Dr. Lena Palaniyappan wins the 2025 Royal-Mach-Gaensslen Prize

Dr. Lena Palaniyappan tells the story of a young man with schizophrenia, well controlled by medication, who was having difficulty in job interviews. The young man’s father told Palaniyappan that “it wasn’t the voices [the young man heard], it wasn’t the paranoia, but it’s the way he interacts that gives away that he is struggling.”

It is such sharing with patients and their families that has led Palaniyappan to conduct research on psychosis using innovative approaches. As both a clinician and a researcher, Palaniyappan can take the concerns of patients and their carers into his research, and take research results to the patients.

In this case, the conversation with the young man’s father led Palaniyappan in a new direction. He started looking at the way people with psychosis express themselves or have difficulty doing so. Today, Palaniyappan and his team research how a person’s language can predict psychosis onset or episodes. For example, he talks about a mother of a young person who can tell when an episode is imminent because of subtle changes in the way the young person talks.

Looking at psychosis from new angles

Palaniyappan, a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and a professor with McGill University in Montreal, is the winner of the 2025 Royal-Mach-Gaensslen Prize in Mental Health Research. A prize ceremony was held at the Royal in Ottawa January 29, 2026. During an interview with guest moderator and former CBC newscaster Laurence Wall, Dr. Palaniyappan discussed his work to prevent and predict psychosis, which can affect people as young as in their early teens.

He is one of Canada’s and the world’s top schizophrenia researchers, constantly conducting and publishing studies with new insights into the disease.

“You can’t prevent what you can’t predict,” he said. “The brain has its way of keeping its secrets. What markers can you use to predict psychosis?”

In addition to people’s speech, Palaniyappan is using cutting-edge imaging to see what is going on 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.

Centre of Excellence

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.

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.”

The Centre is also involved in the community. “We sometimes separate health from social care, but we shouldn’t,” he said, discussing the need for housing, employment and other social supports. In terms of prevention, it is also important to “go to the streets,” he said, to identify people at risk before they ask for help. He said mental health treatment should have a community presence. The Centre of Excellence has such a presence, working with community partners and making presentations in the community.

The future

Psychosis is often thought of as a lifelong disease, but Palaniyappan talks optimistically about a cure. He made the analogy to the stigma that people with leprosy once suffered — a stigma he witnessed during his early life in India. Once the disease was understood and easily treated, the stigma against leprosy disappeared alongside the disease. Similarly, he says, the end to stigma against psychosis will be achieved when a cure is in sight.

Personalized approaches help treat depression

Translating the findings from clinical trials into tools that clinicians can use to help make decisions about treating depression — that’s the goal of research by Dr. Helena Kim, a postdoctoral researcher with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the University of Toronto.

There’s a gap between the growing discoveries from mental health research and how these discoveries are applied to patient care, Kim says. Decision-making algorithms (called “decision trees”) can help pinpoint which treatment changes can help which patients. This approach is often called “personalized medicine,” and it is being used in many areas of patient care. With Kim’s research, treatment of depression joins the list.

Her research is funded through the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation Fellowship in Mental Health, Addictions and Cognitive Health, awarded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). She has completed the first of two years of research.

The fellowship was a good fit for Kim’s patient-oriented research, whereas other CIHR grants are focussed more on basic research. “This is another example of how the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation of Canada can make a difference,” says Dr. Christopher Carruthers, chair of the foundation’s board. “We can fund research that is critical and immediately applicable in the clinical setting but doesn’t fit existing categories for other research funding.”

Applying research results in patient care

Kim looks at studies with data sets consisting of patients with depression. Findings from the studies — about risk factors, the success of treatment approaches, and outcomes — can give physicians guidance on how best to help their patients.

“There are different predictors for different dilemmas and different patient groups,” says Kim. This is why the existing “rules of thumb” may not provide the best answers. “There is no one-size-fits-all,” says Kim.

To date, Kim has developed three decision trees for “hard-to-treat” or “complex” depression.

The first drew from a study of more than 1300 adults with major depressive disorder who didn’t see much improvement even after four weeks of treatment with an antidepressant medication. The decision tree answers questions such as, should the treatment continue longer? Should the dose be increased? Or should the patient switch to another antidepressant?

The research showed that a few clinical factors predicted the effectiveness of staying on an antidepressant, increasing the dose, or switching to a new drug. Among these were better or poorer physical health and post-traumatic stress disorder. Looking for such predictors can help clinicians make the best choice to help their patients.

Another tree helps decide the best approach for patients with major depressive disorder who also drink alcohol often (“at-risk” drinking). Drawn from a study that included more than 140 patients with both problems, it looks at which is best — care from a single physician or “collaborative care” with non-physicians providing additional care over the telephone.

The decision tree indicates which type of care is suited to which patients. The number of drinks the patient is taking per week emerged as a factor in the decision.

Her third decision tree involved patients who have depression late in life and are not responding to an antidepressant. Such patients are at risk of suicide or can lose their ability to function in daily life. Thus, the aim is to help them improve quickly, before depression takes a toll.

