UVic website rich with strange and new science

This summer marked the satisfying end of a mammoth project: to create a research profile page for all thirty members of the University of Victoria's Centre for Biomedical Research.

The Centre for Biomedical Research's raison d'être is to bring together health researchers from disciplines normally so separated by research cultures, philosophies and methods (and yes, sometimes disdain), they don't naturally talk to one another. The centre is so multidisciplinary, I ended up talking to some intensely interesting people well outside of my own specialty of microbiology. Topics ranged from Arctic-bacteria vaccines to face-recognition research to rare genetic diseases. I learned what zebra fish, sea urchins, and whales can teach us about human health. I learned that soap can be bad for you, nicotine can be good, and that Attention-deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may be caused by a broken "pleasure of learning" mechanism.

In fact, I think these 30 interviews were the most fun I've ever had. But then came the hard part: digesting enough of each research area to give a knowledgeable, authoritative review. Part of the problem is that the Centre was trying to accomplish so much with these seemingly simple 700 word articles. First, members wanted to share this wealth of research with the general public. But they also wanted to attract grad students and collaborators, meaning that a newspaper-level language and level of detail wasn't going to cut it. So I adopted a style that I've admired from the New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, where they start out so simple anyone can follow, then get progressively more complex to cater to the experts.

Many of these profiles were posted online to coincide with Café Scientific, a Centre for Biomedical Research public lecture series that is becoming so popular you have to register well in advance. Sign up for the next one by Dr. Patrick MacCleod "The harsh reality of Rett's syndrome: from diagnosis to cure." Details are on the CBR's front page http://cbr.uvic.ca Read my profile on Patrick's work, here.