McCall MacBain Postdoctoral Fellows Teaching and Leadership Program

Applications are due August 14 at 5pm

This program supports the development of leadership and educational skills of Postdoctoral Fellows, training them with evidence-based teaching methods to build the next generation of world-class instructors. This program aims to create better teachers, and in turn, better students.

The program consists of 3 training opportunities:

• Monthly Workshops aimed to teach essential teaching and leaderships skills
• Weekly Journal Club readings designed to supplement workshops with core papers in education cognition research
• Monthly Invited speakers presenting on cutting-edge education research

Sample Workshops

The series of workshops will build a foundation for program members to create their INSPIRE course module and pursue discipline-based education research.

How and why you should write an Op/Ed (Wade Hemsworth)

This workshop will prepare Program Members for how to write an Op/Ed article on the topic of their choice. Writing an Op/Ed will help members fine tune their communication skills by writing for a lay-audience about a complex topic. Op/Eds can be published on the McCall-MacBain program website and submitted to other publication outlets (The Sil, The Spec, etc.)

How to prepare/design a presentation or lecture (Joe Kim)

In these two workshops, Joe will first describe how he plans out his lectures (before converting them to PowerPoint). He will then teach the program members how to design PowerPoint slides (including multimedia).

How to give a lecture that incorporates Education Cognition research (Faria Sana)

Faria will give some background about active learning and why it is so vital to use in the classroom, as well as practice active learning techniques in the workshop.

How to write effective multiple-choice questions (Joe Kim)

This workshop will have program members practicing how to write effective multiple-choice questions (MCQs) using Bloom’s Taxonomy

Email Connie Imbault (Program Manager and Research Coordinator) with any questions

Applications Open For Postdoc Teaching & Leadership Program

Written on 04 August 2020.

'Prehabilitation': Training your body for surgery may improve recovery, reduce complications

If you’ve had a surgery postponed due to the pandemic, or one is on the horizon, there may be some work you can do right now to prepare and to help improve your postoperative outcome.

Prehabilitation, a strategy that uses exercise to improve patients’ functional capacity before surgery to help improve outcomes, is increasingly recommended for those facing scheduled surgeries, and it’s improving outcomes and experiences for patients across a wide range of situations.

There’s no guarantee, of course, but it gives patients much greater agency over their own health, and it’s never a bad idea to do what you can to lower your risk of complications following surgery.

Postoperative risks

Statistically, dying within a month after an operation accounts for 7.7 per cent of deaths globally, which makes it one of the top three factors contributing to global fatalities, trailing only heart attack and stroke.

While death is the most severe outcome, surgery patients are also susceptible to additional post-operative complications such as intense fatigue, longer hospital stays or hospital re-admittance, anemia and anorexia among a host of others. Those most at risk post-operatively are generally older adults that already live with other chronic diseases, take various medications and have a lower fitness level.

The success of a surgical procedure depends on more than the skill of the medical staff and the complexity of the operation. It is becoming apparent that the likelihood of the patient returning to a physically and psychologically healthy state is also dependent on what they do in the weeks leading up to the surgery.

Scientists have shown that an effective way of increasing chances of success is to physically train in the time leading up to a surgery. In this time of uncertainty, when many surgeries have been delayed, prehabilitation might be an opportunity to help optimize outcomes.

Doctors are often concerned with a patients’ risk factors, like high blood pressure, blood lipid status or obesity, many of which are difficult to control. Perhaps physical fitness, something you can change with exercise training and impacts several risk factors, should be added to this list. Exercise training can improve your physical fitness incrementally in as little as two weeks, making it a viable option for people about to undergo a surgical procedure.

Prehabilitation

The concept of prehabilitation is based on the idea that patients with a higher functional capacity, or fitness level, will better tolerate a surgical procedure, have fewer post-operative complications and demonstrate better functional, psychological, social and surgical outcomes.

Think of your fitness as a pitcher of water, and each outcome after surgery as a plant. The more water you have at the start somewhat predicts how many plants or outcomes you can care for. Critically, scientific evidence suggests that an individual’s fitness level may be a stronger predictor of post-operative risk than traditional risk factors, as small improvements in fitness have been associated with substantial improvements in survival.

The great news is that we know that many types of exercise training are effective, including brisk walking or jogging, high-intensity interval training, weightlifting, breathing exercises and muscle- or joint-specific training.

The current fitness of the patient is an important factor to consider when prescribing a pre-surgical exercise program, as someone with a higher fitness level will most likely be able to complete a more challenging program, such as high intensity interval training combined with strength training, and will require more activity to see physical gains. By contrast, an older, frail patient undergoing chemotherapy in preparation for a surgical procedure will be more limited in their fitness level, and may only be able to complete deep breathing exercises with a focus on strengthening their inspiratory muscles, which are respiratory muscles used when inhaling, such as the diaphragm.

