2011 IGH News

December

• CALL FOR ABSTRACTS - Advancing Excellence in Gender, Sex and Health Research
  Hosted by the CIHR Institute of Gender and Health
  Montréal, Canada,
  October 29-31, 2012

  The conference will explore advances in our understandings of how sex and gender influence the health of women, men, and people of diverse gender identities over the lifespan. It will showcase excellence across the full scope of health research, from cell to society, offering a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary learning and exchange. The conference will feature dynamic presentations on new discoveries and innovative interventions, interactive poster sessions, lively discussions and valuable networking opportunities with leaders in the field. It is open to all researchers, policy-makers, health care providers, non-governmental organizations, students and others with a shared interest in gender, sex and health.

  For more information, visit the Gender and Health Conference website
  View the call for abstracts
  Submit an abstract

  The deadline to submit an abstract is February 15, 2012.

• Gender and Health Researcher Dr. Kate Shannon Awarded the 2011 Peter Lougheed/CIHR New Investigator Salary Award

October

• IGH Holds Meeting of IGH-funded Chairs, Teams and Centres
  On October 4 and 5, 2011, IGH convened a meeting of representatives from the Institute's largest strategic investments to share best practices and innovations in methods and measures, knowledge translation, and evaluation in gender, sex and health research. The meeting was an opportunity for IGH-funded research chairs, teams, and centres to share some of key outcomes of their work, to network with each other and to interact with IGH's Institute Advisory Board. The agenda included a mix of presentations, discussions in plenary and small groups, and interactive activities. It was clear that many synergies were forged over the course of the meeting and there was an appetite for further collective engagement. Several recommendations were generated in group discussions that will serve as helpful guidance for IGH in designing future strategic initiatives.

  
• IGH Invests $7.65M in Violence, Gender and Health Teams
  The Institute of Gender and Health congratulates the successful teams funded through IGH's Violence, Gender and Health Team Grants strategic initiative. In partnership with CIHR's HIV/AIDS Research Initiative, six teams were funded with a total of $8.5M ($7.65M from IGH and $850K from the HIV/AIDS Research Initiative). The primary objective of this strategic initiative is to support expert teams composed of researchers and knowledge users to conduct research on violence, gender, and health. These Team Grants represent a major investment for IGH in addressing the Institute's strategic research direction on violence and health. IGH looks forward to the upcoming work of these teams over the next five years.

  Congratulations to the following Nominated Principal Investigators and their teams!

  • Cecilia M. Benoit (University of Victoria) - Team Grant on contexts of vulnerabilities, resiliencies and care among people in the sex industry
  • Helene A. Berman (The University of Western Ontario) - Promoting Health Through Collaborative Engagement with Youth in Canada: Overcoming, Resisting, and Preventing Structural Violence
  • Stéphane Guay (Hôpital Louis H. Lafontaine) - Vers une meilleure prise en charge des victimes de violence grave en milieu de travail
  • Rosemary J. Jolly (Queen's University) - A two-pronged service and community mobilization intervention to reduce gender-based violence and HIV vulnerability in rural South Africa
  • Marlene Moretti (Simon Fraser University) - Effectiveness of a Relational Intervention in Reducing Violence and Victimization in At-risk Adolescent Girls and Boys
  • Kate Shannon (University of British Columbia) - Team grant on social and structural violence and HIV among vulnerable populations

  Please visit the funding decisions data on the CIHR website for complete team details.

• IGH Funds 5 Café Scientifiques on Gender, Sex and Health Research
  In the latest competition for Café Scientifique funding, the Institute of Gender and Health partnered with the CIHR Communications and Public Outreach Branch to fund five Cafés focused on gender, sex and health research. IGH is pleased to congratulate the following recipients of IGH Café Scientifique funding and wishes them successful events:
  • How Does Gender Matter in Long-term Residential Care? PI: Pat Armstrong, York University
  • "Gender Dysphoria": Treating and Supporting Transgender Youth. PI: Brenda Cossman, University of Toronto
  • Hot and Bothered? What to expect in Perimenopause. PI: Christine L. Hitchcock, University of British Columbia
  • Bodies without borders: Physical health education and boys on the benches. PI: Michael D. Kehler, The University of Western Ontario
  • Ain't I a woman too? Looking at intersectionality's relevance to the next generation of women's health research. PI: Charmaine C. Williams, University of Toronto.

  Please visit the funding decisions data on the CIHR website for complete details.

