IHSPR Institute Advisory Board Members – Biographies
Katie Aubrecht, PhD (Chair)
Canada Research Chair in Health Equity and Social Justice
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Dr. Katie Aubrecht is Canada Research Chair in Health Equity and Social Justice and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Aubrecht has a PhD in Sociology of Education from University of Toronto, and is an alumnus of the inaugural cohort of the CIHR IHSPR Health System Impact (HSI) Fellows. As Director of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation Spatializing Care: Intersectional Disability Studies Lab, she leads an interdisciplinary research program that maps health services, social policies and community resources related to marginality, mental health and resilience across the life span, with a focus on rural communities in Atlantic Canada. Aubrecht’s teaching and research as a health sociologist draw on intersectional disability studies, gerontology and participatory, decolonizing and arts-informed qualitative research methods to analyze disability, aging and mental health education, policy and practice. As part of this program of work she explores creative cross-sectoral approaches to person- and family-centred dementia, mental and behavioural health care. Aubrecht has status as Adjunct Professor in Family Studies and Gerontology at Mount Saint Vincent University and Dalhousie University’s School of Health and Human Performance. Her contributions to initiatives to support patient and citizen engagement and knowledge translation in health research have been recognized through an appointment as Associate Scientist with the Maritime SPOR SUPPORT Unit. She has served as President and Executive Board Member on the Canadian Disability Studies Association, and as Board Director for Canadian Centre on Disability Studies, and Mental Health Research Canada.
Brenda Andreas
Community member and Research collaborator
Province of Saskatchewan
Within her home province she has been an embedded patient partner for fourteen years. She has been instrumental in bringing the voice and visibility of the patient and family to her role on the Saskatchewan Health Authority Patient and Family Leadership Council, the Accreditation Oversight Committee, the Networks Oversight Committee, the SHA Board Quality and Safety Committee and well as the Ministry of Health Primary Care Renewal Committee. In addition, she is a member of the People Centered Measurement working group. Brenda’s experience as a research collaborator in patient-oriented research in primary care started in 2014 in her role as a peer reviewer of grant applications. She is a member of three nationally funded learning collaboratives focusing on Youth Mental Health and Addictions with Health Standards Organization, IPC simulation curriculum in long term care with Health Standards Organization and with Health Care Excellence Canada Virtual Care Collaborative. Currently, she is the co-chair of the Canadian Primary Care Research Network (CPCRN) Patient Council and was a co-applicant on a CPCRN grant application. Brenda is also a patient surveyor with Accreditation Canada and is a member of the PaCE (Patient and Clinician Experience) committee of the North American Primary Care Research Group.
And finally, Brenda has co-delivered in knowledge sharing through podcasts, presentations, publications, poster abstracts, and through co-authorship of a book chapter – Bringing Leadership to Life in Health: Leads in a Caring Environment.
Melanie Barwick, PhD., C.Psych
Senior Scientist, Child Health Evaluative Sciences Program, SickKids’ Research Institute and the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health
Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto
Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
Melanie Barwick, PhD, C.Psych, is a Senior Scientist in the Child Health Evaluative Sciences Program of the SickKids’ Research Institute and the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health. She also leads professional and resource development in Dissemination and Implementation Research and Practice within the Knowledge Translation Program of the SickKids’ Learning Institute.
At the University of Toronto, she is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (Social and Behavioural Health Sciences, and the Institute for Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation).
Her community work includes Chairing the Governing Board for Children’s Mental Health Ontario, membership on the Editorial Board for the SIRC journal Implementation Research and Practice, and as an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Health Services – Implementation Science.
An internationally recognized expert in dissemination and implementation research and practice, her health services research program spans many areas of health to improve the implementation of evidence into practice and broaden the reach of evidence to support decision-making, policy, knowledge, awareness, health, and well-being. She has considerable practical experience in implementation. Her current research, funded by CIHR, is developing a digital tool, The Implementation Playbook©, to facilitate the implementation of innovations in service settings. The paper prototype, The Implementation Roadmap©, is also available to support implementation planning.
She provides professional development in dissemination and implementation practice internationally through the Specialist Knowledge Translation Training™ (SKTT, for researchers and KT practitioners), the Knowledge Translation Professional Certificate™ (KTPC, for KT practitioners), and Planning for Implementation Practice™(PIP). The KTPC is recognized as a Leading Practice by Accreditation Canada and has over 500 graduates worldwide. Since 2004, SickKids has licensed SKTT training to the Research Impact Academy (AUS) and has over 3,600 learners internationally. She is the developer of tools to support dissemination and implementation.
Thomas Beaudry
Engagement and Reconciliation Community Coordinator
Department of Sustainable Development
Province of Manitoba
Residing in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Thomas is a proud Anishanaabe man; a proud father of three (two young men and a young woman); and a mishoom of two boys. He is a graduate of the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources (CIER), with a certificate in Environmental Protection, with the focus on environmental-related issues concerning Indigenous Peoples and communities. Thomas is currently employed with the Province of Manitoba, Agriculture and Resource Development, as an Engagement and Reconciliation Community Coordinator.
Thomas’ goal is to work with Indigenous Peoples and communities, NGOs and government in the area of environment and health, applying traditional knowledge towards creating healthy environments, people and communities. As well as to work at a local, national and international level on Aboriginal issues related to the health, environment and development.
