FUNDING
Thank You!
Through your taxes and donations, you make our work possible and we want you to know that we appreciate it. Below, you can see what agencies fund our research and how we put those funds to good use.
CIHR
Through its operating grant programs, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is Canada’s largest and most important national funder of both fundamental and applied health research. We are currently funded through an operating grant that pays for reagents, mice, our portion of shared facilities, and lab staff salaries.
NSERC
Through its Discovery Grant program, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) funds creative and innovative research with the long-term goal of generating new knowledge and discoveries. Funding from this program helps to support personnel and operating costs for our projects investigating the control of immune activation. The NSERC Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) program has also funded important equipment purchases and upgrades, including upgrades to our multiphoton confocal microscope.
MSSOC
The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada (MSSOC) is a very important funding agency and is largely responsible for the strength of MS research in Canada. They have funded our research in different ways from the very beginning. Dr. Kerfoot returned to Canada with the aid of the Garrett Herman Transitional Career Development Award, which helped complete his post-doctoral training and fund the opening of his new lab. The MSSOC has also contributed operating funding that supported the early development of our research models, and has supported several of our trainees. Currently, the MSSOC funds our work through an operating grant that helps to pay for personnel and operating costs for projects investigating B cell contributions to autoimmunity.
Western
BrainsCAN
Schulich
Internal funding programs from Western University and Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry have been essential for starting new programs in the lab, as well as initiating new collaborations to expand the kinds of research we do.
Funding from the Western BrainsCAN program is helping us to partner with the MS clinic, MR imaging, and behavioural researchers to explore mechanisms leading to cognitive disfunction in chronic autoimmune disease.