Claire Bombardier

Dr. Bombardier is a widely published clinical researcher and rheumatologist.  She is currently a Senior Scientist for the Toronto General Research Institute and is the Co-Lead for ECHO-Rheumatology.  Former titles include:  Director of Rheumatology for the University of Toronto and Co-Scientific Director at the Canadian Arthritis Network.  She has held a Pfizer Research Chair in Rheumatology and a Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Transfer for Musculoskeletal Care.  She is an international expert for quality improvement research, and has led the development of guidelines for the safe pharmacologic treatment of rheumatoid arthritis patients in Canada and abroad. Dr. Bombardier has published more than 358 scholarly articles, and received many international and Canadian awards, including the ACR Distinguished Clinician Scholar Award (11/2016) and the prestigious American College of Rheumatology Master Designation Award (MACR) in 2013 for outstanding contributions in the field of rheumatology.  In 2005, Dr. Bombardier founded the Ontario Best Practice Research Initiative (OBRI – www.obri.ca) to monitor the safety and efficacy of treatments for people with rheumatoid arthritis to improve treatment and quality of care for people in Ontario.  Her commitment to excellence in rheumatology is recognized, and as a Principal Investigator brings research expertise and visionary leadership to the OBRI team.

Committee(s) :

• Executive Committee

Working Group(s) :

• Co-chair: Knowledge Transfer and Exchange Working Group – Health Policy Impact Team
• Knowledge Transfer and Exchange Working Group – Intra team

Joseph Cafazzo

Dr. Joseph Cafazzo is Lead for the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University Health Network, a state-of-the-art research facility devoted to the evaluation and design of healthcare technology, hosting seventy researchers and staff.

As a biomedical engineer, he has spent his entire career in a hospital setting. By observing healthcare delivery from the inside, he works on ways to keep people out of hospital by creating technologies that allow for self-care at home. At the same time, Joe and his team are the biggest critics of poorly designed health technologies and their ineffectiveness. He surrounds himself with whip-smart, and passionate engineers and designers who are creating technologies that are spirited, modern, people-focused, and truly improve the patient experience.

He is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, in the areas of clinical engineering, human factors, and health informatics and is the recipient of the Career Scientist award by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.

Committee(s):

• Co-chair: eHealth Platform Committee
• Executive Committee

Working Group(s):

• Validation Phase Working Group – Clinical Data

Niels Eijkelkamp

Niels Eijkelkamp is an Associate Professor at the Laboratory of Translational Immunology at the University Medical Center Utrecht. His research focusses on chronic pain, a major debilitating disease that affects over 20% of the population. With cutting edge basic science he aims to unravel pain mechanisms and to identify novel treatments of chronic pain by elucidating the role of the immune system and its interactions with the nervous system in chronic pain. Since 2016 his work geared more toward understanding pain in JIA and identifying novel prognostic markers for persistent pain in JIA by translation of this basic science work to the patient.

Committee(s):

• eHealth Platform Committee

Anna Goldenberg

Dr. Anna Goldenberg is a Scientist in the Genetics and Genome Biology Program at the SickKids Research Institute, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Child and Brain Development Group. Dr. Goldenberg trained in machine learning and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, with a post-doctoral focus in computational biology and medicine. She is an expert in developing machine learning approaches for biological data, network methods and most recently, data integration of omics profiles and clinical data. The current focus of her lab is on developing methods that capture heterogeneity and identify disease mechanisms in complex human diseases. Her translational focus is on methods that efficiently combine many types of patient measurements to refine diagnosis, improve prognosis and personalize drug response prediction for cancer patients. She was recently awarded an Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Research and Innovation.

Committee:

• Executive Committee

Working Group:

• Co-chair: Analytical Framework Working Group

Maarten IJzerman

Maarten J. IJzerman is a full professor of Health Technology & Services Research at the University of Twente and dean of Health and Biomedical Technology in the School for Science and Technology, responsible for the academic programs in Technical Medicine, Biomedical Engineering and Health Sciences.

