Pathology PhD

Sabateeshan “Saby” Mathavarajah, a PhD student in the Department of Pathology and a recipient of Dalhousie’s inaugural Killam International Research Award, has recently had his international research collaboration profiled in Dal News.

Mathavarajah worked with Dr. Ingo Braasch, an expert in genomics and aquaculture at Michigan State University… Mathavarajah’s research centres on how immunity present in an animal’s body from birth can affect the development of tumours and offer insights into how to treat them.

Mathavarajah, whose studies at Dalhousie are supervised by Dr. Graham Dellaire, travelled to Dr. Braasch’s Michigan laboratory for the lab’s unmatched species sample bank, to expand his research on the PML gene in tissue regeneration.

“The Braasch lab is one of the only labs in the world with established, consistent access to the spotted gar [fish] and they were the first to sequence the organism,” [Mathavarajah] says. “Having access and being able to study the role of PML directly in the organism revealed the new insights on its function in tissue regeneration that we would not have known otherwise.”

The collaboration produced a paper published in The Journal of Experimental Zoology-B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution.

Read the complete profile on Dal News.