Ryan Heistad is a 2015 graduate of Saskatchewan Polytechnic's Bioscience Technology program (formerly SIAST), and currently works as a research technician in the Cell Signaling Laboratory (PI: Darrell Mousseau).  His work consists of further examining the effect that clinically relevant antidepressant drugs face on Alzheimer disease-related pathology.  His work is based on cell culture as well as in vivo animal-based studies, but has recently started to include assays based on the Caenorhabditis elegans model.  he provides support to some of the post-doctoral researchers in the Mousseau group, but also helps with training of students.