The Core Academic Unit (CAU) brings together a multidisciplinary team of leading health researchers from numerous academic centres across Ontario including McMaster University, Queen’s University, the University of Ottawa, the University of Toronto, and the University of Western Ontario. The CAU serves as the academic core of the ODPRN to lead research activity and provide scientific and policy guidance for the ODPRN. Furthermore, the CAU plays a critical role in supporting the ODPRN’s student training goals by supervising students enrolled in graduate programs across Ontario. Finally, members of the CAU work collaboratively with the ODPRN Rapid Response Unit and Formulary Modernization Unit to conduct relevant pharmacoepidemiology and drug policy research.
Peter Austin
Peter Austin is a senior scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, Canada and a professor in both the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. His research interests include propensity score methods for estimating causal treatment effects, methods for the analysis of observational data, statistical methods for use with large health care administrative databases and predictive methods in medicine. His research is supported by an operating grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and by a Career Investigator Award from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario. He has published extensively in both the statistical and medical literature. See Current Publications from PubMed.
Doug Coyle
Dr. Doug Coyle joined the University of Ottawa full-time in September 2004. Previously he has been based at the Ottawa Health Research Institute and the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. He is a health economist and obtained his PhD from Brunel University. His thesis explored issues related to handling uncertainty and variability with respect to decision making in health care. Doug’s research is of a multi-disciplinary nature and has led to collaboration with numerous researchers across Ontario and world wide. He is a member of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care’s Committee to Evaluate Drugs and Drugs for Rare Diseases Working Group. Doug Coyle is the lead of the ODPRN Pharmacoeconomics Unit. See Current Publications from PubMed.
Irfan Dhalla
Dr. Irfan Dhalla practices general internal medicine and conducts research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. His research primarily focuses on health care policy, especially the organization, delivery and financing of care provided to individuals with complex chronic diseases and on the regulatory framework for prescription drugs. He is the founder of the Toronto Virtual Ward, a multi-organizational initiative designed to improve post-hospital care, and is leading a CIHR-funded randomized controlled trial comparing the Virtual Ward with usual care. He also serves on the board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, an organization that advocates for improvements in health care for all Canadians, on the Committee to Evaluate Drugs, which makes recommendations to the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care regarding which drugs should be publicly funded and under what conditions, and on Health Quality Ontario’s Governing Council for the Avoidable Hospitalization Strategy. In 2010, he received a CIHR Rising Star Award for his research on harm arising from the use of prescription opioids, and in 2012 he was named one of ‘12 people to watch’ by the Toronto Star. See Current Publications from PubMed.
Gerald Evans
Dr. Gerald Evans is the chair of the Division of Infectious Diseases and a professor in the Departments of Medicine, Biomedical & Molecular Sciences, and Pathology & Molecular Medicine at Queen’s University, and an attending physician in Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine at Kingston General Hospital and the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston, Ontario. Dr. Evans is a former president of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease (AMMI) Canada. He is a member of the Ontario Anti-infective Review Panel, and former chair of the Guidelines Committee of AMMI Canada. He is the immediate past chair of the Committee to Evaluate Drugs of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, the Ministry’s expert advisory committee on optimal drug utilization for the province of Ontario. He is a recently appointed adjunct scientist with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences working through the ICES@Queens node. He also serves as chair of the Working Group on Drugs for Rare Diseases for the MOHLTC. His research interests include clinical guideline development, antimicrobial pharmacology, and health technology assessment for optimal drug utilization.See Current Publications from PubMed.
Amit Garg
Dr. Amit Garg is a professor of Medicine, Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of Western Ontario. He practices nephrology at the London Health Sciences Centre and cares for patients with chronic kidney disease, acute kidney injury and individuals wishing to donate a kidney to a loved one. Dr. Garg conducts clinical and health services research to improve health outcomes for patients with kidney diseases including those receiving dialysis or a kidney transplant. He also aims to improve the efficiency by which renal care is delivered. He currently holds a Clinician Scientist Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He is the current Director of the London Kidney Clinical Research Unit and Scientific Director of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences @ Western Facility. Amit Garg is the lead of the ODPRN Student Training Unit. See Current Publications from PubMed.
Tara Gomes
Tara Gomes a scientist at ICES, with a degree in Community Health and Epidemiology from the University of Toronto. She is also the Scientific Lead of the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network (ODPRN) and an assistant professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto. Tara Gomes is the lead of the ODPRN Pharmacoepidemiology Unit. See Current Publications from PubMed.
Anne Holbrook
Dr. Anne Holbrook is the Director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University, a professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University, and Senior Scientist in the Centre for Evaluation of Medicines at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton. She trained in clinical pharmacy, clinical pharmacology, medicine, internal medicine and clinical epidemiology at the University of Toronto, Philadelphia College, McGill University and McMaster University. She is an Active Medical Staff member of Hamilton Health Sciences and St Joseph ‘s Healthcare Hamilton, leading an internal medicine and clinical pharmacology teaching service specializing in the management of complex, hospitalized adults with multiple diagnoses, multiple medications, drug-related harms or intolerances, or medication access issues. She is one of the most senior drug policy expert advisors in the country, having advised governments and public payers at the federal, provincial and regional levels for several decades on comparative effectiveness, safety and cost-effectiveness of medications. Decisions taken currently influence more than $10 billion worth of medication expenditures annually. See Current Publications from PubMed.