The data for this decision tree were from a study of 742 patients in whom different medication regimens were tried. It looks at such questions as, does adding one of two antidepressants studied to the first drug improve outcomes? Or does switching to another antidepressant work better?

How many drugs the patient had already tried proved to be a factor in deciding whether to add a drug to the patient’s regimen or switch to a new drug. The patient’s age and severity of depression (determined by a commonly used questionnaire) also had an effect on the decision to add a drug or switch.

Kim says decision trees are simple to use, easily deployable, and scalable. They can be incorporated into day-to-day practice to help clinicians make well-informed decisions. And, of course, they can help relieve depression for patients effectively and quickly.

The research agenda for next year

During the second year of her fellowship, Kim plans to develop more decision trees, this time for non-drug treatments. She will draw from a study of psychotherapy for depression during the period before and after childbirth, as well as studies of brain stimulation techniques, including repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and theta burst stimulation (TBS).

She also wants to incorporate “biomarkers” into decision trees. Biomarkers are a patient’s biological differences, such as a genetic difference or the way they metabolize drugs, usually determined by blood tests. The effect of biomarkers on responses to medications has been explored in previous research.

Once she has designed decision trees, Kim’s next step is to test how feasible and useful they will be in clinical practice. But that’s a story for her next research grant.

For more details about the research and decision trees, see Dr. Helena Kim’s presentation.

A new survey will help find and fill gaps in communities’ ability to help those at end of life and their caregivers

To improve the experience of death and dying in Canada — both for those at the end of their lives and for their caregivers, friends and family — we need to build knowledge and support services in their communities. But where should we devote time and money to best help people?

Answering this question is the purpose of the Death Literacy Index (DLI), a survey to understand many aspects of people’s skills, knowledge and awareness around death and dying (“death literacy”). The survey was designed in Australia and first released in 2020, as part of the “compassionate communities” approach to foster communities’ ability to provide palliative and end-of-life care.

The survey has been adapted for use in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, China and Turkey to date.

Now, it’s being adapted to the Canadian context, thanks to funding from the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation of Canada.

“It’s a significant tool in helping an individual or community identify their gaps in what they know about death and dying,” says Dr. Nick Busing, who is on the board of Compassionate Ottawa, the project’s sponsor, and an emeritus professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa. The survey shows whether respondents know about resources in their community or have experience at the bedside of someone dying, among many other aspects. “Institutions like hospitals could use a tool like this to understand where their employees are in relation to death and dying,” he mentions as an example.

“At the moment, we don’t have anything as a measure of death literacy in Canada,” explains Christine McPherson, a psychologist, nurse and associate professor at the University of Ottawa, who is leading the research.

As a result, she says, there’s a gap when organizations try to find ways to improve people’s knowledge and skills. Information to fill this gap can help guide policy, allocate funding and determine whether efforts to improve death literacy are effective.

“For example, do we put more money into advance directives?” she asks. “The survey will show where the gaps are — what people know, what they don’t, and what support they still need. For example, do we know how to plan for serious illness, to make sure our wishes are known? Do we know what funeral directors do? Do we know what palliative care is and how to access it?”

“This work fits well with one of the three key areas of focus of the MGF — mental health,” commented Dr. Ian Arnold, a director of the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation of Canada. “Increasing our society’s ability to understand the key factors that affect how we deal with and react to the end of life is essential to managing this often-difficult life transition. This will make this transition easier for the individual dying, their family, and their friends and communities.”

Project progress

Adapting a survey is a complex process. McPherson says many steps are needed to ensure that the survey “actually does what it’s supposed to do.” On the one hand, Canada has similarities to countries like Australia, Ireland and the UK, where the survey is being used, such as our publicly funded universal health care system. But we have differences as well, such as medical assistance in dying and different provincial policies affecting palliative and end-of-life care. Canada’s communities are often very diverse, encompassing cultures with varying attitudes and approaches to death and dying.

These observations come from a pilot study on whether the DLI would be clinically useful in Canada. The team asked Canadians familiar with a public health approach to end-of-life care about the DLI. Respondents said the survey had potential if it were modified to the Canadian context.

To modify the survey, first, an advisory group was formed to interpret the findings from the pilot study and two subsequent consultations and apply these to a new Canadian version of the DLI. Several members of Compassionate Ottawa are serving on this group.

The next phase involves interviews with Canadians from diverse backgrounds, asking them to look at and comment on the original DLI survey. This phase is designed to determine the relevance of the survey’s content and its sensitivity to cultures that may have different values, beliefs and practices concerning death and dying. As of October 2025, recruitment of participants for these interviews has started.

A partner in these phases is the Canadian Hub for Applied and Social Research, a support and consulting service at the University of Saskatchewan. The hub recruits participants and collects and analyzes data.

With the information from the interviews about the survey’s relevance and sensitivity in hand, the advisory group will start to modify the survey for Canada. The first draft of a modified survey will be tested with a sample of Canadians to ensure the questions, response options and instructions are clear to users. Based on this testing, the survey will be further modified.

Once that phase is completed, the survey will be rigorously tested in a larger sample of Canadians and the responses analyzed.

