George and his peers received a group award for the Best Project in the SPA 2019 grant-writing section.
The Summer Program in Aging (SPA) is an annual event organized by the CIHR Institute of Aging. This year SPA was held in Estérel, Quebec, and was centered on the topic - "Geroscience: A novel interdisciplinary approach for research on aging". Zhuang (George) Han, a Biochemistry Master's student in Dr. David Westaway's lab, won a CIHR travel award to attend the retreat and was one of two trainee representatives from this university.
George's research project aims to investigate why genetically programmed neurodegenerative diseases do not manifest until later life. His experiments presented at the SPA conference concern a potentially neurotoxic protein called Tau and how its toxicity might be accentuated by cellular aging induced by a protein called lamin-A.