Andrew Ramsook wins $100,000 to study the muscles that breathe
The kinesiology professor, who joined Waterloo in 2025, will build an integrated respiratory testing lab with John R. Evans Leaders Fund money.
Dr. Andrew Ramsook, a kinesiology professor who arrived at Waterloo in 2025, has been awarded $100,000 by the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, part of the Canada Foundation for Innovation. It will pay for instruments that test breathing from the airways and lungs through to the muscles that drive them.
His proposal notes that lung disease is estimated to cost Canadians $24 billion by 2030, with an aging population, wildfire smoke and rising youth vaping among the drivers. Within the respiratory system, only the breathing muscles are known to improve with training, and they can change blood flow, heart rate and blood pressure.
The new lab will help him learn how those muscles signal the rest of the body. Early experiments will look at fatigue in the breathing muscles during and after hard breathing work such as exercise, followed by readings of how active they are, and a final combined assessment of lung size and how well the lungs move oxygen into the blood.
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