C150 research excellence leads to boost in Canada’s public health expertise

When the federal government announced the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program (C150) in 2017, it invested $117.6 million to strengthen Canada’s research muscle—a goal that turned out to be vitally important ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Caroline Colijn has been based out of Simon Fraser University (SFU) since 2018 as the C150 in Mathematics for Infection, Evolution and Public Health. Yves Brun joined the Université de Montréal (UdeM) in 2019 as the C150 in Bacterial Cell Biology. Brun is a world-renowned expert on bacteria, and Colijn is breaking new ground in understanding and modelling how an outbreak spreads. Both Canadians had previously been abroad for years, researching at two different ends of the disease spectrum.

Colijn: “Within 18 months, a global pandemic started.”

Colijn’s groundbreaking research weaves together mathematics, statistics, evolution and epidemiology to understand and predict the dynamics of infectious diseases. After completing her education in Canada and doing postdoctoral work at the Harvard School of Public Health, she moved to the United Kingdom in 2007, taking positions at the University of Bristol, and later Imperial College London.

The UK was a “dynamic, exciting place to do science,” says Colijn, but she always knew she would want to come back to Canada one day—she just didn’t know when. Then she heard about the C150 program.

“It was definitely on my radar right away as an exciting opportunity, a way to bring my career to Canada and be able to run a research group there,” she says.

A year and a half after Colijn started at SFU, the first news stories emerged of a “novel coronavirus”, and she began reading more about it on bioRxiv, a preprint server where life sciences experts can disseminate early research findings.

She says, “I kept seeing very early papers trying to do things like estimate the basic reproduction number, or estimate other quantities, or just even describe transmission events that had happened, on planes, for example. I thought, we should be getting into these data and seeing what we can make of it.”

With an SFU colleague, Jessica Stockdale, Colijn organized a weekend “hackathon” at the university in February 2020.

“We thought it would be interesting to have a hackathon where we looked at public data, and we got students, graduate students, postdocs and anyone else who was interested to get together. We invited the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), and they sent someone who we then worked with for years afterwards with the provincial modelling team.”

As the virus spread around the world, so did Colijn’s efforts to fight it. She wore many hats, including as part of the BC COVID-19 Modelling Group and as a member of Canada’s Chief Science Advisor’s expert panel on COVID-19.

Colijn provided advice to the BCCDC, while the Public Health Agency of Canada relied on her team for COVID-19 weekly incidence projections for Canada. During this time, Colijn also mobilized knowledge by giving interviews with major news outlets, including CBC News, the Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail.

She is proud to have played a part in decisions that she believes saved lives. Based on her modelling, she advocated for social distancing measures in British Columbia, for vaccinating high-contact workers first, and for deferring second doses until more people had received their first dose.

The public health work conducted during the pandemic by Colijn and other experts in its Faculty of Health Sciences helped grow SFU’s reputation as a public health hub. The medical school SFU is launching is set to accept its first students in 2026.

For Colijn, what’s most important now is making sure the research infrastructure that was built during the pandemic doesn’t fall by the wayside.

“As the climate changes and human populations get denser, we may see more viruses with pandemic potential,” she says. “So we need to make sure that we maintain strong pandemic preparedness, build the analysis capability, and also build data gathering and data sharing capabilities.”

Colijn is part of a team proposing to unify and strengthen Canada’s pandemic preparedness infrastructure by building up a single, national resource where experts can share knowledge and modelling tools. Data sharing across borders is also still a major challenge, she adds.

“I’m working on those topics,” she says, “and then continuing my own work on the best modelling and analysis tools to understand how pathogens are evolving and spreading.”

Brun: “We’ve learned during the pandemic that helping the public understand science is very important.”

For more than 25 years, Brun built his award-winning career in microbiology in the United States. He completed his education in Canada, then pursued postdoctoral studies at Stanford University before joining the Department of Biology at Indiana University.

“We built probably the strongest group in microbiology, in basic bacteriology, in the US,” Brun says. “One of the best in the world.”

Brun is passionate about multidisciplinary collaboration, which allows him to focus on what he believes he is best at—deepening our knowledge and understanding of bacteria cells. It also enables him to bring in more bright minds to find practical applications.

Brun wanted to return to Canada eventually, but with a “really great position” and “fantastic colleagues” at Indiana University, he didn’t know if that day would come before retirement. But, that day did come: he was recruited by UdeM to conduct his research as a C150, in his “favourite city in the world.”

“Montreal has multiple institutions, a lot of people doing fantastic research,” he says, “and I could easily see building bridges with people doing very different things from what I do, which I’ve always enjoyed.”

At UdeM, Brun runs a 15-person lab that studies the basic mechanisms of bacterial behaviour and their evolution. The work is amping up our understanding of bacterial growth, reproduction, cellular organization, adhesion and aging.

We’re at an important moment for bacteria research, he explains, with a rapid increase in the number of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. Brun’s lab is studying two promising targets for developing new antibiotics: bacterial cell wall synthesis, and bacterial adhesion to surfaces.

Recently, Brun assembled a pan-Canadian research team of 15 professors that includes Yoshua Bengio, the computer scientist considered one of the “godfathers of artificial intelligence” (AI). Their newly funded research project combines ultrarapid microscopy methods to get rich data sets for training machine learning models to predict new antibiotics. The results could help develop faster responses to future pandemics.

“What the C150 program has enabled me to do is take risks and go in new directions,” says Brun. “Having this opportunity to explore risky avenues happens rarely in a career, and it can bring good things.”

Brun also credited the C150 program with giving him more capacity for public outreach and knowledge sharing.

“We learned during the pandemic that helping the public understand science is very important,” he says, “but we don’t usually have time to do it, because we’re so busy writing grants and papers and teaching.”

Brun is particularly proud of The Poetry of Bacteria, a public conference he produced with the Society for Arts and Technology, in Montréal. He worked with graphic artists and a theatre director to create a fully immersive experience in a dome with a 360-degree spherical projection screen. It ran for two weeks in April 2022.

“It’s about how bacteria are cool—what do we know about bacteria, what do they do? Not the bad things, the good things, because it’s a minority of bacteria that infect us. In fact, bacteria are extremely important for our health. And the public was amazing,” he says. “There were kids, like 7- and 10-year-olds asking questions afterwards.”

Brun is thrilled to pass his own sense of wonder about bacteria on to the next generation and see where it can lead.

“I’ve always been a manufacturer of knowledge,” he says. “That, of course, provides all this important background for people to develop applications.”

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Keywords

• Public health
• COVID-19
• Bacterial Cell Biology
• Infectious diseases
• Data sharing
• Antibiotics
• Machine learning
• Pandemic preparedness
• Microbiology
• Mathematics for Infection, Evolution and Public Health