Multiple myeloma is the second most common type of blood cancer mostly affecting the elderly. Myeloma patients are often treated with chemotherapy and sometimes by bone marrow transplants. While the existing chemotherapy treatments work and maintain remission, there is still no cure for multiple myeloma. Current drugs or treatment approaches create undesirable side effects. An important goal of myeloma research is to find new treatments that not only improve patients’ survival, but also their quality of life.

HOME-RL (the Housing, Mobilization, Engagement & Resiliency Lab) conducts community-based, high impact research on the role that housing, social services, and community programming plays as fundamental contributors to social, physical, and mental wellbeing.
 
Currently, our largest project is the Maritime Community Housing & Health Initiative. This project has a few different components, but we are currently focusing on the first and largest phase of the study that explores the impact of publicly funded housing initiatives (rent-geared-to-housing and rent supplements) on mental health, wellbeing, and resilience in low-income households. We want to answer the question: do public housing affordability interventions promote wellbeing in low-income households? To do this, we are surveying people who are waiting for housing every 6 months for 18 months. Once they receive the affordable housing intervention, we survey them as part of an intervention group at 6 month intervals for an additional 18 months. By doing this, we can compare the mental health and wellbeing of people waiting for affordable housing interventions with that of those who have received them and see if there are any differences.  

While not a research project, the recent launch of the University of New Brunswick’s Bachelor of Health program was another demonstration of the interdisciplinary collaborations that continue to thrive at the Tucker Park campus. The new four-year undergraduate program is unique in Canada, and just welcomed its first cohort of twenty-plus students this September.

With continued improvements in medicine, more cancer patients are becoming cancer survivors than in the past. The question that we asked in this study was, are there long-term effects of a cancer diagnosis on a survivor’s overall physical and psychological health? How are factors, such as social connectedness, resilience, anxiety, and depression, influencing psychological well-being (for example, people’s perception of happiness) and physical wellness (energy, fatigue, pain, and so on) in people who have been diagnosed with cancer?

The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, is a respiratory illness that has had disastrous consequences around the world. In order to slow the spread of the virus, governments have implemented numerous social isolation and disease containment policies, including the Government of New Brunswick. The aim of our project is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 and the associated government response measures on the mental health of residents of New Brunswick through administration of an online survey. Additionally, we are interested in looking at how different demographic factors influence mental health and attempts to access support for mental health issues.