In this episode, medical student and researcher Vaidehee Lanke shares what large provincial datasets reveal about opioid use disorder, maternal mental health, and pregnancy.

Armed with data, she hopes better support —before, during, and after birth—can change outcomes for mothers and babies.

Lanke spent her summer working with epidemiologist Dr. Nadeem Muhajarine and the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit on a pan-Canadian project tracking opioid use in perinatal populations across five provinces.

"The question we set out to answer was: What is the association between opioid use disorder and perinatal mental health conditions?" Lanke said. Opioids in excess are linked to maternal death, stillbirth, and poor fetal growth.

Using hospital discharge records, ambulatory care data, and physicians' billing data from 2016-2024, Muhajarine's team is assembling a provincial cohort of pregnant patients to study when, and how often opioid use disorder and mental health challenges collide.

"It's like that critical thinking piece, like how to look at massive amounts of data and make sense of it," said Lanke, who earned her masters in epidemiology at McGill before returning home to Saskatoon to attend medical school.\

"Sometimes [with code] you're poring over it, and it's like that little comma or like, you know, semi colon, that makes all that difference."

Lanke calls strong public health the 'backbone' of medicine. She sees computational biology as a way to pinpoint when and where to intervene more effectively with high-risk mothers and infants.

"This was a dream project for me, because it brought together all my different worlds," she said.

As an undergraduate student, Jack Walther's friends often come to him when they need a listening ear, or help with with relationship struggles.

This summer, Walther took his fascination with the brain and mood disorders to Dr. Darrell Mousseau's psychiatry laboratory, learning to untangle some of the tiny molecular threads that might explain why depression so often shows up alongside dementia.

Walther and the research team dug into the physical interactions between serotonin and the beta amyloid peptides that build up in patients with Alzheimer's disease. .

He admits going from the classroom to the laboratory was a sharp learning curve.

"It was totally different," he said. "It's daunting once you get onto it, but once you get going, it makes a lot more sense and you feel way more comfortable."

Using human embryonic kidney cells, Walther and lab staff used cross-linking chemicals to literally 'catch' proteins interacting.

In this episode, Walther recalls the day Mousseau hustled into the lab, results in hand.

"I could see the excitement in his face and it just made kind of the lab buzz a little," said Walther. "We found there is actually some kind of physical interaction between these beta amyloids and the serotonin receptor."

Mousseau's laboratory is narrowing down biochemical events common to depression and Alzheimer's disease, looking for modifable targets in the depressed brain that could slow or delay the onset of the neurodegenerative disorder.

Walther said being part of that laboratory work felt 'incredible'.

"I want to bring some good into this world," he said. "I would like to focus on people that struggle to help themselves. Whether that's neurodegenerative or it's people that are just stuck in place and don't know what to do."

He aims to earn his honours degree in neuroscience, then keep pressing on.

"Whichever way that takes me, that's when I'll be happy with what I've accomplished," Walther said.

Eve Simpson knows from experience scientific research doesn't always follow a linear path.

In the first of three student research episodes, the fourth-year biochemistry, microbiology and immunology student looks back at a summer spent decoding Eastern Equine Encephalitis Virus (EEEV) in Dr. Anil Kumar's lab.

Simpson said she loved doing bench research, but felt frustrated in the moments where she hit setbacks and moments of doubt.

"I felt like I was letting everyone down," she said. "But everyone I spoke to said they'd been through that. It's part of being a researcher. That's what drives us to do better and keep being curious and learning."

Simpson realized those failures still tell researchers what doesn't work, and provide data for the greater scientific community.

She is now pursuing her honours degree, and plans to return to Kumar's laboratory as she looks at graduate studies, driven by curiosity and a commitment to public health.

"I want to do better. I want my research to help people and I want to do better for the world," she said.