Kyle Dumont

Hi, my name is Kyle, and I am 28 years old. I weigh 75 kilograms and I am 184 centimeters tall. Why am I telling you this? Well, you ended up here and you want to know about me so here it goes: I was born in a small town in Ontario, Canada (population 7,000) and at ten years old, I moved to Montréal, Québec. Throughout my teenage years, I worked in many restaurants and decided that I wanted to be a chef. Little did I know that cooking for people other than my family was extremely stressful. After finishing high school, I took interest in microbiology and immunology, so, intuitively, I applied to the microbiology and immunology degree at McGill University—bad idea. After spending hours trying to master streaking (not the nudity type), I decided the program was not for me. I took a year off and during this time, I played a lot of sports and started going to the gym. To my surprise, I became stronger and faster—most probably attributable to puberty and not my work ethic—and I wanted to learn how and why this was happening. I started my bachelor’s degree in kinesiology at McGill University and after four years of hard work, I thoroughly enjoyed my four seconds of fame crossing convocation stage. Following this, I started my master’s degree in Vancouver, Canada where I developed an in vitro model of exercise (think “exercise in a dish”) to study exercise signaling. Fast forward a few years—and another four seconds of fame—I am now a PhD student in the Ruas lab where I study how the conversation between adipose tissue and the brain changes in response to exercise, and how this affects whole-body metabolism. The outcome of my research could provide new therapies to help people with metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes—and a final four seconds of fame.