Dr. Lena Palaniyappan wins the 2025 Royal-Mach-Gaensslen Prize
The Mach-Gaensslen Foundation of Canada is happy to announce that Dr. Lena Palaniyappan is the winner of the 2025 Royal-Mach-Gaensslen Prize, sponsored jointly by the foundation and the University of Ottawa Institute for Mental Health Research at The Royal.
“Prevention is the Holy Grail” for serious mental illnesses such as psychosis and schizophrenia, says Palaniyappan. Targeting prevention to the young people at risk and understanding how these serious illnesses start and affect people is the aim of his research, conducted at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal.
“These illnesses start really early, in adolescence or sometimes even in childhood,” he says. “So any intervention has to start really early.” Finding the people at risk and putting methods in place to prevent psychosis is important, he says. Factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic have worsened youth mental health in general and are expected to result in more psychosis in future.
“If we can even delay these illnesses by five or ten years” patients would benefit, he says. Young people could grow to be adults, completing schooling, finding a spouse and so on, and be better equipped to cope with any mental illness.
Palaniyappan has recently brought together people with lived experience of mental illness as well as advocacy groups to create the Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health. He is one of Canada’s and the world’s top schizophrenia researchers, constantly conducting and publishing studies with new insights into the disease.
These include his studies of the “rich emotional signals” in human speech, which may help predict psychotic episodes. He is also using powerful magnets (7-Tesla imaging) to measure chemicals in the brain. For example, 7-Tesla scanners can show the neurochemical glutamate in the brain, which may help researchers determine how it affects certain symptoms of psychosis.
But all of his work is grounded in the experiences of patients and their families and communities. At the Centre of Excellence, all research is discussed with councils representing young people and their parents, who guide the research. “We pick the [research] questions that are dear to the hearts of patients and families.”
Palaniyappan’s achievements will be celebrated at the Royal-Mach-Gaensslen Prize event January 29, 2026, at The Royal in Ottawa. For more information, see The Royal’s website.
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