Highly motivated students are encouraged to contact dkane@stfx.ca about potential research opportunities

Research Interests

Think back to the last time you quickly ascended a long flight of stairs, or otherwise exerted yourself. What happened? Why did it take time for your breathing and heart rate to return to baseline? Clearly, tasks of physical effort lead to acute physiological change. Some of these changes, repeated over time, can even result in an adaptive response, a training effect. Going beyond improvements in performance, per se, both the acute and chronic changes that occur with exercise are now recognized to constitute stimuli for the many collateral benefits of exercise to health. Repeated daily for a year, those same stairs would likely pose less of a challenge to ones physiology at the end of that year. The heart would pump blood more effectively, and the muscles would better resist fatigue. Much as a callous forms on bare feet, so does the body adapt to the tasks of physical effort. Nearly all the acute and chronic effects of exercise that manifest in the health benefits increasingly appreciated by the medical establishment, occur to a large degree at the cellular/molecular level. My primary research interests are focused on elucidating these mechanisms accounting for the biological consequences and health benefits of exercise.