UBC Human Kinetics student Chris Willie receives prestigious awards

Chris Willie is pursuing a PhD in Human Kinetics at UBC’s Okanagan campus. He has just received the prestigious Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Chris Willie, a Human Kinetics PhD student at UBC's Okanagan campus, has received the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS), worth $35,000 per year over three years. The CGS is offered to the top-ranked applicants to enable them to fully concentrate on their studies and seek the best research mentors in their chosen fields.

Willie is also the first student at UBC's Okanagan campus to be recognized with a UBC Killam Doctoral Scholarship, which is among the most prestigious graduate awards in Canada, given to the top doctoral candidates at UBC.

"These awards are not solely reflective of my achievements, but rather they indicate the high standard and impact of research being produced here," says Willie. "Not only will they enable me to focus on progressing my own research interests, but over the next three years the CGS and Killam scholarship will continue to facilitate global collaboration between UBC's Okanagan campus and top scientists and clinicians worldwide."

Under the supervision of Associate Professor Phil Ainslie, the awards will support Willie's research on better understanding the integrated mechanisms regulating human cerebral blood flow in health and disease. In other words, how blood flows to the brain in a variety of different clinical populations.

Willie notes a significant portion of Canadians die from, or live with, diseases that are directly or indirectly caused by improper blood flow the brain. Stroke alone is the third leading cause of death in Canada.

"The better we understand how blood distribution is regulated in the brain, the better equipped we are to improve treatment and develop preventative options," he says.

Other recognition Willie has received over the past few months includes a Canada Graduate Scholarship - Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement (CGS-MSFSS) of $6,000 to support his current research in Perth, Australia, where he is carrying out an interventional study with a group of more than 100 healthy elderly people with and without dementia.

He is also the principal author of three major studies, one of which appeared this March in one of the world's top clinical journals, Hypertension.  Titled Neuromechanical features of the cardiac baroreflex following exercise, the study provides new insights into the mechanisms that control blood pressure before and following exercise in healthy people.

The other two research papers, both published in Neuroscience Methods, provide the first detailed review and guidelines in the use of ultrasound for the assessment of human brain blood flow, and novel information about blood delivery to the brain during exercise, respectively.