Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Award in Clinical/Health Services Research Advancement
Dan Yedu Quansah, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher
Congratulations to Dan Yedu Quansah, PhD., CIHR Health System Impact Fellow at the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Centre, as recipient of the 2024 UOHI EDI Award in Clinical Research Advancement! Dr. Quansah is recognized for his passion and research addressing the intersections of sex, gender, ethnicity, and other social determinants of cardiovascular health. Under the tutelage of Kerri-Anne Mullen, PhD, he is developing and implementing novel interventions to improve CVD outcomes in underserved and high-risk populations of women.
Dr. Quansah co-produces and co-authors research with women with lived experience, focusing on sex-specific risk factors such as gestational hypertensive disorders. He aims to improve awareness, screening, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment in groups of women who experience health disparities and are at higher risk of premature CVD, particularly South Asian, Black, and Indigenous women. His Rapid Review was featured in a special “Her Heart Matters” edition of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology Open, while a scoping review underway is examining the barriers and facilitators of CVD prevention services. This work is informed by both patient partners and qualitative interviews and focus groups, to assess knowledge of CVD and risk factors; access and barriers to care and support; and assess self-management. This work set the stage for the interactive components of a Think Tank event Dr. Quansah helped lead, enabling over 50 patient and stakeholder partners to collaboratively identify priorities and strategies to address them.
Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Award in Basic Research Advancement
Termeh Aslani, PhD Candidate
Congratulations to Ms. Termeh Aslani, PhD Candidate, recipient of the 2024 UOHI EDI Award in Basic Research Advancement! She’s made insightful contributions to incorporate the impact of sex into research led by Kyoung-Han Kim, PhD, leading to two first-authored studies and opening new directions for the team’s research. In the first project, Ms. Aslani illuminated significant sex differences in ketone body metabolism, showing through a series of experiments that intermittent fasting had a greater impact on males compared to females. Further, females generate more ketone bodies upon fasting and are more dependent on these ketone bodies. And finally, these sex differences led to different responses in immune cells, such as macrophages and neutrophils.
In the second project, Ms. Aslani encountered project-stopping off-target gene recombination when using Mlc2v-Cre mice to knock out genes in the ventricle of the heart. Taking this challenge as an opportunity, Ms. Aslani carefully designed several experiments to examine the prevalence and sex dependency of this off-target effect. Notably, she found that 96% of female Mlc2v-Cre mice exhibited off-target recombination, compared to the male showing 16%. This finding is significant, suggesting that some gene deletion could occur maternally in oocytes, which might affect the interpretation of phenotype data. These projects show that Ms. Aslani is a scientific leader with an exceptional ability to bring both innovative insights and EDI best practices to complex scientific inquiries.