David Juurlink
David Juurlink joined ICES as a scientist in 2003. He is also a staff physician in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Toronto, and a medical toxicologist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Dr. Juurlink has degrees in pharmacy (1990) and medicine (1994) from Dalhousie University in Halifax. He completed postgraduate training in internal medicine (1998), clinical pharmacology (2000) and clinical toxicology (2002) at the University of Toronto. He also holds a PhD in clinical epidemiology (2003) from the University of Toronto. Dr. Juurlink is Vice-Chair of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Nucleus Committee in Clinical Pharmacology and a member of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care Committee to Evaluate Drugs. David Juurlink is co-Principal Investigator of the ODPRN. See Current Publications from PubMed.
Andreas Laupacis
Dr. Andreas Laupacis is a general internist and the Executive Director of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital. From 2000-2006, he was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. He is a professor at the University of Toronto in both the Department of Medicine and the Institute Health Policy Management and Evaluation. His research interests are broad; he has published over 295 peer-reviewed articles, covering a variety of topics in clinical epidemiology, health services research, and health technology assessment. Recently he has become interested in engaging the public about health care issues (www.healthydebate.ca). He has also served as a member of numerous academic and governmental advisory committees, including Cancer Care Ontario (2011-present), where he chairs the Strategic Planning, Performance & Risk Management Committee, and the Alberta Health Services Board (2008-2010), where he chaired its Quality and Safety Committee. In 2011, Dr. Laupacis was awarded the 2011 Health Services Research Advancement Award from the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation and was also named the Justice Emmett Hall Laureate at the annual Canadian Association for Health Services and Policy Research conference in Halifax, NS. See Current Publications from PubMed.
Muhammad Mamdani
Dr. Muhammad Mamdani is the Director of the Applied Health Research Centre (AHRC), the Keenan Research Centre, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. He is also associate professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation of the Faculty of Medicine, where he supervises graduate students, and an adjunct scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). Prior to joining the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute and St. Michael’s Hospital, Dr. Mamdani was a Director of Outcomes Research at Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals in New York. Dr. Mamdani’s research interests include pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacoeconomics, and drug policy. He has published over 200 research studies in peer-reviewed medical journals. Dr. Mamdani obtained a Doctor of Pharmacy degree (PharmD) from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1995 and subsequently completed a fellowship in pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research at the Detroit Medical Center in 1997. During his fellowship, Dr. Mamdani obtained a Master of Arts degree in Economics from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He then completed a Master of Public Health degree from Harvard University in 1998 with a concentration in quantitative methods, focusing on biostatistics and epidemiological principles. Muhammad Mamdani is co-Principal Investigator of the ODPRN. See Current Publications in PubMed.
Julia Moore
Dr. Julia Moore leads the Team for Implementation, Evaluation and Sustainability (TIES) for the Knowledge Translation Program at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital. She is a knowledge translation, implementation, and evaluation specialist. Dr. Moore holds a PhD from Pennsylvania State University in Human Development, where she focused on implementation science. In her current role, Dr. Moore engages in knowledge brokering and capacity building across multiple projects at local, provincial, national, and international levels. She oversees the ODPRN’s knowledge translation strategy, which supports successful uptake of ODPRN research findings into policy and practice.
Michael Paterson
Mr. Michael Paterson joined ICES as a Research Coordinator in 1992 and became an ICES Scientist in 2008. He currently leads the Chronic Disease and Pharmacotherapy Research Program. Mr. Paterson is an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University, and a member of St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton’s Centre for Evaluation of Medicines. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Human Biology from the University of Guelph and a Master’s degree in Physiology from the University of Toronto. See Current Publications in PubMed.
Sharon Straus
Dr. Straus is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. She holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Translation and Quality of care and more than $20 million in peer reviewed research grants as a principal investigator. She has >300 publications, and has supervised >20 graduate students from different disciplines including clinical epidemiology, health informatics and human factors engineering. She is co-PI of KT Canada, a CIHR and CFI funded national, Clinical Research Initiative, PI of KT Canada’s CIHR-funded Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research and PI of a network meta-analysis team grant for the Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network. She is Division Director of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Toronto and Director of the KT Program at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s. In 2011, she was awarded the Complete Physician Award and the Mentorship Award from the Department of Medicine, University of Toronto.
Matthew Weir
Matthew Weir is a staff physician in the Division of Nephrology at the University of Western Ontario. He is the director of London Health Sciences Centre’s Kidney Care Centre. Dr. Weir received his BSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from McMaster University in 1999 and his MD from Queen’s University in 2003. He completed his postgraduate training in Internal Medicine in 2006 and Nephrology in 2008 at the University of Western Ontario. He is in the process of completing an MSc in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Western Ontario. See Current Publications in PubMed.
George Wells
Dr. Wells is a Professor of the Departments of Epidemiology and Community Medicine and Department of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. He is also Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Health Research Institute and Director, Cardiovascular Research Methods Centre at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. Dr. Wells’ interests are in the design and analysis of multicentre clinical trials, methodology related to health care delivery, systematic reviews and network meta-analysis and the development and assessment of decision support technologies for patients and clinicians. Dr. Wells has been on the executive and steering committees of national and international research programs, external safety and efficacy monitoring committees, scientific grant review committees, editorial committees and scientific advisory committees. He is currently the Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology and on the Editorial Committee of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. He has worked extensively with national and international government and non-government research organizations, as well as pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.