Congratulations to DMCBH members Drs. Zachary Pennington, Jessica Rosin and Alexander Wiesman, who have been awarded funding through Brain Canada’s 2025 Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research Program.
Brain Canada’s flagship Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research program is built to equip early-career researchers to take high-risk, high-reward approaches to advance brain and mental health. Since 2019, this program has supported 157 emerging scientists, bolstering Canada’s research ecosystem and giving the next generation of leaders the resources to pursue bold ideas and big discoveries.
This year, 26 scientists will receive $100,000 each to advance knowledge with the potential to improve brain and health outcomes for Canadians and beyond. Their research spans eating disorders, substance use disorder, neurodegeneration, neurodevelopment, chronic pain, and more to support prevention, early detection, better treatment options, and clearer pathways to recovery.
The Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research program is made possible thanks to an anchor gift from the Azrieli Foundation, matched by Brain Canada through the Canada Brain Research Fund (CBRF), a unique arrangement between the Government of Canada (Health Canada) and Brain Canada, with the support of additional generous donors and partners.
Learn more about our DMCBH members’ projects:
Zachary Pennington: Drift of reward memories in the amygdala
In each moment, our senses are bombarded by a vast array of stimuli. In order to make sense of this barrage, the brain engages learning processes that filter out irrelevant information, group stimuli into categories based upon their similarity, and associate stimuli based upon the predictive relationship between them (for example, if one stimulus routinely comes before another). Although the latter, ‘associative memories’, are fundamental to survival, they also contribute to devastating mental health conditions like substance use disorder ( SUD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In SUD, cues previously paired with drugs can come to drive drug-seeking. In PTSD, cues present at the time of trauma can later precipitate profound fear. Understanding the neural bases of these memories may allow them to be regulated.
Dr. Pennington’s lab is focused on understanding the underlying brain processes that support associative memory formation and storage, as well as how they might be targeted in mental health treatment. His group utilizes a wide range of cutting edge technologies to record and manipulate brain circuits, while also developing novel technologies that other scientists can harness to advance discovery. Dr. Pennington’s Brain Canada Future Leaders project is focused on understanding how associative memories about rewards are maintained across the lifespan, using novel tools that allow the same cells in the amygdala to be recorded across long periods of time. This proposal, advancing a paradigm-shifting framework for how long-term memories are maintained, could provide fundamental insight into conditions like SUD and PTSD.
Jessica Rosin: Studying the impact of maternal circadian disruption on the development and function of offspring sleep circuits
Considering that sleep disturbances brought on by shift work, nighttime light pollution from technology (e.g., TVs, phones, tablets, computers, etc.), and other factors (e.g., stress, anxiety, depression, etc.) are common in modern society, we established a maternal sleep disruption model to study the impact of sleep disturbances on offspring brain development and behaviour. As disrupted sleep has been documented in a number of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), targeting our efforts towards better understanding neurodevelopmental disruptions is essential—especially with occurrences of NDDs on the rise (~1:10 in Canada) and both the cause and mechanisms through which these systems go astray in children still unknown. Although various theories have been proposed, disrupting the intrauterine environment has been shown to negatively affect the developing brain and may provide a causal link to the appearance of NDDs later in life; however, the mechanism(s) by which fetal neural cells change their developmental programs in response to maternal sleep disruptions to result in neuropsychiatric consequences is understudied.
Dr. Rosin’s research is targeted at understanding how maternal sleep disruptions during pregnancy impact the development and function of offspring sleep circuits. Her lab aims to characterize changes in brain development in the fetus, in addition to assessing functional changes in offspring by examining their brains and sleep behaviours. Dr. Rosin’s research findings will help define connections between maternal sleep disruption during pregnancy and changes in brain development that can be linked to NDDs. Ultimately, her goal is to use this knowledge to support healthcare professionals in their recommendations to pregnant women about the potential risks associated with chronic sleep disturbances, and at the level of government, advocate for policy change for jobs that require pregnant women to conduct shift work.
Alexander Wiesman: Dynamic imaging markers of risk-associated brain signaling changes in healthy older adults
Alzheimer’s disease is a brain disorder of aging that causes problems with thinking and remembering. Since the Canadian population is, on average, getting older, Alzheimer’s represents one of the biggest issues facing our society. We know that some interventions like exercise and diet can help people resist developing Alzheimer’s disease, but unfortunately it is very difficult to know who is starting to show “brain signs” of the disease early enough for these interventions to work. The best tools we have for this currently are rare, invasive, or both. New low-risk, widely-available tools to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease in people who otherwise seem healthy are desperately needed.
Dr. Wiesman’s recent research suggests that non-invasive measures of brain signaling with magnetoencephalography (MEG) may represent such a tool. These measures tell us how much a person’s brain is reacting to harmful Alzheimer’s proteins before they develop problems with remembering and thinking and can then predict who is going to eventually develop these problems. His new project will test whether these Alzheimer’s disease “brain reactions” can be detected in older adults who are at higher risk for developing the disease. It will also test whether these brain changes can be detected using a much less expensive and more widely-available tool called electroencephalography (EEG).
The findings from this research could be used to develop a new, low-cost screening tool for detecting Alzheimer’s disease in older adults who do not have symptoms. This will be incredibly useful both for doctors who diagnose the disease, and for scientists who need to screen for signs of Alzheimer’s disease to decide who should be included in clinical trials. Dr. Wiesman’s work will also give us new information about which Alzheimer’s disease risk factors, such as exercise, diet, and air quality, have the strongest effect on brain health.
