Bayer and CVN Award Research Fellowships to 2 Pulmonary Hypertension Specialists

Bayer and the Canadian Vascular Network (CVN) recently announced the winners of a joint research fellowship that provides recognition and financial support to outstanding Canadian physician-researchers with an academic interest in pulmonary hypertension (PH).

The recipients are Dr. Jason Weatherland, a respirologist and clinical assistant professor at the University of Calgary, and Dr. Don Thiwanka Dilshan Wijeratne, a Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) specialist and assistant professor at Queen’s University. The fellowship, whose dollar range was not disclosed, offers winners funding for a final year of training, or salary support to a clinician-researcher in the initial five years of a first staff appointment.

“Bayer is an organization driven by our mission, science for a better life, and the research fellowship is another shining example of how we put this mission into practice,” Dr. Shurjeel Choudhri, Bayer’s senior vice president and head, medical and scientific affairs, said in a press release. “We know that supporting future researchers and scientists in the area of pulmonary hypertension will fuel innovation, improving the lives of Canadians.”

CVN, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), is a multidisciplinary network of researchers across Canada, launched by the government as part of a coordinated strategy to evaluate and resolve specific challenges in the area of vascular health.

The organization represents Canada’s first comprehensive initiative to bring researchers and others together to tackle vascular diseases in certain priority areas. One of these areas is integrated research, an approach based on the development of multi-disciplinary research projects – including the identification of early warning signs of vascular disease (like dementia), and improvements in how vascular disease is measured and treated. Other priority areas for CVN is capacity generation and training, with the goal of developing a new generation of researchers and clinicians focused on integrated approaches through their involvement in network research and in specialized training programs; and knowledge translation into practices and policies for integrated treatment and research approaches.

“On behalf of the CVN, we are thrilled that this year we were able to support two outstanding young investigators,” said Dr. Duncan Stewart, scientific director at CVN. “This is an exciting time for PH research and we look forward to working with the 2016 Fellows.”