’s why the Green Crop Network brings together a variety of research expertise from McGill and 13 other Canadian universities.

Laurette Dubé’s career as a nutritionist seems so distant that she calls it “a former life.” Since then she has completed an MBA in Finance, a master’s of professional studies in marketing and a PhD in consumer psychology. She joined the Desautels Faculty of Management as a consumer psychologist in 1995, focusing her research on “non-rational” aspects of decision-making and behavior.

McGill University study could lead to personalized medicine to treat morbid obesity with genetic cause.

The accelerated world of medical research promises new diagnostic tools and treatments for Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and even cancer. These advances, however, raise a daunting array of ethical issues. Enter Bartha Maria Knoppers, the recently appointed director of McGill’s new Centre of Genomics and Policy.

Brenda Milner needs a bigger mantelpiece. On November 20, 2009, in a ceremony held in Berne, Switzerland, the legendary Montreal Neurological Institute researcher received the International Balzan Prize, yet another entry on her long list of prestigious accolades.