September

• IGH Bids Farewell to Long-time IAB Members, Welcomes New IAB Leadership
  Having served their maximum board terms, Dr. Blye Frank (Chair of the Board) and Dr. Yves Tremblay are leaving the IGH Institute Advisory Board (IAB) after 7 invaluable years of service to the board. Dr. Frank joined the board in 2004 and was appointed board Chair in 2009. Dr. Frank helped to ensure the integration of boys' and men's health in IGH's strategic vision throughout his time on the board. Dr. Tremblay joined the board in 2005 and was instrumental in ensuring that biomedical research has an integral home in IGH. The Institute has benefited immensely from the contributions of Drs. Frank and Tremblay.

  IGH thanks these board members and congratulates them on the exciting new roles they have recently taken up. Dr. Frank is the newly appointed Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. In this role, Dr. Frank will continue to advance gender and health research in the field of education. Dr. Tremblay has been appointed Director for the FRSQ Respiratory Health Network in Quebec. He has stated that one of his key objectives during his term will be to integrate gender and sex in the Respiratory Health Network Agenda. IGH will deeply miss both Drs. Frank and Tremblay but rests assured that they are continuing to advance the work of the Institute in these new frontiers.

  IGH is pleased to announce that former IGH IAB Vice-Chair Dr. Joan Bottorff has been appointed by CIHR Governing Council as the new Chair of the IGH IAB. An IGH board member since 2007, Dr. Bottorff is a Professor in the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health and Social Development, and Director of the Institute for Healthy Living and Chronic Disease Prevention at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her research program focuses on health promotion and health behaviour change in the context of cancer control with a particular focus on gender-related influences. IGH looks forward to working with Dr. Bottorff as the Institute embarks on a new phase of strategic development.

June

• Mastering Methods & Measures at the 2011 IGH Summer Institute
  IGH held its 3rd annual summer institute for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in gender, sex and health research on June 6-10, 2011. A multidisciplinary group of about 40 trainees from across Canada came together at the University of British Columbia Vancouver campus for this intensive training in methods and measures for gender, sex and health research. Throughout the week, trainees worked with mentors (expert researchers in the field) in plenary sessions devoted to quantitative, qualitative and biosocial approaches, as well as one-on-one consultations to facilitate applying key learnings to trainees' own projects. This year's summer institute also featured small-group master classes on specialized topics such as researching gender relations and health, sex differences in the pulmonary physiology of exercise, masculinities and health, and visual methods in gender and health research, among others. In addition to numerous selected readings, the summer institute curriculum incorporated the recently published textbook Designing and Conducting Gender, Sex and Health Research, co-edited by mentor Dr. John Oliffe and Dr. Lorraine Greaves (Sage 2012). The summer institute culminated in a poster session on the final day where trainees shared how their experiences at the summer institute will inform their research projects and programs.

April

• New Gender, Sex, and Health Videos!
  The CIHR Institute of Gender and Health and Knowledge Translation Branch are pleased to launch three new videos on gender, sex, and health research. Tune in to learn more about why gender and sex matter in mental health, men's health, and intimate partner violence, and what CIHR-IGH funded researchers are doing to understand and address these pressing issues:

  • Adrianna Mendrek on mental health
  • John Oliffe on men's health
  • Harriet MacMillan on intimate partner violence

  These videos were produced on-site and in celebration of the first Canadian national conference in gender, sex, and health research – Innovations in Gender, Sex, and Health Research – hosted by CIHR-IGH in Toronto, Ontario, November 22 & 23, 2010.

January

• IGH Award for Excellence Goes to Dr. Jordan Guenette

  

  IGH is pleased to announce that Queen's University postdoctoral fellow Dr. Jordan Guenette is the 2010/2011 recipient of the annual IGH Award for Excellence in Gender, Sex, and Health Research. The award recognizes outstanding gender, sex and health published research papers by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Guenette's winning paper "Sex-differences in exercise-induced diaphragmatic fatigue in endurance trained athletes" published in the Journal of Applied Physiology sought to determine whether there are sex differences in respiratory muscle (i.e., diaphragm) fatigue. The human diaphragm is the primary muscle involved in breathing and is the only skeletal muscle required to sustain human life. As such, understanding fatigue characteristics of this muscle has important clinical implications in a wide range of populations. Little, however, is known about how the diaphragm functions and responds to exercise in women, largely because all previous studies have been conducted in men. Guenette and colleagues' study is the first to use the most accepted and validated methods to characterize diaphragmatic function in women during exercise and to compare responses between sexes. Contrary to their original hypothesis, results revealed that women were actually less likely to develop diaphragm fatigue than men.