Two new research chairs for Memorial

Dr. Priscilla Renouf

This past year, Memorial became home to two new Canada Research Chairs. One is focused on viral hepatitis / immunology and was awarded to Dr. Thomas Michalak, Faculty of Medicine, the other, a chair in North Atlantic archaeology, was awarded to Dr. Priscilla Renouf, Archaeology Unit, Department of Anthropology. Both chairs include $200,000 per year for salary and research support.

"The Canada Research Chairs program will help Memorial strengthen its research programs and help us solve problems of major importance to the citizens of our province and country. I have no doubt that the investment by the Government of Canada in the Canada Research Chairs program at Memorial University will be repaid many times," said Dr. Axel Meisen, president of Memorial.

"The Canada Research Chairs program will help us recruit and retain outstanding academic leaders during a period of tremendous international competition for faculty," said Dr. Christopher Loomis, Memorial's acting vice-president (research and international relations). "The two new chairs just announced are top-level researchers and leading scholars in their academic fields." The North Atlantic archaeology chair will enhance and build upon existing links between the Archaeology Unit and other universities, agencies and research groups. This chair involves site survey and excavation of campsites and settlements of ancient hunting and fishing peoples and reconstruction of past settlement patterns and the past environment.

"This research is important for understanding Newfoundland's 9,000-year history of human occupation, and placing that culturally diverse prehistory in the context of a changing environment," Dr. Renouf explained. "More broadly, this research is important nationally because it reconstructs part of the past of Canada's indigenous peoples and tries to understand their strategies for living and flourishing in a northern environment."

	Dr. Thomas Michalak

Dr. Renouf has been an active field archaeologist for many years, working on sites in Port au Choix, on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula. The new Parks Canada museum at that national historic site is based largely on her work. Her research was also an integral part of the Newfoundland Museum's Full Circle: First Contact travelling exhibition, which tells the dynamic story of the first European and native interchange on the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. The viral hepatitis / immunology chair involves the immunological, molecular and pathological aspects of both hepatitis B and hepatitis C.

"My research will centre on understanding how the virus induces liver disease, how it evades the immune system, and how it establishes persistent infection," said Dr. Thomas Michalak. "Such knowledge will be used in the development of better therapeutic strategies against hepatitis B and hepatitis C."

Dr. Michalak will establish a network of international collaborators and interact with other researchers in the clinical divisions within the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's and with the Immunology and Cancer Research Groups within the university's Faculty of Medicine.

Dr. Michalak has worked in the field of viral hepatitis for more than 25 years and has completed much groundbreaking work, including the establishment of a large colony of Eastern American woodchucks for the study of the woodchuck hepatitis virus, closely related to the virus. The Canada Research Chair will enable Dr. Michalak to continue to expand his research on antivirals and viral hepatitis, and to collaborate with other researchers around the world on the potential development of novel therapeutic strategies and preventive vaccines against hepatitis B and C.