RPP Profile: Dr. Colleen MacQuarrie
"I have always had a fire in the belly for research," says Dr. Colleen MacQuarrie, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Prince Edward Island. "In my early days, I wasn't clear about where I wanted to go, but I'm an activist academic and throughout my career, I've pursued various guises of social justice through health research."
Dr. MacQuarrie conducts research to better understand the multifaceted nature of health and wellness. Her work is geared towards understanding "change processes" for health behaviours (or what natural and/or influencing factors shape health decisions), the transitions people experience after being diagnosed with a specific disease, and population health interventions. To better understand how environments support the health choices of both families and individuals, Dr. MacQuarrie takes a community-based approach to her research -- which means that she explores health supports and challenges by including the community perspective(s) in her project. "Community" is a fluid concept and can be composed of people living in the same geographic location, coping with the same or similar diseases, experiencing similar life events, or sharing characteristics (such as gender, race, or sexual orientation). "A lot of my work circulates around issues of empowerment and making a difference in people's lives," she notes.
Currently, Dr. MacQuarrie is the Principal Investigator of a CIHR operating grant to examine smoking behaviour and cessation in pregnant girls between the ages of 14 and 19 who are adjusting to the role of being a mother. Tobacco smoking is becoming increasingly concentrated in specific populations, such as low-income youth with less education, and pregnant girls represent a substantial portion of these groups. Dr. MacQuarrie's research will address the gap in knowledge that currently exists about effective interventions for this population; it has the potential to clarify better practices for working effectively with these teens.
"No one has looked at the experience of adolescent girls as they transition from pregnancy to motherhood and how tobacco fits in," she says. "We're doing that. A teen perspective will be directly applied to the data, too, which is also unique."
Before she became the Principal Investigator for this project, however, Dr. MacQuarrie was a co-investigator on two other CIHR operating grants that were funded through CIHR's Regional Partnerships Program (RPP). RPP is designed to help build research capacity in targeted areas across the country, including PEI. She attributes her experience with the RPP grants to her success in the subsequent CIHR competition that led to her current research. "As an RPP co-investigator, I gained experience in collaboration with two diverse and active teams," she explains. "I was involved fully in writing the application for CIHR and gained hands-on insight into the running of a grant and the process for getting funded."
The RPP process in PEI is quite unique. All RPP applicants (in each participating region) must register with their respective Advisory Boards before they apply to CIHR, but PEI actually takes the registration process a step further by conducting a preliminary peer review of potential applications. The PEI Health Research Institute reviewed the application and then found a match to do a second (anonymous) review.
"We ended up with loads of feedback. It was a fabulously intense month," Dr. MacQuarrie chuckles. "You need to have a spirit of adventure when you write research proposals. Receiving criticism is difficult, but getting those early reviews gave us a chance to strengthen our CIHR applications by addressing the reviewers' questions. I 'ghost wrote' research proposals as a graduate student myself, but I learned a lot more by going through this RPP process."
Dr. MacQuarrie also credits RPP with helping to build a bigger research foundation at UPEI. She travelled across the country for her own studies, completing her undergraduate degree at UPEI and then moving to Carleton University and Simon Fraser University (SFU) for her graduate work. "SFU has more infrastructure for conducting research," she recalls. "The support isn't quite the same at UPEI, but we're really starting to see research on the ground here now."
Unlike many of its larger counterparts across the country, UPEI has few graduate programs – which means that UPEI professors teach and mark assignments without the help of graduate assistants. The work of teaching classes of 170 students can become intense, but being part of an undergraduate university also means that Dr. MacQuarrie can hand-pick honours students to assist her with the research side of life.
"If an undergraduate student is going to be my research assistant, he or she must have plans to go on to grad school," she says. "For the pregnant adolescents project, I mentored a student through Masters-level work – I'll admit it! Most of my students go on to graduate programs in Canadian universities, and they are very well-trained by the time they get there."
The exposure to programs of research that these students get through RPP and other grants is incredibly valuable for fostering their interest in research and in graduate studies – but most importantly, the funding provides these students with "local heroes" that they can then emulate.
"When you're in the early or mid stages of your career, it builds your confidence to see other seasoned people persevering and getting research funding," emphasizes Dr. MacQuarrie. "I don't think researchers would have persevered here in a smaller university setting to the same extent without the opportunities provided through the RPP because it adds incentive to the effort that must be invested in creating fundable and competitive proposals."