Monica Hsu

I am a 3rd year Integrated Sciences student focusing my studies on oncology at UBC. In addition, one of the big aspects of my life is also playing ultimate frisbee. I play for UBC, Traffic, and Team Canada. I've recently sustained a relatively serious ankle injury that prevented me from playing the sport for a while, as a result, I wanted to investigate the possible risks of injuries. I joined the lab to work on a project researching the relations of sleep, athletic injuries and prevention. We are currently working on developing effective methods to communicate the implications of sleep to promote injury prevention. In the future, I wish to fully understand the relations between sleep and athletic injuries and communicate this effectively to youth and college athletes.

Ruth Liu

I am a BHSc 2022 candidate at McMaster University. I joined the H-Behaviours Research Lab the summer after my first year of university. During first year, many of my friends reported delayed sleep times and irregular sleep patterns due to the stress of adjusting from high school to university. During midterm seasons, I personally experienced feelings of daytime drowsiness after a sleep-deprived night of studying. As a result, I became interested in to what degree sleep deprivation affect daytime performance, and why sleep problems are a common phenomenon among adolescents and young adults.

As a directed studies student at the lab, I am apart of the vigilance project team. My work at the lab includes conducting a scoping review on the association between sleep deprivation and sports injury, conducting patient chart reviews, and providing scientific grounding for the vigilance games, which are games that measure basic cognitive and motor skills. The purpose of the vigilance games is to raise awareness of sleep through allowing participants to self-experience the effect of sleep deprivation on cognition.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to become involved in the lab. My experience at the lab pushed me to work at a fast-pace while producing high-quality work. By working closely with the other directed studies students, I developed essential skills such as teamwork, communication, and public speaking. I look forward to seeing where our work will lead in advancing the discussion on sleep!

Gemma Tomasky

I am a BKin candidate at the University of British Columbia. I was interested in the work the H-Behaviours Research Lab by hearing about the work through a friend. I contacted the lab and was lucky enough to arrange a directed studies course through the H-Behaviours Research Lab, and it was been a privilege to be a part of this team.

With a group of direct studies students at the lab I am involved in the Vigilance and Wake-A-Thon projects. This incorporates developing the Wake-A-Thon games that were previously developed into ones that are justified by literature. This work has helped me develop my knowledge on literature research as well as my critical thinking skills. I am involved in another project utilizing patient charts of adolescents who live with concussions. This process explored how sleep potentially relates to cause or recovery of a concussion. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in the BCCHR Summer Student Research Program and to present this work at the 2019 World Sleep Congress and at the BCCHR Student Summer Poster Day.

Through this experience I have learned valuable skills in team-building, communication, empathy, and critical thinking. Notably, critical thinking has helped transition the Wake-A-Thon games to ones that are supported my literature and easily communicated in school settings. Being a member of this team has given me the opportunity to work directly with passionate and intellectual lab members, doctors, and physiotherapists. Ultimately, I appreciate everyone at the H-Behaviours research team for supporting my continuous academic growth.

Scout McWilliams

I am a third year medical student at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and am interested in pursuing a career in family medicine. More specifically, I would like to work in rural, underserved areas of Canada, where access to basic healthcare services is lacking.

Volunteering in the H-Behaviours Research Lab this summer has allowed me to explore areas of medicine that I previously knew little about. For example, iron deficiency (ID) is something that I haven’t learned a lot about in school, and I was intrigued to find out that iron deficiency is implicated in conditions such as restless legs syndrome (RLS) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). With this information in mind, I have been working on a scoping literature review of ID clinical guidelines to better understand how ID is being diagnosed, which populations are being targeted, and identify whether or not conditions such as RLS and ADHD have been included. ​

I hope to carry the knowledge and skills that I have gained this summer into the next stages of my education, and ultimately into my career as a physician.