Reach 2025: Research Advances
Beyond Boundaries
A year of breakthroughs in science and innovation
By Abeer Khan
Illustrations by Maya Nguyen
From unveiling a groundbreaking method to predict dementia to potentially revolutionizing electronics, CIFAR researchers have pushed the boundaries of innovation this year. Here are some of their most exciting discoveries:

Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities
White-nose syndrome has devastated several North American bat species over the past 18 years. The syndrome is caused by an invasive fungus called Pseudogymnoscus destructans, which infiltrates the skin of hibernating bats and causes them to become more active than usual. This increased activity burns up the fat they need to survive winter and ultimately leads to starvation and death. How the fungus initiates its infection has largely remained a mystery until now. Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities Fellow Bruce Klein and Marcos Isidoro-Ayza, a PhD candidate at Klein’s lab, have been able to study how the fungus gains entry and covertly hijacks cells' keratinocytes at the surface of bats’ skin. This discovery offers new hope to better understand white-nose syndrome and save North American bats, who are facing an existential crisis.
Gravity & the Extreme Universe
The CHORD (Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector) radio telescope, which is currently under construction, installed its first dish in January 2025. The project, which involves Gravity & the Extreme Universe Program Director Victoria M. Kaspi and Fellows Matt Dobbs, Ue-Li Pen, Ingrid Stairs and Kendrick Smith, will help address some of the most fundamental questions in science, such as the evolution of the universe, its composition, the origins of Fast Radio Bursts and the validity of Einstein's General Relativity on the largest scales. CHORD builds on the success of Canadian radio telescope CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) and will be the world's most advanced fast radio transient detector, providing maps of large-scale structure and galactic emissions with unprecedented precision.
Humanity’s Urban Future
For centuries, the media has advertised the future, from architectural plans to glossy magazine depictions of modernity. But how do these images emerge, and what role does the past play in shaping them? At the “Imag(in)ing Urban Futures” workshop in Mexico City, members of the Humanity’s Urban Future program examined how diverse media – films, television, newspapers and AI – shape our urban imagination. This workshop inspired a forthcoming paper on this topic by Co-Director Simon Goldhill and Fellows Julie-Anne Boudreau and Roger Keil that aims to stimulate research and conversations about the urban future, driving engagement to better transform it.
Quantum Materials
Led by Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, a Quantum Materials Fellow, MIT physicists have created a transistor using a ferroelectric material that could revolutionize electronics. Ferroelectric material is a special crystal that can spontaneously generate positive and negative charges within itself and these charges can be flipped by applying an electric field. The material used in this advance, which the team discovered in 2021, is ultrathin and separates positive and negative charges into different layers. The transistor is remarkably durable and can survive 100 billion switches, making it the most resilient device ever. The ultrathin transistor could open the floodgate to deliver high-speed, energy-efficient electronic devices and denser computer memory storage.
Brain, Mind & Consciousness
As part of an international research team, Adeel Razi, a 2021-2023 CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Brain, Mind & Consciousness program, has discovered a new method for predicting dementia with over 80 per cent accuracy and up to nine years before diagnosis. The newly developed test analyzes functional MRI (fMRI) scans to detect changes in the brain’s “default mode network” (DMN). The DMN connects brain regions to perform cognitive functions, and is the first neural network that Alzheimer’s disease affects.
Child & Brain Development
Child & Brain Development Fellow Paul Frankland and a team of researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto have found that stress significantly impacts how the brain encodes and retrieves negative memories. To test whether stress impacts memory specificity, the researchers trained mice to associate one sound with stress and another sound with no stress. The results found that acute stress prevented mice from forming specific memories, instead leading to more generalized memories encoded by more neurons. These findings can be applied to applications to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.
CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human
Several researchers in the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human program, including program Co-Director Sarah Teichmann and members Muzlifah Haniffa, Aviv Regev and others, published a new update on the Human Cell Atlas Consortium in Nature. The new findings include mapping all the gut’s cells, producing a blueprint of human skeletons in utero, mapping the molecular architecture of the placenta, and more. Since its inception in 2016, the Consortium has aimed to create a complete biological map of human cells to better understand how the body works – in both health and disease.
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