Roy Golsteyn is an associate professor of biology and an Alberta Ingenuity faculty member at the University of Lethbridge. He is an example of the growing numbers of faculty who conduct world-class research while maintaining a teaching schedule that brings that research into the classroom.

He directs the Cancer Cell Laboratory where his team studies the problem of how cancer cells escape a cancer treatment. The majority of cancer patients in Canada will receive some form of treatment, such as chemotherapy or radiation, and unfortunately these treatments are not as successful as we would like them to be.

To improve them, we need to understand all the steps that occur after a treatment. Golsteyn's research team has developed a new experimental system that uses microscopes and special biological tools to study how cancer cells react to treatments. They have found that after a treatment, cancer cells will divide one more time, a "double-or-nothing" gamble called checkpoint adaptation that may produce cells that are resistant to future treatments.

Golsteyn's laboratory studies checkpoint adaptation in collaboration with biotechnology companies and the pharmaceutical industry, with the goal of helping doctors improve treatments for cancer patients.