Dr Lari looks into an enclosure containing a turtle
Dr Ebrahim Lari in CSB’s aquatic animal facility (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Congratulations to Dr Ebrahim Lari of Professor Leslie Buck’s lab, who has been awarded a prestigious NSERC Banting Fellowship, the first to be awarded to a CSB post-doctoral fellow. His research investigates the mechanism of anoxia tolerance in cells of western painted turtle .

Professor Buck explains that “In the short term, Ebi’s work is focused on discovering the cellular mechanisms that permit vertebrate cells to survive days to months without oxygen. In the long term, it has clear clinical implications for the protection of human tissue from low-oxygen damage — for example, during or following a heart attack or stroke.”

With the help of the Banting award, Dr Lari says his plan is to push his current research to another level. “Most of our research to this point has been on excitable cells like those found in the brain,” he says. “But now, we’ve also started looking at non-excitable cells and how they tolerate low levels of oxygen.”

Read more about Dr Lari’s voyage to our department and his research at: https://uoft.me/LariBuckBanting