Caroline Seiler

Meet Caroline Seiler (she/her), Program Manager for the Weston Family Microbiome Initiative. Caroline is responsible for managing the flagship Proof-of-Principle (POP) program and general program development for the Microbiome Initiative. She holds a PhD in Medical Sciences from McMaster University and a BSc in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Toronto.

Her doctoral research, conducted through McMaster’s Farncombe Institute, explored the role of gluten, wheat, and the nocebo effect in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and was featured as the cover story in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology in September 2025. She also published high-impact meta-analyses on celiac disease and inflammatory bowel diseases and coordinated a second clinical trial in IBS.

After becoming a McMaster-Janssen Diverse Future Leaders fellow, she interned at Johnson & Johnson to support a new product launch and create scientific communications assets for cutting-edge data in the gastroenterology therapeutic area. She also has extensive leadership experience as previous President for McMaster’s Graduate Students Association, where she spearheaded several initiatives benefiting students.

Outside of work, Caroline enjoys ballroom dancing and taking long road trips across the continent.

Weston Family Foundation investing $20 million to advance health innovation in Canada.

Our newest funding strategy to help scale projects with evident potential to have a real-world impact

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TORONTO, ON – September 23, 2025, Launched in 2025, the Weston Family Foundation is making a $20 million investment to scale cutting-edge Canadian research projects at the forefront of innovation. This approach builds on the Foundation’s “Spark, Sheperd, Scale” funding philosophy — supporting innovative ideas at initial stages, then providing significant funding to accelerate the most promising work into real-world impact.

After a rigorous review process, two projects falling under our Healthy Aging Strategy, comprised of the Weston Brain Institute and Weston Family Microbiome Initiative. Each received $10 million in funding. The following scaling investments align with our mission to catalyze innovation in health research:

  • McGill University – Led by Dr. Pedro Rosa-Neto

Project Title: The Next Generation of Biomarkers

Focus: Advancing the next generation of biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease to enable earlier diagnosis, precise monitoring, and more effective personalized therapies.

  • University of Alberta and University of Ottawa – Led by Dr. Heather Armstrong, and Dr. Alain Stintzi

Project Title: Microbiome-Based Precision Nutrition for Optimal IBD Health

Focus: Developing microbiome-based nutrition tools to improve outcomes for people living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

These grants represent our commitment to supporting research that extends beyond initial funding. When early results show promise, we aim to move projects through our funding funnel, allowing teams to expand their scope, speed up progress, and increase the chance of delivering solutions that can reach more people, faster.

By supporting bold, high-risk research at scale, the Foundation creates space for Canadian researchers to tackle urgent health challenges, evaluate new paradigms, and improve lives.

For more information, please refer to the link below:

Our 2024 Recap: the Weston Family Foundation’s Year in Review

August 5, 2025 – 2024 marked a year of meaningful progress for the Weston Family Foundation, and we are proud to celebrate the collective achievements made possible through collaboration with our staff, advisors, grantees, and partners across Canada.

Grounded in our mission to champion learning and innovation in support of the well-being of all Canadians, the Foundation continues to serve as a catalyst for change through its focus on healthy aging and healthy ecosystems. In 2024 alone, the Foundation donated more than $66 million across these funding priorities. This impact reflects the dedication and vision of our entire community, and we are deeply grateful to everyone who made it possible.

This year, instead of a traditional year-end letter, we’re excited to share our first-ever Year in Review video. It offers a glimpse into the work the foundation supports—bold ideas brought to life through collaboration, all with a focus on lasting impact.

“Our work may appear diverse, but it is all aligned under one vision: the well-being of Canadians, this video highlights just a few examples of the progress made in 2024 and the many incredible organizations and individuals we partnered with along the way.” says Garfield Mitchell Chair, Weston Family Foundation 

As the Foundation continues to evolve its funding strategy, these moments serve not just as milestones, but as powerful reminders of the impact of purpose-driven work—and of the Canadians who make it possible.

Watch the 2024 Year in Review video:

Proof-of-Principle 2025: Microbiome-based interventions

Program Overview

The Weston Family Foundation, through its Proof-of-Principle program, funds Canadian scientists performing high-risk, high-reward translational research that leverages the microbiome towards improving human health.

Microbiome-based interventions, such as fecal microbial transplants, probiotics, prebiotics, and fermented foods, have the potential to improve human health. However, while significant strides have been made in the past decade to better understand the microbiome, there are likely several unknown microbiome-based interventions with significant potential for developing live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), preventative strategies, and personalized medicines. Thus, there may be opportunities to manipulate or target the microbiome to improve health outcomes for Canadians. 

The Foundation is pleased to announce the current iteration of this funding opportunity to address these key areas in microbiome research. The Proof-of-Principle 2025 program supports high-impact, scalable projects that use microbiome-based interventions to modulate the microbiome, enhance therapeutic responses, or improve health outcomes.

