Grant: Tr. Grant: Health Research Training Platform - Vascular Cognitive Impairment

More than 400,000 Canadians are living with dementia; two thirds of them are women and many come from vulnerable portions of our society including Indigenous communities and persons with lower socioeconomic status. There is a growing understanding that diseases of the heart and blood vessels put the brain at risk for dementia. To turn this knowledge into actions to prevent and treat dementia by improving vascular brain health, Canada must train a large workforce with the skills to discover new medicines, test them in people, leverage 'big data' approaches, identify the social determinants of vascular brain health, and address the adverse health impacts of structural racism. We will create a Platform to train this workforce. Much of the Platform will be online and openly accessible to learners at all Canadian educational institutions. We will match learners to mentors, leveraging a deep pool of 72 participating mentors from diverse backgrounds. To lessen the barriers imposed by structural racism, we target learners at an early stage from diverse communities following principles of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusiveness. Indigenous communities and elders will be empowered to develop the modules relevant to vascular brain health in Indigenous communities, supported by our technical expertise. The output of our Platform will be a new generation of innovators skilled in methods to promote vascular brain health, who will populate the academic, non-profit, for-profit, healthcare, and government sectors to enhance our ability to prevent dementia.