Lara Boyd, Associate Professor, Department of Physical Therapy and Jennifer Gardy, Associate Professor, School of Population and Public Health are among twelve members of UBC who have been named B.C.’s most influential women of 2018: Stem Stars by BC Business. This honour is bestowed upon women who have made vital contributions to science, technology, engineering and math in B.C.
Dr. Boyd is also a neuroscientist and a Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Motor Learning. She is leading the effort to understand what therapies positively alter patterns of brain activity after stroke. Her group uses a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation to map changes in brain activity. Her studies are among the first to comprehensively examine the patterns of brain activation as they relate to motor learning and parameters of practice after stroke.
Dr. Gardy is a Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics and is in the emerging field of communicable disease genomic epidemiology – using whole-genome sequencing of bacterial and viral pathogens to understand outbreak and epidemic dynamics. Much of her research focuses on tuberculosis (TB), with particular interest in using genomics as a tool for improving TB service delivery in B.C. She is also an occasional host of CBC’s The Nature of Things.