This June 30, 2021 marks the retirement of Dr. Jane Roskams from the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Roskams has been a core member of the Zoology Cell Biology group, iCORD and the Brain Research Center. She holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Neuroscience from Penn State College of Medicine, a Bachelor of Science from the University of Wales (Swansea) and a Master’s in communications from the University of Idaho. Prior to joining UBC, she was an IRTA fellow at the NIA, and held NIH Post-Doctoral Fellowships in Neuroscience and Neuropathology at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Dr. Roskams first joined UBC in 1997 as an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry, at the Center for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics. She later (2000) became an Asst Professor in Zoology, and progressed through the ranks to Full Professor in 2004.
Jane Roskams’ highly successful research program was centered on understanding cellular and molecular mechanisms of neural development that could be manipulated in the context of brain repair after injury, and in neurodegenerative disease. With a core focus on using the olfactory system as a key model for understanding brain plasticity, her research covered a broad range of areas – including stem Cell Biology, Gene expression informatics, spinal cord injury, epigenetic regulation of nervous system plasticity, and mouse and human glial cell biology. Dr. Roskams has published in the best journals in the field including Nature, Cell, Neuron, PNAS and Molecular Cell, and her research has been funded by the MRC/CIHR, NIH, Brain Canada, and a number of international foundations based in the UK, Austria, Switzerland, and the US. The impact of her research is reflected in almost 6000 citations of her 70 research publications. Perhaps even more impactful early in her career was her contribution as an editor and writer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories’ landmark “Genome Analysis – a Lab Manual” Series, and as a developmental editor of At The Bench, At the Helm, and LabRef – books that can be found in thousands of labs throughout the world, which have been translated into several different languages.
Throughout her career Jane has been a passionate advocate for inclusivity, and diversity in STEM, serving on multiple committees at UBC, at CIHR, and in international organizations on the status of women and minorities. She has been deeply involved in undergraduate and graduate education and mentorship within and beyond UBC. She founded the UBC Mentor center in 2005 – finding partner mentors for High school and undergrad students - and has served on steering committees for the Neuroscience, Experimental Medicine and CELL grad programs. Dr Roskams has trained and mentored over 100 undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have advanced onto careers in the Academy, Medicine, Government, Pharma and the Tech sector. Dr Roskams has received multiple awards for teaching and research, and appointed to leadership roles in international research organizations (International Brain Research Organization, FENS, Dana, INCF, Society for Neuroscience). She has received both National (CIHR’s Synapse award) and International (Society for Neuroscience Bernice Grafstein Award; IBRO’s Teaching Award) recognition for mentorship of students and colleagues alike. She was recently awarded Penn State’s highest achievement – their distinguished alumnus award.
Beyond Zoology, Jane played an integral role in the development, expansion and funding of UBC’s Brain Research Center (now Djavad Mowafaghian Center for Brain Health), and in the early development of a UBC Undergrad program in Neuroscience. Dr Roskams also served as Associate Principal at the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, working across Faculties of Medicine, Science, Arts and Applied Science to develop, fund, and recruit into new interdisciplinary centers and programs (e.g Genome Sciences and Technology, Resources Environment and Sustainability, Fisheries, Human Early Learning Partnership), and set up transparent and equitable governance and management systems. She also oversaw the re-organization, expansion and funding of all of CFIS’s interdisciplinary graduate and postdoctoral training programs.
In the last decade, Dr Roskams’ work has been increasingly focused on Open Science, Open Data and Citizen Science, which was detailed in her recent TED talk. A former advisor to the US BRAIN initiative, from 2015-2018 she took extended leave of absence from UBC to become Executive Director of the non-profit Allen Institute in Seattle working on their strategic expansion into three Institutes – for Brain Science, Cell Science and Immunology and their Frontiers external funding program. She has served on policy advisory committees for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine for Enhancing Diversity, Data Sharing and NextGen Neuroscience training She also advised the Obama Office of Science Technology Policy on enhancing STEM diversity, Open Data and Citizen Science, and has testified to both Parliament Hill (Ottawa) and the US Congress and Senate to advocate for scientific funding and policy. Dr Roskams led the development of the non-profit Brain Commons - for the sharing of PTSD data across multiple countries, and -whilst serving on an advisory for Gov. Jay Inslee - was integrally involved in developing the Cascadia Data Alliance, focused on developing pathways and pipelines to enable interoperable data sharing collaborations between BC and Washington State.
Returning to UBC in 2018, Dr Roskams became the Western lead for the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP), a Brain Canada-funded interoperable platform across Canada combining neurological and neuropsychiatric disorder data from humans and animal models with digital health and informatic and analytical tools. She developed and heads the CONP’s Scholar training program – funding and training students and postdocs in collaborative neuro-informatics projects across Canada, and serves on the Board of Directors for two different CFREF programs – Healthy Brains Health Lives (at McGill),) and BrainSCAN (at Western). She also serves on the Executive governing committee of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF, at the Karolinska Institute), where she has led the development, funding and expansion of a global online free Training Space in brain data science – a user-directed training environment of open analytics and open data lessons and hands-on workshops. Rather than actually “retire’, Jane will continue some of this work from Seattle, where she has an affiliate appointment in UW Neurosurgery, and co-leads the expansion of Mozak, a Citizen Science game for reconstructing the brain from multiple sources of imaging data, to develop enhanced algorithms to accelerate brain discovery. She will maintain an adjunct affiliation with UBC, as she continues to work on projects focused on brain health and ‘real world evidence” data for dementia, and youth anxiety and depression, in the non-profit sector.
If you ask Jane what she is most proud of, she would tell you without hesitation that beyond all the people she has trained and coached,– top of that list is her own children who grew up at UBC daycare centers, working on UBC volunteer projects and playing all of their sports on UBC’s fields. Dylan (BSc, MA, LLM) is a Lawyer and the Open Science Alliance Officer for the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute, Breeshey is a quantitative biologist at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Center, just beginning her PhD in Machine Learning at the Turing Institute’s HDRUK program, and Makalo – a gifted athlete and comedian, currently tossing up between a future in the NHL vs. SNL, whose favorite thing in the whole world is to make everyone laugh.
We wish Dr Roskams a wonderful retirement!