

Over 300 attendees gathered at McGill University on May 6 and 7 for the HBHL Symposium 2025, a vibrant two-day celebration of cutting-edge neuroscience and brain health research.
This year’s event featured inspiring keynote talks by Damien Fair (University of Minnesota), Lucina Q. Uddin (UCLA) and Amélie Quesnel-Vallée (McGill University), who explored topics from neuropsychiatry and brain network dynamics to social determinants of brain health.

The Government of Quebec and the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) have announced a significant $265.3M investment in scholarships and grants for the 2025-2026 funding year, supporting research across key FRQ sectors: Nature and Technologies, Health, Society and Culture, and Interdisciplinary Research.

Provost and Vice-President (Academic) Christopher Manfredi has named 31 McGill professors as Distinguished James McGill Professors, James McGill Professors or William Dawson Scholars. The internal awards recognize exceptional research achievements.

Last week, we welcomed neuroscientists Liisa Galea (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) and Robert-Paul Juster (Université de Montréal) for SEX CELLS!, a vital conversation on implementing Sex- and Gender-Based Analysis Plus (SGBA+) in health research.
McGill University, the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM) and Université de Sherbrooke, partners in the RNA Network for Therapy Development & Production (Réseau DePTAQ), are pleased to announce the appointment of Panagiotis (Takis) Prinos, PhD, as Director of Réseau DePTAQ.

The 2025 Bravo Gala was a celebration of McGill University's research community, and HBHL is proud to have been so well represented.
Congratulations to the following HBHL-supported researchers for these outstanding awards:

Last week, HBHL hosted the third talk of the 2024-2025 Neurogenesis Speaker Series at the Neuro, featuring Dana Small and Yashar Zeighami.
Dana Small’s presentation, "The Interoceptive Origins of Reward," explored how biological signals are integrated to determine food choice, while Yashar Zeighami’s talk, "Fine-Tuning Neuroimaging Analysis to Reveal Hidden Insights," highlighted his research into the development of multi-scale computational models of brain anatomy.

Montreal, March 26, 2025 – McGill University’s DNA to RNA Initiative (D2R) has awarded over $10 million in funding to support three groundbreaking research projects that will advance RNA-based therapies for cancer and rare genetic diseases. The awards were initially announced at the D2R Research Symposium on March 13, 2025.

NeuRo Genomics Initiative will help better understand rare and aging-related neurological disorders affecting Canadians
A project led by Ziv Gan-Or, MD, PhD, at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) of McGill University and Martine Tétreault, PhD, at Université de Montréal has received more than $8 million to sequence the genomes of 8,700 people, to map the role of genetics in neurological disorders.

On March 13, the Government of Canada, announced more than $308 million to advance science and research across the country. More than $153 million will support 179 new and renewed Canada Research Chairs at 38 research institutions.
Co-Principal Investigators Manisha Pahwa, CIHR Research Excellence, Diversity, and Independence Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, and Professor Ananya Banerjee, from McGill's Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, have been awarded $449,604 from the Canadian Cancer Society’s Health Equity Research Grant
Montreal, February 13, 2025 – McGill University’s DNA to RNA Initiative (D2R) and McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity (MI4) have awarded $500,000 to fund five high-impact research projects aimed at advancing the understanding of Mpox through its Rapid Response for Mpox Research funding program.

Yesterday, HBHL hosted the first Neurogenesis Speaker Series talk of 2025 at The Neuro, featuring Paul Masset and Pouya Bashivan.
The D2R (DNA to RNA) Initiative has awarded more than $6 million to support eight Core Platforms at McGill University and one at the University of British Columbia through its Core Platform Sustainability funding program. This program supports state-of-the-art Core Platforms that are essential for advancing research and development and facilitating technology uptake and transfer in fields relevant to RNA therapeutics.