Eligible projects will be in one of the three priority areas:

  • Intervention: Developing novel therapeutic microbiome-based interventions for treating disease or improving health outcomes in a population.
  • Modulation: Improving patient responses to already existing treatments or therapies by modulating the microbiome.
  • Mechanism: Causally determining how the microbiome relates to a disease to identify new therapeutic targets.

Please refer to the Program Details for a full description.

Funding available per project: Up to $300,000 over a maximum of 30 months.

Important dates:

  • Program information session: May 1, 2025 and May 6, 2025
  • Letter of Intent deadline: June 2, 2025 at 2 p.m. ET
  • Award announcement: October 2025

For more information about this program, including details on project and applicant eligibility, Foundation definitions, program review criteria and expected project outcomes, please see the relevant documents below.

We welcome you to contact us with any program related inquiries. Please send your questions to microbiome@westonfoundation.ca.

Relevant Documents

Watch the webinar about this grant call:

Marcel van de Wouw

Marcel van de Wouw (he/him) joined the Weston Family Foundation in 2024. He is responsible for the oversight of all programming related to the Microbiome Committee.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Marcel researched the link between the gut microbiome with child development and perinatal mental health as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary. Previous to this, he worked as a PhD researcher investigating how microbiome-targeted interventions impact the brain and behaviour using preclinical approaches at University College Cork (Ireland).

Marcel has a BSc in Biology and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience.

Proof-of-Principle

The Weston Family Foundation has been supporting research studying the microbiome for seven years. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest and investment in understanding the role of the microbiome in human health and disease, yet we are only beginning to understand the potential implications of the microbiome in healthy aging.

The Proof-of-Principle (POP) is a funding program, through the Weston Family Microbiome Initiative, meant to provide support of Canadian research efforts on the microbiome, focusing on advancing the application of the microbiome in improving human health. With three funding calls (2023, 2024, and 2025) and for each call, total available funding up to 300,000 over 30 months.

The most recent Proof-of-Principle program funding was announced in 2023: The Microbiome & Precision Nutrition. The human body is host to trillions of microbes. Research suggests that these organisms play important roles in health and disease and have a profound bearing on nutrition.

The Proof-of-Principle 2023: Microbiome & Precision Nutrition program aimed to understand how the microbiome influences the impact of diet on human health with a focus on precision nutrition.

Click each link to learn more about the projects that received funding in 2023 and 2024.

The Proof-of-Principle 2025 program provided research grants of up to $300,000 over a maximum of 30 months to support high-impact projects that seek to leverage microbiome-based interventions to modulate the microbiome, enhance therapeutic responses, or improve health outcomes.

To learn more about the POP 2025 funding opportunity, visit the grant call.

Proof-of-Principle 2025 Grant Call

Stay tuned for more information about the Proof-of-Principle 2025 funding opportunity. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates. 

LinkedIn

Proof-of-Principle 2024: Microbial biomarkers of disease and therapeutic response

Program Overview

The Weston Family Foundation, through its Proof-of-Principle program, funds Canadian scientists performing high-risk, high-reward translational research that leverages the microbiome towards improving human health.

Biomarkers are a critical component of modern healthcare, with diverse applications in disease prevention, detection and monitoring, as well as therapeutic development. They are poised to play an increasingly important role in personalized medicine, providing means to estimate an individual’s disease risk and prognosis, and predict and monitor an individual’s response to a given therapy.

Emerging research suggests that the microbiome is a potentially understudied source for biomarkers that holds significant potential for predicting and understanding individual responses to therapeutic or preventative strategies. Consequently, there may be opportunities to manipulate or target the microbiome to enhance an individual’s response to these strategies. 

The Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of a new funding opportunity to address these key areas in microbiome research. The Proof-of-Principle 2024 program aims to support high-impact projects that seek to identify, validate, or apply microbiome-based biomarkers of disease and therapeutic response.

Eligible projects will:

  • Evaluate compositional or functional microbiome biomarkers.
  • Build on established responder/non-responder phenotypes towards the optimization of therapeutic or preventative strategies.

Please refer to the Program Details for a full description.

Funding available per project: Up to $300,000 over a maximum of 30 months.

Important dates:

  • Program information session:  May 1, 2024 or May 7, 2024
  • Letter of Intent deadline: June 4, 2024
  • Award announcement: October 2024

For more information about this program, including details on project and applicant eligibility, Foundation definitions, program review criteria and expected project outcomes, please see the relevant documents below.

We welcome you to contact us with any program related inquiries. Please send your questions to microbiome@westonfoundation.ca.

Relevant Documents

Proof-of-Principle 2023: The Microbiome and Precision Nutrition

Program Overview

The Weston Family Foundation, through its Proof-of-Principle program, funds Canadian scientists performing high-risk, high-reward translational research that leverages the microbiome towards improving human health.

