March 26, 2025
330PM to 500PM
Join us for a compelling session on how social adversity—emotional stress, loneliness, financial insecurity, and childhood hardship, may accelerate cardiovascular (CV) aging and disease. This interdisciplinary study leverages research on free-living primates to uncover biological mechanisms linking social stress to CV health.
Why Attend?
With an aging population, CV disease is an increasing health and economic burden. While many causes are well known, studying the independent effects of social adversity on CV health in humans is challenging due to various confounders (e.g., diet, pollution, inactivity). However, research on primates—who share similar biology and structured communities—provides valuable insights. This session will explore findings from a new collaboration with the Caribbean Primate Research Centre, integrating social ecology, genomics, and immunology.
About Health After 2020
This session is part of the Health After 2020 program at UBC Health. Health After 2020 enables researchers to engage in interdisciplinary and cross-institutional projects that support, challenge, and improve health producing systems. These collaborations are intended to respond to the broad effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and further our understanding of the determinants and experience of health and wellbeing.
| Speaker | Organization | Biography |
| Tony Dawkins | University of British Columbia | Tony’s postdoctoral research is centered around cardiovascular remodeling in health and disease. Using non-human primates as a model, one stream of Tony’s postdoctoral research examines how the social environment influences cardiovascular health and aging, and explores the underlying mechanisms, with the ultimate goal of informing human health research. |
| Erin Siracusa | University of Exeter | Currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter, U.K. Erin is working with Dr. Lauren Brent, Dr. Noah Snyder-Mackler, and Dr. James Higham to study the causes and consequences of age-based changes in social behaviour using a free-living population of rhesus macaques. We are interested in how this 'social aging' affects other morphological, physiological and demographic patterns of senescence to gain a better understanding of the role that social relationships play in the aging process. |
| Robert Shave |
University of British Columbia |
Dr. Shave is known for his work examining the acute and chronic effects of exercise and/or environmental stress upon the heart. Using echocardiography and biomarkers Dr. Shave and his colleagues have provided insight to the beneficial and potentially negative effects of endurance exercise upon the heart, the influence of exercise on cardiac remodeling and the ventricular mechanics that underpin cardiac function in health and disease. Recently, Dr. Shave established the International Primate Heart Project to examine heart disease in great apes and to provide insight into the evolution of the human heart. Dr. Shave’s work will continue to combine comparative and experimental physiology approaches to further understand structural and functional cardiovascular adaptations to exercise in a range of populations with a specific focus on human evolution and the potential of cardiovascular mismatch disease. |
| Lauren Brent | University of Exeter | Within societies, not all pairs of individuals have the same relationship - some pairs are friends, some are foes, some share little other than living in the same group or population. My research asks when and why this structure arises, sets out to quantify the consequences variation in social ties has for the health, aging and fitness of individuals, and attempts to determine the adaptive function of social ties. |
Event Details
March 26, 2025
3:30pm to 5:30pm
RHS 257 & Online
UBC Okanagan
Kelowna, BC, CA
V1V1V7