As part of the recently announced Killam Connection Course developed by Dr. Eli Puterman (Healthy Aging: from Cells to Societies), we’ve invited internationally renowned researchers and physicians to engage the topic of healthy and successful aging from different perspectives. It is our hope that through this series of five lectures, our public audiences will emerge with a greater appreciation for the many different ways to think about what promotes or hinders healthy and successful aging. Our goal is to support a Canadian culture that values science and discovery to support decisions – at the individual and policy levels.
Members of the greater Vancouver community and the medical professions are invited to attend. Please register for each lecture individually. Maximum capacity per lecture is 240. For more information, please see the course website.
January 7, 2020
Lloyd B. Minor, MD, Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine
With his leadership, Stanford Medicine has established a strategic vision to lead the biomedical revolution in Precision Health, a fundamental shift to more proactive and personalized health care that empowers people to lead healthy lives. Dr. Minor is also a professor of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery and a professor of Bioengineering and of Neurobiology, by courtesy, at Stanford University. With more than 140 published articles and chapters, Dr. Minor is an expert in balance and inner ear disorders. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Title: Precision Health: Stanford’s Vision for Healthy Aging
Summary: Life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped for three consecutive years, and life expectancy at birth in Canada has stopped rising. Many factors contribute to this lack of progress, but one is the traditional reactive model of health care. Stanford Medicine’s Precision Health vision is ushering in proactive health care that will improve health and wellness throughout the live span by predicting, preventing, and curing disease–precisely.
January 28, 2020
Rachel Yehuda, PhD, Professor and Vice Chair of Psychiatry, and Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Dr. Rachel Yehuda is also the Mental Health Patient Care Center Director at the Bronx Veterans Affairs. She has published several hundred scientific papers and compiled over 10 books examining diverse aspects of traumatic stress, and has studied PTSD and resilience in combat veterans, survivors of genocide, interpersonal violence and terrorism, as well as in animal models. Her work has focused on neuroendocrinology, neuroimaging, genomic and molecular biological studies of trauma, experimental therapeutics (pharmacological and psychotherapy trials), biomarkers, genetic and epigenetic heritability, gender differences, and suicide
Title: Intergenerational Effects of Trauma
Summary: There has been much interest in trying to understand whether the effects of trauma are passed down to the next generation, or even subsequent generations. Recent advances in molecular biology and epigenetics have provided paradigms for understanding long term effects of stress. Epigenetic research in animals has provided models for how such effects might be transmitted and there has been great speculation regarding whether and to what extent such mechanisms can be applied towards understanding some of the enduring effects of trauma in offspring of survivors. This presentation will focus on the consequences of parental trauma and will examine the question of whether such effects are biologically ‘transmitted.” Most of the research has been conducted on adult children of Holocaust survivors but is supported by observations in children born to pregnant women who survived the world trade center attack on 9/11. Findings demonstrating epigenetic marks associated with parental trauma effects of PTSD will be reviewed, and discussed in the context of whether they represent generational “damage” resulting from adversity or indicate attempts to adapt to environmental challenge to achieve resilience.
February 11, 2020
Evan Adams, MD, Chief Medical Officer for the First Nations Health Authority
Dr. Evan Adams is of Tla’amin First Nation ancestry. In his role as CMO, Dr. Adams provides invaluable leadership representing the FNHA as he works closely with government partners on population and public health matters that affect First Nations and all British Columbians.
Dr. Adams leads a team of FNHA physicians—health and wellness partners to BC First Nations—who focus on First Nations health and wellness with a population health approach with the aim of creating a unique health care model that will be the first of its kind in Canada. He contributes to the continued transformation of health care and responds to the wellness directives provided by First Nations communities.
Title: Self-Determination as We Age, and Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Summary: TBD
March 10, 2020
David Rehkopf, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Research and Policy at Stanford University
Dr. Rehkopf is a social epidemiologist who studies how federal, state and local policies exacerbate or diminish social inequalities in health. He received is Masters degree in Public Health in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from University of California, Berkeley, and his PhD from the Harvard School of Public Health in the Department of Health and Social Behavior.
Title: The Environment and Our Health: New Discoveries Using Novel Approaches
Summary: Dr. Rehkopf will describe a new type of approach to finding new social, behavioral and environmental influences on health that increase the reliability of findings and decrease false positive findings.
March 24, 2020
Catrine Tudor-Locke, PhD, FACSM, FNAK is Professor and Dean of the College of Health and Human Services at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Dean Tudor-Locke is a walking behavior researcher and a recognized world leader in objective physical activity assessment and promotion, specifically focused on pedometer or accelerometer-determined ambulatory activity captured as steps/day across the lifespan. She is a trained program evaluator and adult educator focused on practical applications in objective monitoring measurement and intervention. She has also published on clinical vs. free-living gait analysis, including interpretation of cadence as a simple indicator of ambulatory patterns. She has also published work documenting the relationship between time spent in sedentary behavior and relatively low ambulatory activity, measured as steps/day.
Title: Stepping into Later Adulthood: The Importance of Walking and Walking Well
Summary: Step counting is now a widespread and acceptable approach to self-monitoring physical activity courtesy the recent surge in wearable technologies. And cadence (steps/min) is emerging as a reasonable indicator of intensity. Dr. Tudor-Locke will review current scientific literature related to step counting and cadence tracking with a specific focus on older adults. She will present evidence regarding the volume, dose (frequency, intensity, duration, timing) and dose-response relationships for step-based metrics, including steps/day (volume), cadence (steps/min; intensity), peak 30-min cadence (steps/min; composite index of frequency, intensity and duration), and zero-cadence (a proxy for sedentary behavior).