Dr. Tania Lam
Professor
School of Kinesiology
Faculty of Education
Dr. Lam has always been dedicated to helping others. Even as a child she planned for a medical career, and after considering Médecins sans Frontières and beginning a clinical therapy practice, she realized that the most effective way for her to help people was through research. She is particularly interested in the human walking gait and its relationship with the nervous system. At present, she and her team of researchers are examining the ways that information is communicated through the body during walking and mapping those results against the nervous system to benefit people with partial SCI.
Dr. Lam is a Principal Investigator at ICORD and an Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia. She completed her B.Sc. at Queen’s University and her Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Alberta. Her Post-Doctoral Fellowship was at the University of Zurich.
While most people believe that the spinal cord is the sole conduit for information, researchers like those in Dr. Lam’s laboratory are aware that the entire nervous system is involved in distributing and passing information, particularly during complicated physical activities such as walking. This means that with the right kind of encouragement, alternative pathways for passing information can be developed and reinforced, so that patients can actually improve their ability to walk.
Dr. Lam particularly appreciates the opportunity to interact formally and informally with researchers from different disciplines, and with a wide variety of research goals and methods. While her group has a focus upon therapeutic rehabilitation, they also contribute strongly to the basic science behind neuroplasticity. At the same time, they work with social researchers to discover how therapeutic outcomes can be enhanced by efforts made in the community. From robotics experts to neuroscientists, from qualitative researchers to computer programmers, Dr. Lam is constantly invigorated and challenged by the cross-discipline community of ICORD
