Search

As a physiotherapist, Laura has primarily worked in adult brain injury since 2011. Her teaching focus is physiotherapy foundational clinical skills and applied neurological injury/illness rehabilitation; and her research focus is interventions for adults with persistent symptoms post concussion/mild traumatic brain injury. She has consulted with WSIB Ontario on mTBI Program of Care revision, presented at See The Line concussion symposium, and taught physiotherapist instructors across Canada about concussion/mTBI rehabilitation for the National Orthopaedic Division of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association.

Dr. Diop graduated from University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal) where he also completed an MSc in physics under the supervision of Prof. Ahmadou Wague. In 2004 he was awarded a PhD degree in Physics from Laval University (Quebec) for his work on 3D Colloidal Photonic Crystals, under the supervision of late Prof. Roger A. Lessard. He then joined the group of Dr. Rod Taylor at the Institute for Microstructural Sciences of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC, Ottawa) for a 2-year postdoctoral position to work on optical trapping of cells. In 2006 he moved to London (Ontario) to take a 2nd postdoctoral position in the group of Dr. Keith St Lawrence at the Lawson Health Research Institute (LHRI). Two years later, Dr. Diop became a Research Associate then a LHRI Research Scientist in 2013. His work at LHRI has led to significant technological advancements, including a method that can continuously monitor absolute cerebral blood flow and oxygen metabolism at the bedside. Dr. Diop is also an assistant Prof. in the department of Medical Biophysics and the school of Biomedical engineering at Western University where he leads the Translational Biophotonics Lab.

My research employs molecular biology to understand the pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease. Early in my career, I studied the mechanisms of chromatin dynamics, which have broad implications in the influence of the environment in conditions such as diabetes and smoking. I later helped characterize how transcription factors and microRNA direct cardiovascular differentiation and how perturbations of these mechanisms are implicated in cardiovascular disease. My interest in stem cell biology attracted me to Joseph Wu, MD, Ph.D. at Stanford, to learn more about human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) disease modeling endothelial dysfunction.

Advances in next-generation sequencing, bioinformatics, and gene editing make it possible to decipher SNPs contributing to cardiovascular disease and disease-specific transcriptome profiles. More precise diagnostic biomarker-based tests could be developed with a deeper appreciation of an individual’s molecular signature. Additionally, personalized medicine could emerge from iPSC disease and advance precision medicine.

As a recently appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario, I am now an independent physician-scientist conducting research using iPSC disease modeling that I developed at Stanford University. My research focuses on cardiovascular disease modeling to 1) investigate the effects of the environment on the vasculature, 2) discover biomarkers to risk stratify cardiovascular disease, and 3) discover druggable target genes for cardiovascular disease. The overarching goal of my research is to use iPSCs to understand mechanisms underlying the relationship between inherited factors and how environmental stress, such as diabetes, e-cigarettes, and marijuana, sensitize an individual to exacerbated cardiovascular disease. The discovery of these gene and environment interactions will facilitate the identification of high-risk individuals who could benefit from therapy that alters disease trajectory. In the future, iPSC disease modeling could guide the discovery of sm! all molec ule agonists or inhibitors that could be used as personalized medical therapy for cardiovascular disease.