Author Archives: Dr. Dawn M. E. Bowdish

Post-doctoral Position Available in Immunosenescence (position filled April 30,2010)

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Have you ever wondered how we age?

Would you like to build your career exploring the immunology of aging?

An immediate post-doctoral opportunity is available for a creative scientist with a strong commitment to excellence and innovation in science to pursue leading edge research in human immunology. The position is in the Department of Pathology & Molecular Medicine at McMaster University located in the heart of the Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario.  McMaster University has been ranked as one of Canada’s most research intensive universities known for it’s highly collaborative and mentoring atmosphere.

The research area focuses on understanding the immune changes associated with aging, with a particular emphasis on the role of immunosenescence on the ability of human monocytes and macrophages to respond to Streptococcus pneumoniae. In conjunction to these studies methodological work on identified biomarkers will be carried out and tested using samples from clinical outcome studies.

This position also provides the opportunity to engage in Canada’s largest cohort study on aging. The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) (www.clsa-elcv.ca) is a national longitudinal study of adult development and aging that will follow 50,000 Canadians between the ages of 45 and 85 years at baseline over a 20-year period. Data will be collected every 3 years through interviews and 30,000 participants will also have a clinical assessment and collection of biological samples creating a national biobank and research platform.

Two enthusiastic researchers, Drs. Cynthia Balion and Dawn Bowdish, will supervise this position. In addition, the post-doctoral fellow will work with experts spanning the research continuum from discovery, to epidemiology, and translational science.

Interested candidates should send a CV, cover letter and three references to Dr. Dawn Bowdish (bowdish@mcmaster.ca, www.bowdish.ca).

We’re back online (2010-02-26).

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A calamity at the company who does our web hosting took us offline for a week, but it was gratifying to hear from so many people “Hey, did you know that your webpage is down?”.  We now know that the website is being looked at! As a teaser for our followers: it’s been a week of many lab developments, which will be posted after this next grant deadline (March1st).

The Bowdish lab recieves CFI funding

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The Bowdish lab has received CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) funding for infrastructure for her project “Drug development in a post-antibiotic world”. This infrastructure grant ($350,000) will allow her to build a new tissue culture suite, purchase new molecular biology equipment, upgrade the facilities at the high throughput screening lab and Biophotonics unit, all of which will be required to accommodate her expanding lab and to allow her to discover novel “immunomodulators”, that is drugs that enhance the immune response and fight infectious disease.
See the article on McMaster’s Daily News here and in the Hamilton Spectator here.

Congratulations to Alex, Harikesh & Zhongyuan for their poster award!

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The Bowdish lab undergraduates, Zhongyuan, Harikesh & Alex, co-presented their poster entitled “Your Mama’s so phat, even a macrophage couldn’t engulf her” at the IIDR Opening Symposium and won best undergraduate poster. Don’t let the title fool you, this was a very serious piece of work on their characterization of MARCO expression & function. Below is the excerpt from the IIDR website.
11-28-2009 poster winners

Dawn to talk at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering, Nov. 26, 2009

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I am looking forward to presenting some recent, unpublished data at the Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster. This will be a very different audience than usual but I suspect that there will be many overlapping interests as macrophages are involved in biopolymer and nanoparticle recognition and detrimental host responses. Below is the title & abstract of the talk.

Macrophage scavenger receptors: role in adhesion, uptake & migration.
 Macrophages are tissue-resident white blood cells that are essential for detection of pathogens, clearance of modified host products and recognition of foreign bodies. Macrophages recognize both host and foreign ligands via surface expressed receptors. The result of this recognition may be a pro-inflammatory response, phagocytosis, or differentiation & adhesion. Although macrophage responses are essential for host defence and tissue homeostasis, they can also be detrimental when the macrophage is unable to clear foreign particles such as implants or environmental and synthetic particles. The scavenger receptors are macrophage receptors that have the unusual capacity of recognizing modified self proteins, pathogens and foreign particulates. We aim to determine how these receptors transmit signals to the cell and how this signaling affects macrophage adhesion, phagocytosis & endocytosis (uptake) and migration.