CIHR Project Grants

Roy Suddaby

Business professor Roy Suddaby and a mostly UVic team received $2.1 million for a five-year project titled Overcoming the Impact of Historical Trauma on Health Outcomes for Indigenous Populations: Quest Health.

Suddaby and the interdisciplinary crew intend to document the ways in which bureaucracy in the health care system triggers Indigenous Historical Trauma (IHT) and creates barriers to health care for Indigenous peoples.

They’ll attach costs to those barriers - economic costs as well as social costs for the patients, their families and their communities and costs to federal and provincial health care systems.

Finally, they will analyze whether Quest Health, an Indigenous-led health and wellness entity based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is a possible solution to the barriers.

"Healthcare bureaucracies often replicate colonial structures, forcing Indigenous patients to navigate systems that echo historical oppression and may retraumatize them,” Suddaby says. “Addressing these systemic harms is not just a matter of equity—it is a necessary step toward reconciliation, restoring trust, and honouring Indigenous self-determination in health and well-being. Our research team is honoured to work with the Chemawawin Cree Nation, Quest Health, and the Indigenous Health Institute to better understand and address this critical but often overlooked barrier to health care access.”

Jeff Masuda and Sarah Wright Cardinal

Public Health and Social Policy professors Jeff Masuda and Sarah Wright Cardinal were awarded $1.6 million for the five-year project Holding space for Indigenous re-narration of urban wellness, self-determination, and community flourishing in colonial Vancouver's Downtown Eastside's Single Room Occupancy Hotels.

This multidisciplinary team of researchers supports the further advancement of Uya’am Gaak Cultural Society, a unique solely Indigenous-governed harm reduction organization, founded in 2023, that works for housed and unhoused residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Governed by an Elders Advisory from a diversity of Nations, Uya’am Gaak connects Indigenous DTES residents with Elders from their own cultures who possess knowledge of their ancestral languages and protocols as well as deep-rooted ties to the DTES.

The research supports principal investigator and Nisga’a Elder Rhonda Stephens of Uya’am Gaak, who centres strength-based, nation specific, and gender-inclusive approaches to bring together Indigenous SRO tenants experiencing intergenerational colonial injustices tied to systemic housing exploitation. “Our project,” says Masuda, “works against deficit-based narratives of Indigenous peoples in the DTES by following anti-racist, decolonial, and resurgence-based Indigenous research methodologies to combat deeply colonial mythologies that perpetuate harms against Indigenous communities in the Downtown Eastside.”

Over five years, the research team will gather and share stories of local Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and SRO tenants who call the multigenerational Indigenous community of the Downtown Eastside home. These stories will contribute to Uya’am Gaak’s autonomous pursuit of nation specific approaches to wellness, self-determination, and community flourishing for Indigenous residents of the Downtown Eastside.

Craig Brown

Craig Brown, professor in the Division of Medical Sciences, received $1.15 million for a five-year project Understanding the role of endothelial calcium waves in regulating microcirculatory function in brain health and injury due to stroke.

This research will build on recent findings by Brown’s team that tiny blood vessels can be clogged by single red and white blood cells, plus their exciting early data showing that calcium waves in the lining of those blood vessels can prevent cells from getting stalled. With this project, Brown will explore the relationship between calcium waves and blood flow, and attempt to identify tactics that will improve blood flow and ideally post-stroke recovery.

“Collectively,” Brown says, “these studies will offer unprecedented insights into the fundamental role that endothelial calcium waves play in regulating brain blood flow, as well as potentially offer new therapeutic approaches for recovering brain function after injury.”

Mariya Goncheva

Mariya Goncheva, a Biochemistry and Microbiology assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Virology, received $986,850 for a five-year project titled The co-infection paradigm - understanding how bacteria enhance influenza virus infection. 

“Many of us have experienced the flu and know it’s an unpleasant but largely self-limiting disease,” she says. "After a week or so you get better. However, sometimes complications can turn this infection life-threatening.”

One such complication is when a person also gets infected with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. These co-infections are difficult to treat and can lead to increased morbidity and even death.

Goncheva  will examine co-infection at the molecular level, to learn how exactly the presence of the bacteria affects how the virus grows, how the host responds, and eventually, how to design new ways to attack them.

Ryan Rhodes

Ryan Rhodes, a professor in Exercise Science and Physical Health Education, received $615,825 for a five-year project, Reframing Retirement:  An Examination of Identity Change and Self-Regulation Approaches to Promote Physical Activity.

“Adults aged 60 and over are the fastest growing segment of Canada’s population,” Rhodes says. “Physical activity can prevent the onset and progress of age-related chronic diseases and positively influence physical and mental health outcomes. However, many Canadian adults aren’t meeting the recommended activity guidelines and the levels drop as they age.”

With a pan-Canadian team of researchers, Rhodes will test two methods promoting physical activity among newly retired adults who weren’t participating in regular physical activity. Next, he’ll examine whether these approaches improve physical and mental well-being and health-related fitness outcomes.

All of these projects will support UVic’s Health and Wellbeing impact area as well as UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 Good health and well-being.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Project Grant program is designed to capture ideas with the greatest potential to advance health-related fundamental or applied knowledge, health research, health care, health systems, and/or health outcomes. The best ideas, the program recognizes, may stem from new, incremental, innovative, high-risk lines of inquiry, or knowledge translation approaches.