The human body is host to trillions of microbes. Research suggests that these organisms play important roles in health and disease and have a profound bearing on nutrition. The Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of a new funding opportunity. The Proof-of-Principle 2023 program will support high-impact projects that seek to leverage the microbiome to maximize the health benefits of precision nutrition.

Eligibile projects will:

  • Leverage the microbiome to maximize the benefits of nutrition in people.
  • Evaluate microbiome heterogeneity and how it impacts nutrient metabolism in humans.

Please refer to the Program Details for a full description.

Funding available per project: Up to $300,000 over a maximum of 30 months.

Important dates:

  • Program information session:  June 14, register here or July 5, 2023 register here
  • Letter of Intent deadline: August 1, 2023 apply here
  • Award announcement: November 2023

For more information about this program, including details on project and applicant eligibility, Foundation definitions, program review criteria and expected project outcomes, please see the relevant documents below.

We welcome you to contact us with any program related inquiries. Please send your questions to microbiome@westonfoundation.ca.

Relevant Documents

$8M in funding awarded for crucial brain health research

As part of its commitment to decreasing neurodegenerative diseases of aging and improving the well-being of Canadians, the Weston Family Foundation is pleased to announce nearly $8 million in funding for brain-health research.

In November 2020, the Foundation launched Brain Health: 2021 – Lifestyle Approaches and Microbiome Contributions. The program, jointly run by the Weston Brain Institute and the Weston Family Microbiome Initiative, was designed to support projects examining the impact of lifestyle and the microbiome on the maintenance of optimal brain health, and specifically the prevention or delay of neurodegenerative diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Applications for the program were reviewed by a panel of international experts and four projects were selected to receive funding:

  • Dr. Alex Parker (Université de Montréal) – $1.6M
    • Project description: Conducting a clinical study to assess the benefit of a probiotic in treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia.
  • Dr. Manuel Montero Odasso (St. Joseph’s Health Care London/Lawson Research Institute) – $1.5M
    • Project description: Testing whether an at-home, personalized intervention targeting specific lifestyle risk factors for dementia can improve brain health in older adults suffering from mild cognitive impairment.
  • Dr. Simon Bacon (Concordia University) – $1.5M
    • Project description: Examining bariatric surgery patients and how dramatic changes in diet can influence brain structure and function, towards identifying patterns that can improve cognitive health as well as those associated with risk of cognitive decline.
  • Dr. Thien Thanh Dang Vu (Concordia University) – $1.5M
    • Project description: Testing whether an online cognitive-behavioural intervention program can improve the sleep quality and ultimately the cognitive performance of patients with cognitive complaints who are suffering from insomnia.

In addition to the above grants, an additional $1.8 million was awarded to six grantees through the Weston Family Microbiome Initiative Proof-of-Principle program. The awarded projects seek to leverage the microbiome to improve diverse aspects of brain health, including combatting Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis, improving mental health, and supporting cognitive development in early-life.

These grants follow on the footsteps of $12 million in Foundation funding to the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA) for a new brain-health initiative announced in November 2021.

The Healthy Brains, Healthy Aging Initiative will augment the CLSA platform, and marks the first time a national study of aging in Canada has introduced both brain imaging and microbiome analyses to investigate cognitive aging in the population over time. Read more about the Healthy Brains, Healthy Aging Initiative here.

$12M awarded to give researchers new tools to advance healthy aging science

The Weston Family Foundation is pleased to announce $12 million in funding to the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), hosted at McMaster University, for a new initiative that will shed light on the many factors that influence brain health as we age, including lifestyle and the human microbiome.  

The Healthy Brains, Healthy Aging Initiative will feature a cohort of 6,000 research participants who are currently enrolled in the CLSA. It marks the first time a national study of aging in Canada has introduced both brain imaging and microbiome analyses to investigate cognitive aging in the population over time.

The goal of the six-year initiative is to enhance the CLSA platform with longitudinal data from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain and microbiome analyses of the gut, to help researchers examine how diverse lifestyle, medical, psychosocial, economic, and environmental factors as well as changes in the microbiome correlate with healthy aging outcomes.

The Weston Family Foundation mission

As part of its overall giving strategy, the Weston Family Foundation dedicates funding to catalyze and scale science-based approaches to improve the health and well-being of Canadians as they age. Specifically, the Foundation aims for more Canadians maintaining optimal health with aging; decreased economic burden of diseases of aging in Canada; and more Canadians equipped with knowledge and strategies to maintain optimal health and independence.

Potential breakthroughs as a result of data gathered by the Healthy Brains, Healthy Aging Initiative will not only improve the health of Canadians as they age, but will generate research evidence to inform policy and programs that increase the agency of Canadians on their own health outcomes.

Click here for more info.

Press release: Announcing the Healthy Brains, Healthy Aging Initiative