Age: 39
Occupation: Pediatric neurologist and Assistant Professor, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary
A question from a patient’s grandmother changed the trajectory of Mary Jansen Dunbar’s career. The woman asked if her granddaughter, who was in utero and had a brain injury, could still have a good life.
Dunbar, a pediatric neurologist, didn’t know what to say. The answer depends on a person’s concept of a good life, and there are many gaps in knowledge about brain injuries in children.
So Dunbar embarked on a mission to help give evidence-based information to families about perinatal strokes or other forms of brain injury in children and infants, including those still in utero.
“When I talk to families, they want answers grounded in science and compassion, not judgment and ableism,” she says.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dunbar finished her second master’s degree at the University of Calgary in clinical epidemiology, focusing on perinatal stroke (her first was in neuroscience). She did it while working from home with a toddler and an infant who was born in the first wave of COVID-19. Dunbar’s husband, also a physician, was working in the ICU.
Today, Dunbar divides her time between seeing patients and running a research lab dedicated to perinatal brain injury research. She established an Alberta-wide fetal neurology clinical research program and invented a simple device that makes collecting fluids from spinal taps easier, greatly increasing diagnosis success rates. After patenting her product, she made it available free of charge.
Dunbar has developed first-of-their-kind tools to help predict the risk of cerebral palsy and strokes in babies, and her work has shown that some brain injuries in newborns, previously believed to be caused by delivery, actually happen before birth. She also discovered that male babies are twice as likely to have symptoms of stroke recognized early compared to females — Dunbar and her team are trying to figure out why. “Our work can contribute to the worldwide advancement of care for fetal brain disorders,” she says. “That’s something I’m really excited about over the next five years.”
Thank yous
“My parents, Don Dunbar and Judy Jansen, and brother Max Dunbar; my husband Braedon McDonald and my children Frances and George McDonald; my family in-law, Eric McDonald, Debbi McDonald, Cameron McDonald and Meghan Engel; my mentors and colleagues in Calgary, especially Dr. Adam Kirton, Dr. Michael Hill, Dr. Aleksandra Mineyko, and Dr. Patrick Whelan; the UBC pediatric neurology residency program; my nominators and champions Dr. Fiona Clement, Dr. Kirsten Fiest, Tanna Giroux, Dr. Antonia Stang; and all the patients and families for entrusting me with their care and their stories.”
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