Maarten and his team work on methods to evaluate the benefits of diagnostic and imaging technologies for personalized medicine and on the application of outcomes research to evaluate stakeholders value and the health economic impact of medical technologies in development. Maarten is a pioneer in the field of early Health Technology Assessment and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for healthcare. He currently is involved in several initiatives to develop emerging good practices for applying Simulation Modelling in Healthcare Delivery research. Maarten IJzerman has more than 170 peer-reviewed articles in the intersection of engineering, medicine and outcomes research. He is an active member of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) and has served on numerous national and international boards and advisory committees.

Committee(s):

• Executive Committee
• eHealth Platform Committee
• Patient Preferences Advisory Committee

Working Group(s):

• Co-chair: Health Economics Working Group
• Analytical Framework Working Group
• Budget Working Group

Dr. Deborah Marshall is a health economist and health services researcher leading a programme of applied research using patient preferences, patient engagement and simulation modelling methods.

Dr. Marshall leads the health economics, socioeconomic benefits, patient preferences and patient engagement activities for several national and international research programmes (funded by CIHR and/or Genome Canada) in precision health and patient-oriented research to develop health economic tools and approaches to evaluate outcomes: 1) UCAN CAN-DU (Understanding Childhood Arthritis Network Canada-Netherlands) and 2) UCAN CURE (Precision Decisions for Childhood Arthritis personalized medicine networks in childhood arthritis combining genomic techniques, machine learning methods and simulation modelling to predict response to treatment and its associated health outcomes and economic impact; 3) SOLVE Care4Rare Canada – harnessing multi-omics to deliver innovative diagnostic care for rare genetic diseases; 4) TIGeR (Translational Implementation of Genomics for Rare diseases), partnership with Medical Genetics and Alberta Provincial Laboratory for the clinical application of genome wide sequencing; and 5) IMAGINE Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (SPOR) Chronic Disease Network (Inflammation, Microbiome, and Alimentation: Gastro-Intestinal and Neuropsychiatric Effects, CIHR SPOR) on inflammatory bowel disease and the microbiome. 6) OCEC (One Child Every Child) – Dr. Marshall is leading the Impact, Evaluation and Knowledge Mobilization Cross-cutting Accelerator of this national child health and wellness research initiative.

Deborah is the Principal Applicant of the CIHR Health Systems Impact Fellowship National Training Program – “Enhancing a Community of Practice for the Health System Impact Fellowship Program: Advancing Capacity for Sustainable & Patient-Centered Learning Health Systems across Canada” to create a community of practice towards achieving high-performing, patient-centered learning health systems across Canada. In addition, she is the former chair of both the Arthur J.E. Child Chair of Rheumatology Outcomes Research; and Canada Research Chair, Health Services and Systems Research (2008 – 2018). Deborah also holds various memberships in University of Calgary and Alberta Health Services: 1) Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute (ACHRI) Member as well as Scientific Director of Research and Partnership Evaluation and Impact; 2) O’Brien Institute of Public Health Member; 3) McCaig Institute of Bone and Joint Health Member; 4) Senior Scientist at Arthritis Research Canada.

She is a Founding Member of the Global Economics and Evaluation of Clinical Genomics Sequencing Working Group (GEECS). Deborah is also a founding co-investigator of the innovative Patient and Community Engagement Research (PaCER) programme at the University of Calgary which trains patients to design and conduct health research, using specific adapted methods of qualitative inquiry. She is an active member of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) as the Past President of the Board of Directors, the Chair of the Dynamic Simulation Modeling Applications in Health Care Delivery Research Task Force and as a member of the Patient Preferences Special Interest Group, the Optimization Methods Task Force and co-author of related ISPOR Task Force Reports. She has also served as a member of the Board of Directors for Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) and is a member of the HTAi Patient Preferences Working Group. She was co-chair of the Scientific Research Committee and Board of Directors of the Arthritis Alliance of Canada (AAC), and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Alberta PROMs & EQ-5D Research & Support Unit (APERSU)

Activity Lead:

• Health Economics

Committee(s):

• Executive Committee
• Patient Preferences Advisory Committee
• Steering Committee

Working Group(s):

• Co-chair: Health Economics Working Group
• Budget Working Group

Quaid Morris

Dr. Quaid Morris is a faculty member and associate professor at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular research at the University of Toronto where he holds cross-appointments in the Faculty of Medicine, Arts and Sciences and Applied Sciences. He is currently the Co-director of the Graduate Stream in Computational Biology, Department of Molecular Genetics. Dr. Morris pursued graduate training and research in machine learning at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, England and obtained his PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His areas of research include Computational Biology, Machine Learning, Cancer Genomics, RNA-binding proteins, Functional Genomics, Post-transcriptional regulation, Electronic Health Records and Health Informatics.

