As an associate professor in the department of medicine at the U of A, she is changing how we understand the relationship between diet, gut microbiome and inflammatory bowel disease
Age: 38
For the first years of her medical training Heather Armstrong kept her distance from gastroenterology.
“It hit too close to home,” says Armstrong, who lives with inflammatory bowel disease and knows the field as a patient. After moving to Edmonton from New Zealand as a teen, she studied at the U of A before heading to Australia for a PhD (Med) to prepare her for research.
“I love discovery and solving problems,” she says. “Medicine allows us to impact individuals on the day-to-day, but I was more passionate about how I could make a difference for the largest number of people, and make discoveries that actually change someone’s life.”
As an IBD patient, Armstrong has benefited from drug treatments and therapies to manage her condition. She wasn’t planning to work in gastroenterology, let alone IBD research, until she was offered a fellowship at the Stollery Children’s Hospital focusing on IBD and other autoimmune diseases. “I decided I could lean into it,” she says.
Now, she leads research into the relationship between diet, the gut microbiome and inflammation. It has earned her a Canada Research Chair and a tenure-track position, and shows that foods considered healthful — certain dietary fibres and resistant starches — aggravate inflammation in some people with IBD. That finding is central to her precision nutrition program, which uses stool samples to identify which carbohydrates a person’s microbiome can process. The goal is to give patients personalized dietary guidance. The approach reflects what’s often missing in IBD treatment: practical, evidence-based guidance. “There’s discovery and money in pharmaceuticals. I wanted to study what patients can do to take control of their health.”
This article appears in the November-December 2026 issue of Edify
