Chief Scientific Officer, Michael Smith Health Research BC
Professor, School of Population & Public Health, University of British Columbia
Senior Scientist, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Evaluation Vancouver Coastal Health
Stirling Bryan is a health economist with extensive experience of engagement with the health policy and decision-making worlds. He began his career in the United Kingdom with appointments at St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School and then Brunel University, before moving to the University of Birmingham in 1997. His research track-record reveals a long-standing goal of informing health policy and practice, demonstrated, in part, through an extensive engagement with the National Institute for Health & Care Excellence (NICE). In 2005 he was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowship and spent one year at Stanford University, researching health technology coverage decision making in US health care organizations. Stirling immigrated to Canada in 2008, taking on the roles of professor in UBC’s School of Population and Public Health, and director of the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Evaluation (C2E2). He provided leadership for C2E2 through until 2018 and remains a senior scientist at the Centre where his research lab and team are located. Over recent years, he has become a strong advocate for, and practitioner of, patient-oriented research, and now partners with patients in all of his research activities. In 2016, he was appointed scientific director for the BC SUPPORT Unit, a component part of BC’s Academic Health Science Network (BC AHSN) focused on promoting patient-oriented research, and in January 2020 stepped into the leadership role as president for BC AHSN. He was in this role until September 2021, helping to navigate the course through to consolidation of BC AHSN with the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Stirling is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and recently completed his term as chair of the Advisory Board for CIHR’s Institute for Health Services & Policy Research. He currently serves as president for the Canadian Association for Health Services & Policy Research, and is co-editor for the Wiley-published journal, Health Economics. Stirling and his partner have two sons and one dog. Weekends are typically spent enjoying the company of friends and family and experiencing the beauty and wonders of British Columbia through hiking, snowshoeing, and skiing.
Healthcare Excellence Canada
President and CEO
Dr. Jennifer Zelmer is the inaugural President and CEO of Healthcare Excellence Canada, the new organization formed in 2020 through the amalgamation of the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement and Canadian Patient Safety Institute. Jennifer has been a member of CAHSPR for many years, including serving as an ex-officio participant in Board meetings while she was Editor-in-Chief of Healthcare Policy / Politiques en santé. She is a C.D. Howe Research Fellow and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Victoria, as well as a member of several health-related advisory committees and boards. Jennifer received her PhD and MA in economics from McMaster University and her B.Sc. in health information science from the University of Victoria.
Director, Manitoba Centre for Health Policy
Professor, Departments of Community Health Sciences and Family Medicine, University of Manitoba
Alan Katz is the Director of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and Professor in the Departments of Community Health Sciences and Family Medicine at the University of Manitoba. He received his medical training at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and a MSc from the University of Manitoba. He has worked in rural Saskatchewan and in the core area of Winnipeg. He is a past chair of the Health Research Ethics Board in the Max Rady College of Medicine, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences and has been a researcher at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy for over 14 years. His research is focused on Primary Care delivery in First nations communities and quality of care indicators, knowledge translation and disease prevention. He currently holds over $4 million in research grants as the nominated principal investigator and is a co-investigator on grants valued at over $10 million.
Maggie Keresteci’s career trajectory has been fueled by her belief that when someone listens, healthcare improves and lives change. Maggie’s relentless curiosity led her to pursue a career in clinical research in the intensive care unit and oncology, followed by an opportunity to work at Innovus Research, an organization that pioneered research in patient reported outcomes. Maggie took on significant leadership roles at the Canadian Institute for Health Information, followed by a role as the inaugural Director of Quality at the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. She went on to provide senior leadership for health system programs and knowledge translation at the Ontario Medical Association, where she was also responsible for engagement of a diverse membership of 30,000 physicians. She is an active participant in many provincial and pan-Canadian advisory panels where she provides strategic advice on achieving integration in the health system, including insights about the importance of patient, caregiver and family partnership in research, co-design of care and clinical interactions. Throughout her career Maggie has influenced the delivery of programs and models of care, conceived of and tested health services hypotheses that led to the development of evidence driven policies and leveraged innovation to improve care. She is a volunteer Board director with Emily’s House, Toronto’s only paediatric hospice and is a member of the core group for one of the newly announced Ontario Health Teams.
Department of Pediatrics and Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Université de Montréal
Clinical Assistant Professor
Dr. Olivier Drouin is a Clinical Assistant Professor in both the Department of Pediatrics and Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Université de Montréal. He completed his medical training at McGill University and his residency in General Pediatrics at both the Montreal Children’s Hospital and the CHU Sainte-Justine. To this clinical training, Dr Drouin added a Master’s in Public Health, profile Clinical Effectiveness, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Concomitantly, he completed the Harvard-wide Pediatric Health Services Research Fellowship. He joined the CHU Sainte-Justine and research centre in 2017 and was granted a Clinical Research Scholar – Junior 1 award from the Fonds de recherche du Québec, Santé in 2019. His research expertise is in general pediatrics, adherence to medication, lifestyle behaviours (physical activity, screen time, nutrition), health services research, behavioural sciences, and more recently COVID-19. He also pursued research in patient-centered outcomes research and health economics.
Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto
Director
Audrey Laporte is the Director of IHPME at University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the development of micro-economic theory and the application of micro-econometric methods to address questions of policy interest to health and health care. More specifically her work has centred on a set of themes: modelling of individual health capital accumulation and addictive behaviours; health human resource modelling, e.g. nurse, physician and personal support labour markets; and modelling the impact of policy changes on the performance of health care organizations, e.g. institutional long-term care, hospitals. Her more recent work in collaboration with her students has focused on the impact of health conditions and socio-economic circumstances in early life on later life outcomes. Professor Laporte is President of the International Health Economics Association and Director of the Canadian Centre for Health Economics. She is an Associate Editor of Health Economics, International co-Editor of International Journal for Reviews in Empirical Economics and co-Editor of Healthcare Papers.
Nova Scotia Health
Director of Research
Adrian MacKenzie is the Project Executive for Health Workforce Planning with the Government of Nova Scotia. He holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University and is an Affiliate Scientist with Nova Scotia Health and the Maritime SPOR SUPPORT Unit. Prior to completing his PhD in Community Health at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Dr. MacKenzie studied at Southern Cross University in Australia, the University of California, and St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. In addition to academia, his 20-year research career to date spans roles with government, regional health authorities, and the private sector. Within the broader sphere of health services and policy research, his main research interest is health workforce planning. He has served on and co-chaired Federal/Provincial/Territorial working groups on this topic and also served as a consultant to regional health authorities, unions and professional associations, Canadian and foreign governments, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and the World Health Organization (WHO). He is a Co-Investigator with the WHO/PAHO Collaborating Centre on Health Workforce Planning and Research, an Associate Editor of the journal Human Resources for Health, and a member of both the Canadian Health Workforce Network and the CAHSPR Health Workforce theme group. His first engagement with CAHSPR was as a student and co-presenter at the 2011 annual conference in Halifax.
Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
Professor of Health Policy
Dr. Fiona A. Miller is a Professor of Health Policy in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She holds the Chair in Health Management Strategies and is a Connaught Scholar. Miller directs the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems and CASCADES, a national initiative for climate action and awareness in healthcare, funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada. In these roles, she leads and supports efforts to improve the sustainability of health systems, through research, education, practice change and policy advocacy. As a policy scholar, Miller brings a critical political economy perspective to the analysis of technological innovation and sustainability transitions. Her work aims at sustainable ‘demand driven’ innovation.
BN, MSc. (Thesis), CHE
Chief Program Officer, Strategic Clinical Networks™ with Alberta Health Services
Tracy Wasylak is the Chief Program Officer, Strategic Clinical Networks™ with Alberta Health Services. She has held numerous senior leadership roles within Alberta Health Services. Tracy holds an adjunct assistant professor appointment with the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary. She is the Co-Lead for the ABSPORU 2.0 Learning Health System Team. Tracy is an active collaborator on several health services research teams focusing on health care improvement, patient engagement and health policy. Tracy received the Order of Merit, Nursing Policy Award, from the Canadian Nurses Association in March 2018. She was the recipient of the 2015 AHS Presidents Excellence Award in the category of Innovation, the 2019 award for Outstanding Achievement in Quality Improvement and in 2023 awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal (Alberta).
Université Laval
PhD candidate in Clinical and Biomedical Sciences
Rose Gagnon, MPT, MSc, is a physiotherapist, a PhD candidate in Clinical and Biomedical Sciences and a graduate of the short program in Health Technology Assessment at Université Laval. She recently completed a pan-Canadian training program in primary health care research (TUTOR-PHC) at the University of Western Ontario. During her master’s degree, she developed a pilot project in collaboration with the CHU de Québec to evaluate a physiotherapy care model in the emergency department. Her doctoral project, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, aims to evaluate the economic impact of this care model. Her research interests lie at the intersection of healthcare organization, health economics, and health policy.
Institute of Health Services and Policy Research, Canadian Institutes of Health Research
Scientific Director
Rick Glazier, MD, MPH, is the Scientific Director of the Institute of Health Services and Policy Research at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a senior scientist at ICES (formerly known as the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences). He is also a staff family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and a scientist in its MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, a professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, and Dalla Lana School of Public Health. His research interests include evaluating health system transformation, primary care health services delivery models, health of disadvantaged populations, management of chronic conditions, and population-based and geographic methods for improving equity in health.
Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University
Professor, Department of Family Medicine
Professor, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics
Dr. Maria Mathews is a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. Her research interests include the physician workforce, primary health care, and care in rural communities. Dr. Mathews is President of The Justice Emmett Hall Memorial Foundation and serves ex officio on the CAHSPR board.
