Welcome to the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology

As the largest basic science department in the Cumming School of Medicine, Physiology and Pharmacology and its members represent six of the School's seven research institutes - the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases, the Libin Cardiovascular Institute, the Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute, the McCaig Institute for Bone and Joint Health, and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute for Child and Maternal Health.

The strength of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology lies in our outstanding faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows and students, all of whom take pride in a strong commitment to excellence in research and education. The mission of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology is guided by core values of respect, integrity, and responsibility. The Department is strengthened by diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, and promotes a positive and productive environment committed to the principles of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. Our members actively engage in a culture that addresses barriers faced by equity-deserving groups including women, indigenous peoples, visible/racialized minorities, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQ2S+.

In fulfilling our mission, the Department supports the mandates of the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, as well as the Office of Indigenous Engagement and the Indigenous Strategy [ii’taa’poh’to’p].

On behalf of our department, you are invited to explore our website. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you wish more information.

Congratulations

to our members, Dr. Vaibhav Patel, Dr. Grant Gordon and Dr. Antoine Dufour for their success in the 2024 CIHR Spring Competition.

Congratulations

to Dr. Keith Sharkey who was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. The RSC recognizes outstanding scholarly, scientific, and artistic achievement; elected by their peers, it is the highest honour an individual can achieve in the arts, social sciences and sciences.

Congratulations

to Dr. Kathy McCoy and Gerald Zamponi, the recipients of the Cumming Research Award

Dr. Andrew Leidal is the most recent faculty recruit to the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology at the University of Calgary. He received a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Dalhousie University, and then went on to pursue postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). His research focuses on a cellular “self-eating” process known as autophagy, and how stresses including viral infection, protein misfolding and oxidative damage can cause this pathway to “regurgitate” material outside the cell in the form of extracellular vesicles and particles (EVs). Ultimately, his work aims to define the mechanistic underpinnings and physiological impact of autophagy-dependent secretion as it relates to inflammation and immunity.

In his career, Dr. Leidal has helped redefine autophagy as an important non-cell autonomous regulator of cell fate decisions and tissue microenvironments. His doctoral thesis work was amongst the first to implicate autophagy in the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, a process that is cytoprotective in the context of infection and which viruses subvert to facilitate their replication. Then as a postdoc, he developed a novel secretome profiling strategy that would uncover a previously unrecognized role for the autophagy machinery in specifying the cargoes that are packaged into EVs for secretion outside the cell. Together, these discoveries helped describe autophagy as an important pathway for intercellular communication.

As Dr. Leidal establishes his new lab at the University of Calgary, he seeks to train the next generation of scientists in cell biology and illuminate novel functionality of the multifaceted autophagy pathway.

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Publications