Bringing global health home: Interview with Dr Bhooma Bhayana

Dr Bhayana is a family physician in London who also works with the London InterCommunity Health Center (LIHC) and the Newcomer Health Project, a Schulich initiative. She graduated from the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1985, after which she worked in Toronto for 5 years. She is fluent in English, Hindi and Punjabi, and utilizes all 3 in her community work with recent immigrants and refugees. We met with Dr Bhayana over the phone to hear her thoughts on global health, to understand her involvement with multicultural initiatives and to gather advice for medical students interested in global health

Championing rural medicine: Interview with Dr Ken Milne

Dr Ken Milne is an emergency department physician, Chief of Emergency and Chief of Staff at South Huron Hospital Association in Exeter, Ontario. He has been an advocate for advancing the practice of rural medicine throughout his career. Originally from a farm just outside of London, Dr Milne completed both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Western University before attending medical school in Calgary. He returned to Western in 1997 for family medicine training and began his medical career in Goderich, where he currently resides with his wife and 3 children. In addition to being a clinician, Dr Milne has been conducting research on rural medicine for the last 17 years and helped establish what is now Discovery Week, an integral part of the Schulich School of Medicine’s first-year curriculum. He is also the creator of the knowledge translation project “The Skeptic’s Guide to Emergency Medicine” (SGEM), which disseminates evidence-based information online so patients can receive the best care. We met with Dr Milne over Google Hangouts to talk about his colourful career, the unique aspects of rural medicine and the challenges he faces working in a remote location

Switching (bio-) adhesion and friction in liquid by stimulus responsive polymer coatings

Controlling (bio-) adhesion and friction is essential in many bio-medical and industrial applications. Such control can be achieved using stimulus responsive polymers. Coatings composed of these polymers are able to adapt their physicochemical properties to changes in the surrounding environment, such as temperature, light, pH, electronic and magnetic fields. This responsive behavior can be employed in the development of advanced technologies as for example underwater adhesives, self-adhering wound dressings, soft robotics and targeted drug delivery. In this review, we present an overview of the current status of research on controlling adhesion and friction in liquid environments using surface-bound stimulus responsive polymers. We focus in particular on polymer brushes and the role of specific interactions between the surfaces in the contact. These interactions can give rise to complex relations between swelling of the polymer film and its tribomechanical properties. A careful characterization of the change in specific interactions upon varying the environment is, therefore, critical for the design of effective smart coatings. We will finish this review with an overview of the open questions in the field and a discussion of the potential impact that the polymer-based smart adhesives and lubricants can have on industry and society