Matiram Pun
Graduate student - PhD
Contact information
Biography
About me
My interest in mountain medicine and high-altitude illness pathophysiology brought me to the University of Calgary since it has a graduate program dedicated to the field. Being born and raised in the mid-hills of Nepal, I trekked extensively in Nepal Himalayas. I got enthused with the high-altitude hypoxia and its consequences to the human body during my medical school days.
Currently, my focus is on sleep-disordered breathing, especially obstructive sleep apnea; i.e., intermittent hypoxia in the controlled laboratory environment. Next, I am studying the effects of acute, subacute, and chronic exposure to very high altitudes. I am interested in both low landers going high altitude as well as permanent residents of high altitude.
My research
My supervisor is Dr. Marc Poulin (Human Cerebrovascular Physiology Laboratory). My area of research is sleep-disordered breathing and high-altitude hypoxia.
In the past, I have been involved in the clinical trials for high altitude illness preventions, drug therapeutics, and clinical case management. Similarly, I have been involved in acute gas challenges (breathing gas mixtures) to study human integrative physiology. I am interested in teasing out the mechanistic insight of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) pathophysiology using a healthy human model of OSA; i.e., experimentally induced intermittent hypoxia. I am also interested in exploring mechanisms and ways of mitigating the negative consequences of very high altitude exposure on sleep, breathing, and neurocognitive functions.
BRAIN CREATE program aspirations
I would like to participate in a high-altitude expedition to conduct experiments, especially involving improving the work and the safety of high-altitude workers and permanent residents. I would also like to do collaborative research with international researchers for the hypoxia and sleep-disordered breathing mechanistic studies.
I would be interested to learn about data science and programming to some extent. I believe these skills are necessary to advance our research and interpretation.
Commercialization
I would like to test new physiological and clinical devices (new prototypes) at high altitudes and validate against gold-standard techniques currently employed. Similarly, I would like to explore off-label drugs' potentials in both high-altitude illness prevention and sleep-disordered breathing. The new devices or software, as well as off-label drugs, have tremendous potentials for commercialization.
Publications
Awards
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Research Award (2022)
Alberta Innovates Graduate Student Scholarships for Data-Enabled Innovation (2020)
Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship (2020/2021)
NSERC BRAIN CREATE Graduate Scholarship (2020)
University of Calgary Dean's International Doctoral Recruitment Scholarship (2019/2020)