Working Group(s):

• Analytical Framework Working Group

Berent Prakken

Berent Prakken (MD, PhD) is vice-dean and director of the biomedical education centre at the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) in the Netherlands. He is also a professor of paediatric immunology at UMCU and honorary professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium.

Dr. Prakken serves in various national and international research advisory boards. Currently, he is the president of the Paediatric Rheumatology European Society (PRES) and member of The European League against Rheumatism (EULAR) executive committee.

Committee(s):

• Executive Committee
• Privacy and Ethics Advisory Committee

Working Group(s):

• Co-chair: Mentorship and Training Working Group

Norman Rosenblum

Dr. Norman Rosenblum is a Professor of Paediatrics, Physiology, Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto. He is also a Paediatric Nephrologist and Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children’s Research Institute. He is also the recipient of a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Developmental Nephrology.

Dr. Rosenblum is a MD graduate of Dalhousie University. He completed a Paediatric residency and a fellowship in Paediatric Nephrology at the Boston Children’s Hospital followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Bjorn Olsen’s the laboratory in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Rosenblum was recruited in 1993 as a clinician scientist to the Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto. Since then, the focus of his research has been to elucidate molecular mechanisms that control normal and malformed kidney development in genetic mouse models with a focus on signaling by bone morphogenetic, WNT and Hedgehog proteins. His lab has generated several models of human kidney-urinary tract malformation. He has published over 110 peer-reviewed original manuscripts and book chapters.

Dr. Rosenblum is deeply engaged in developing and managing career development programs for clinician scientists. He founded and led the Canadian Child Health Clinician Scientist Program from 2001-2012. In his present role as Associate Dean, Physician Scientist Training in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, he is Director of both the MD/PhD and Clinician Investigator Programs. Dr. Rosenblum is immediate Past-President of the Canadian Society for Clinical Investigation and a current member of the Council of the American Pediatric Society. He is a founding member of the EUREKA Institute for Translational Medicine and served on the Board of Directors and the Faculty of the Certificate Course (2008-2017).

In addition, Dr. Rosenblum is the recipient of the 2004 Aventis Pasteur Research Award, the American Pediatric Society inaugural 2006 Norman J. Siegel New Member Outstanding Science Award, the Society for Pediatric Research 2010 Maureen Andrew Award in Mentoring, and the Kidney Foundation of Canada 2011 Medal for Research Excellence.

Committee(s):

• Executive Committee
• Commercialization Advisory Committee

Working Group(s):

• Mentorship and Training Working Group*

(*Individual is a co-chair of the committee or working group)

Stephen Scherer

One of the most highly cited scientists in the world, Dr. Scherer and his team contributed to the landmark discovery of global gene copy number variation (CNV) as a common form of genetic variation in human DNA. His group then identified that CNVs are associated with autism and many other disorders. He founded the Database of Genomic Variants that facilitates hundreds of thousands of clinical diagnoses each year. Dr. Scherer has won numerous honours, including the Steacie Prize, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholarship, and the Premier’s Summit Award for Medical Research. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2014, he was selected as a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate in the field of Physiology or Medicine for “the discovery of large-scale CNV and its association with specific diseases.” Dr. Scherer holds the GSK-CIHR Endowed Chair in Genome Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto, and is Director of the U of T McLaughlin Centre and The Centre for Applied Genomics at SickKids.

Jennifer Stinson

Dr. Jennifer Stinson is the Mary Jo Haddad is Nursing Chair in Child Health and a Nurse Practitioner in the Chronic Pain Program at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Her major clinical research interests are in the area of pain and symptom management and the use of e-health (internet) and m-health (mobile phones) technologies to improve the assessment and management of pain and other symptoms in children with chronic illnesses.

Committee(s):

• Privacy and Ethics Advisory Committee
• Patient Preferences Advisory Committee
• eHealth Platform Committee

Working Group(s):

• Knowledge Transfer and Exchange Working Group – Health Policy Impact team

George Tomlinson

Working Group(s):

Analytical Framework Working Group