Dr. Leigh Anne Swayne
Director, Professor
School of Medical Sciences
- Contact:
- Office: MSB 329 lswayne@uvic.ca 250-853-3723
- Credentials:
- BSc (Guelph), PhD (Calgary)
- Area(s) of expertise:
- Cell biology of neuronal and cardiomyocyte structural and functional plasticity as it pertains to neurodevelopment, neurological disease, and aging. Relevance to neurodevelopmental disorders, neurodegenerative disease, brain inflammation associated with infection, brain injury, stroke, cardiac arrhythmias, and structural heart disease. Key expertise in microscopy and protein biochemistry techniques.
- Related links:
Introduction
Dr. Swayne is the Director of the School of Medical Sciences (SMS), where she has been a full Professor since 2022. She trained as a cell biologist and neuroscientist, completing her BSc in Biological Science at the University of Guelph, and a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Calgary. Following postdoctoral studies as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Montpellier (France), and Vision 2010 Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa (Canada), she joined the SMS (known as the Division of Medical Sciences until 2025) as an Assistant Professor in 2011. Dr. Swayne was a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar from 2014 to 2019.
Research
The Swayne Lab studies molecular and cellular aspects of brain and heart health using a combination of advanced microscopy (including live and fixed confocal and super-resolution microscopy), classic cell biology, as well as discovery-oriented omics and bioinformatics. On-going projects centre around environmental and genetic factors regulating heart and brain cell structure and function in health and disease. These range from the impacts of inflammatory mediators, dietary and microbiome related molecules on synapse stability, to the roles and properties of pores for ions and metabolites in membranes, known as ‘channel’ proteins, and their signaling networks, as well as their impacts on synapse stability and cardiomyocyte development.