Preparing for delayed surgeries

Regardless of the specific exercise program, it seems that these exercise interventions are safe, and may be associated with improved post-operative outcomes.

Like training for a race or sporting event, prehabilitation programs are most effective when combined with nutritional and psychological interventions. Surgery induces a stress response causing an increased need for additional energy sources, which can be relieved with nutritional supplementation, such as eating a diet higher in protein.

Addressing a patient’s anxiety regarding pain management, and behavioural modifications like quitting smoking and reducing alcohol consumption, have been shown to independently decrease the risk of postoperative complications. The best postoperative results have been observed when a multi-pronged approach, or a program designed to address all aspects of a patient’s health, has been applied.

In health care, it’s possible to switch gears. If we use prehabilitation and approach surgery like training for a race, we could see better outcomes, fewer deaths and healthier patients. This is even more important now, amid the current pandemic. With so many surgeries delayed, many patients have some extra time for prehabilitation that could improve their outcome.

Emily C. Dunford, Postdoctoral Fellow in Kinesiology, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How very hungry caterpillars grow and grow and don’t get sick

What if I told you that right in your backyard there lives a creature that eats five times its weight every day and grows a thousandfold in weeks. Instinctively, you’d probably want to stay away from the gluttonous beast! However, it wouldn’t be interested in you at all — in fact, it’s a vegan. Feel safer now?

Well, you shouldn’t.

You may have come across this gluttonous beast in kindergarten: the hungry hungry caterpillar, who ate his way through pages of food. Humanity loses $470 billion of food to crop pests like caterpillars every year. To put this in perspective, this is how much money Austria (yes, the whole country) made in 2018 (its gross domestic product).

Caterpillar growth

Caterpillars turn into butterflies and moths, which are important pollinators of plants and crops. So, this group of insects is like a very nice couple with a few very annoying kids.

Caterpillars have to grow a thousandfold in weeks, while eating nothing but leaves. In order to digest plants better, caterpillars produce a corrosive (very basic pH) environment in their guts, similar in properties to commercial cleaning products.

In addition, plants that are fed on by insects produce toxic chemicals to defend themselves from predators, which caterpillars must be able to render harmless. Rapid growth usually requires the best food and easiest metabolism. So, how does a creature that feeds on toxic plants and produces detergent in its gut grow so rapidly?

There is no delicate way of putting it: caterpillars are able to do this by pooping (not addressed in this article) and peeing effectively. Until now, how insects pee has been studied in mosquitoes and flies, but not caterpillars. But you can’t learn how a whale pees by studying a camel.

Caterpillar kidney design

For the past five years, members of Michael O'Donnell’s lab at McMaster University (including myself) have been investigating how excretion works in caterpillars. It turns out that caterpillar kidneys — outpouchings of the gut termed Malpighian tubules — have several cool adaptations that enable caterpillars to safely consume so much food.

Caterpillar kidneys are much more complex when compared to those of other insects — they are closer in complexity to human kidneys than those of adult moths and butterflies of the same species. Generally, animal kidneys require water flow from blood into the kidney because toxic wastes need to be dissolved in water so they can be excreted.

Caterpillar kidneys are connected to the intestine, enabling them to extract water from their food instead of using water from their blood. In fact, not only do caterpillars power their excretion with gut water, they use their kidneys to transfer some of the gut water into their blood, which helps them to grow rapidly.

However, this arrangement doesn’t work when there’s not enough water in the gut. In this case, the caterpillar kidney switches to using the water from their blood, so it can work uninterrupted. This allows their kidney to use water from the caterpillar’s blood to produce urine.

This switch is very rapid and involves some of the same mechanisms muscles and nerves use to respond to stimuli. This allows the caterpillar to work their kidneys non-stop regardless of whether it’s feeding or not.

Caterpillars’ kidneys can recirculate the same water to excrete metabolic wastes more than once, minimizing how much water they lose to peeing.

Caterpillar research

It took us several years to begin understanding how caterpillars could switch between using water from blood or intestine to power their kidneys and why it is safe for caterpillars to do so.

Our work at McMaster University shows us how caterpillars have highly efficient kidneys that enable their growth. Understanding this can help us interfere with their feeding on our crops. Of particular importance is how the caterpillar kidney is different from that of other animals (including us). This will ensure that any control strategies implemented will not affect the bees, birds and humans in the same habitat.

Now, more than ever, while faced with COVID-related food shortages, we must be cognizant of where our food comes from and what it takes for it to get to us. Finding out how caterpillars pee will help us put a dent in that $470 billion of crops we lose to insect pests every year.

Dennis Kolosov, NSERC and McCall MacBain Postdoctoral Fellow; Sessional Lecturer; oCUBE Communications Committee Chair, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.