In adapting a survey like the DLI, “you want the tool to measure what it’s supposed to be measuring and to ensure it’s accurate in measuring that,” often referred to as “validity,” McPherson says. It’s also important that a survey is reliable in measuring across different people and groups — that is, it measures people’s skills, knowledge and awareness in a consistent way.

Survey open for use across Canada

The researchers plan to release the finalized survey freely on the website of the University of Ottawa, so that anyone in Canada can use it. The team will also present the survey to academic audiences and grassroots organizations. “We want to get it out there so people can use it,” says McPherson.

The ultimate goal, says McPherson, is “trying to make sure people have knowledge, skills, awareness before something happens and it becomes a crisis.”

“Too often we avoid talking about death, dying and bereavement until it happens to us.”

Compassionate Ottawa will start using the survey when it’s ready, say McPherson and Busing.

“An organization like Compassionate Ottawa could use the survey results to target some of our interventions or workshops,” says Busing.

Even community organizations may not fully understand the community’s needs, says Busing. “We may have blinkers on. We don’t have the entire picture. So that’s what we need to fill in.”

He believes the survey will help groups like Compassionate Ottawa to do that. He foresees “ongoing, continuous needs assessment for the community related to these critical issues around death and dying,” for the benefit of caregivers and the entire community.

20th anniversary of the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation’s Student Grant Program

2025 marks the 20th year that the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation of Canada has provided grants to medical undergraduates to help them with their earliest forays into research.

“The grants  support medical students to help  introduce them into the world of scientific research,” said Dr. Chris Carruthers, chair of the Foundation’s Board of Directors. The grants were designed to foster research skills among future physicians, sparking the next generation of physician-researchers.

They help the universities involved as well. “The grants also tie in with medical schools to support their research initiatives,” Dr. Carruthers said.

The program started in 2005 with seven of Canada’s medical schools signing on. Today, all 17 medical faculties benefit from the program.

By the numbers

To date, the Student Grant Program has helped 1,466 students with their summer research projects, with total grant funding totalling just under $6 million — a level it will surpass this year.

The projects funded were in psychiatry, cardiology and oncology — the areas of research that the foundation’s founders, Vaclav Mach and Dr. Hanni Gaensslen, targeted in establishing the foundation. Of the total projects funded, 625 were in oncology, 466 were in cardiology and 368 were in psychiatry (the specific area for seven early projects was not recorded).

Understanding the grants’ impact

“Once the program was up and running, the Board of Directors decided to capture the program’s relevance to its grantees. Karen Petticrew joined the foundation as a research coordinator to administer the program and launch this feedback effort,” said Dr. Ian Arnold, vice-chair of the foundation. “From the beginning of the research support program, we used questionnaires that would assist us to understand the value of this approach over time. Students agreed to participate every 5 years in this longitudinal prospective study, and we will soon be looking at 20 years of follow-up data.”

Arnold developed forms and questionnaires for the participating students to gauge the program’s impact on students’ understanding of and involvement with research, as well as to track their satisfaction with the grants.

Students complete questionnaires before and after their research project, as well as a survey to evaluate their satisfaction with the grant. The students’ progress is followed with questionnaires at five-year intervals after their experience to learn the long-term effects of the program.

Petticrew captures is information, analyzes it and reports it to the foundation’s Board of Directors regularly.

In 2017, the foundation, with several members of the Clinicial-Investigator Trainee Association of Canada, conducted an analysis of the students’ surveys, published in the Journal of Investigative Medicine in 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1136/jim-2016-000348). The data showed that the vast majority of students participating went on to publish at least one paper, and most were very satisfied with the experience.

A minority of participants went on to consider a full-time research career, but most recognized the importance of research in their medical education and of incorporating research into their future medical practice.

Lead author Dr. Branavan Manoranjan, who later joined the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation’s Board of Directors, says, “The Mach-Gaensslen Foundation’s Student Research Program is a unique funding opportunity for medical students engaged in clinical or basic science research. It provides essential funds to support and nurture the curiosity and development of Canada’s next generation of clinician-scientists. Financial resources to support trainee-led research remains a major obstacle for students to pursue additional research training in an already prolonged training path as a clinician-scientist. The ability for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation to step up and support the academic pursuits of medical trainees is not only deeply valued but also a call for federal funding agencies and NGOs to support the training of clinician-scientists.”

Appreciation for the foundation’s support

“The program has been a success over the years we have supported it,” said Dr. Carruthers.

Petticrew said she is heartened by the positive feedback she hears. “Over the 17 years that I have been coordinating the Student Grant Program, I have regularly received expressions of gratitude for the funding from the student grant recipients and thank you’s from the medical schools for supporting medical research at their universities.”

In 2014 and 2021, the foundation surveyed the deans of the 17 medical schools about their satisfaction with the program. “Responses showed a high regard for the program and appreciation for support to their students,” said Petticrew.

Following the first 20 years of success with the program, the Mach-Gaensslen Foundation of Canada looks forward to continuing to instill an appreciation for research among tomorrow’s physicians.