Assistant Professor
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia
– Canada
Panenka is an early career clinician-scientist with extensive expertise in human TBI. He is both a neurologist and psychiatrist with fellowship training in TBI with a particular focus on TBI neuroimaging. He was recruited in 2013 by the Department of Psychiatry and UBC, tasked to develop a clinical research program in TBI. He founded the Neuropsychiatry concussion clinic at UBC, and he is the medical and research lead of the Fraser Health Concussion clinic, the busiest concussion clinic in the province of BC. Panenka has several active research projects that stem out of his concussion clinics, with local hockey organizations, as well as multiple ongoing collaborations at the local, national, and international levels.
He has gained national recognition for his work in mental health and TBI and was recently appointed to lead the British Columbia arm of a Brain Canada, national, multisite initiative termed “A National biobank and database for patients with traumatic brain injury ( CAN-TBI)” The BC portion of this grant is just over 1 million dollars and Dr. Panenka’s team is currently the top recruiting arm of this national study which focuses on phenotyping and longitudinally following individuals with all severities of head injury from Canada’s level one trauma centers.
Panenka was recently funded via a CIHR project grant “Characterization of Traumatic brain injury as a contributor to chronic neuropsychiatric and neurocognitive impairment in a marginally housed population” to study the consequences of TBI in a large cohort of homeless and vulnerably housed individuals in Vancouver. This follows on the CIHR funded (March 2014, 1.06M, PI William Honer) grant entitled “Neuropsychiatric complications of co-morbid illness in people living in marginal housing” which is the foundational study to Dr. Panenka’s recent grant; it is longitudinally evaluating over 300 vulnerably housed/homeless youth and adults with extensive neuropsychiatric assessments, neurocognitive phenotyping, and multimodal MRI. Panenka has published over 10 manuscripts on this cohort since 2013. Salient findings from this work include a nearly five-fold mortality rate compared to the general population, mental illness in 74%, and a rate of psychosis of 48%. The first descriptive paper was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and was selected for mention as the 2013 Highlight by Editor Robert Freedman (PMID: 23929175) and more recently Panenka published the first associated TBI focussed paper in J. Neurotrauma (PMID: 28741437) and was a contributing author to a recently published JAMA psychiatry article examining fentanyl use in this population (PMID: 29387869).
Thursday, November 7
11:35 AM – 11:45 AM