Thomas sits on the George and Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation’s (CHI), (Manitoba’s SPOR SUPPORT Unit) Executive Council, helping to inform the Centre’s strategic direction and governance. He also sits on CHI’s Patient/Public Engagement Collaborative Partnership, helping to inform all of CHI’s patient/public engagement in health research activities. Thomas was a caregiver partner on Dr. Maya Jeyaraman’s research study on ER wait times, which has won a SPOR CIHR PIHCI Knowledge Synthesis grant, as well as Dr. Tara Stewart and Dr. Malcom Doupe’s CIHR grant proposal about subacute care. He also sits on the University of Manitoba’s College of Pharmacy Experiential Education Advisory Committee as a patient partner. Thomas completed CHI’s Academic Health Sciences Leadership Program.
'It is time to be comfortable being uncomfortable with one another when collaborating on the issues that need to be addressed. This is in a respectful and safe environment'.
Arlene Bierman
Director of Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement (CEPI)
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Arlene S. Bierman, M.D., M.S., is director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement (CEPI) consisting of five divisions: the Evidence-Based Practice Center Program; the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Program; Digital Healthcare Research; Practice Improvement; and Healthcare Delivery and Systems Research; as well as the National Center for Excellence in Primary Care Research. Dr. Bierman is a general internist, geriatrician and health services researcher whose work has focused on improving access, quality and outcomes of health care for older adults with chronic illness in disadvantaged populations and has published widely in these areas. Dr. Bierman has also developed strategies for using performance measurement as a tool for knowledge translation, as well as conducted research to increase policymakers’ uptake of evidence.
As tenured professor she held appointments Health Policy, Evaluation, and Management; Public Health; and Medicine; and Nursing at the University of Toronto, where she was the inaugural holder of the Ontario Women's Health Council Chair in Women's Health and a senior scientist in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael's Hospital. She was principal investigator for the Project for an Ontario Women’s Health Evidence-Based Report Card (POWER) study, which provided actionable data to help policymakers and health care providers improve health and reduce health inequities in Ontario.
Dr. Bierman has served on many advisory committees including the Geriatric Measurement Advisory Panel of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the boards of Health Quality Ontario, and the National Center of Excellence National Initiative for Care of the Elderly (NICE). She received her MD degree from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill where she was a Morehead Fellow. She completed fellowships in Outcomes Research at Dartmouth Medical School, and Community and Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and also served as an Atlantic Philanthropies Health and Aging Policy Fellow/American Political Science Foundation Congressional Fellow.
Irfan Dhalla
Vice-President, Care Experience and Equity, Unity Health Toronto
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine and Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto
Irfan Dhalla is Vice-President, Care Experience and Equity at Unity Health Toronto. In this role, he works with colleagues to help the organization achieve its vision: The Best Care Experiences. Created Together. Irfan also continues to practice general internal medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital, one of Unity Health Toronto’s 3 sites.
From 2013 to 2019, Irfan was a Vice-President at Health Quality Ontario, a government agency established by the Excellent Care for All Act in 2011. He and his colleagues there transformed the way the government agency supported a health care system that serves 14 million people. He oversaw the work the organization does to support HQO’s recommendations about which health care services should be publicly funded, and he also led the development of a new program to make recommendations about standards of care. This programs continues to thrive at Ontario Health, an organization created through the merger of HQO and several other provincial government agencies.
Irfan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. He obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia, a medical degree from the University of Toronto, a master’s degree in health policy, planning and financing from the London School of Economics, which he pursued as a Commonwealth Scholar, and a master’s degree in health care management from Harvard University.
Irfan’s work has been recognized with awards from many organizations, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, the Canadian Society of Internal Medicine, the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health and the Toronto Star. He is regularly asked to serve on provincial or federal advisory committees. Most recently, he has been co-chairing the federal government’s COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel.
Antoine Groulx, MD, MSc, FCFP
Family Physician
Full Professor, Clinical Medicine, Université Laval
General Director, Alliance santé Québec
Scientific Director, Quebec SPOR Unit
Antoine Groulx is a family physician and training manager with experience in unions, administrative positions and professional associations. He previously served as president of the Quebec College of Family Physicians and as the assistant deputy minister for Quebec’s Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux, where his work focused on community service integration, data reflexivity, and user, decision maker and clinician empowerment.
A Full Professor of Clinical Medicine at Université Laval, he finds the time to balance his family life with clinical, teaching and research work and his job as clinical lead. He is the general director of Alliance santé Québec, a value-creating and sustainable health learning network. He actively contributes to the emerging learning health system structured around the Quebec Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (SPOR) Support Unit, and will become SPOR’s scientific director in 2021.
Josée G. Lavoie, MA, PhD
Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Manitoba
Director, Ongomiizwin Research, Indigenous Institute of Health and Healing
Josée G. Lavoie is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Indigenous Studies, University of Manitoba. She is of French-Quebec ancestry. She has mixed method expertise in public administration, qualitative and health service research (health administrative data). Her research focuses on improved access to primary (ie outpatient) healthcare for underserved and marginalized populations, in rural, remote and inner-city environments; and on shifting health policy. Dr. Lavoie’s program of research is uniquely positioned, innovative and conducted in partnership with First Nations, Inuit and other Indigenous groups across Canada, Australia, New Zealand and circumpolar countries. She is a Fulbright Scholar (Fulbright Arctic Initiative, 2018-19), one of the founding members of the CIHR College of Reviewers (2016-20), and previously served on the Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health (2013-16). Her program of research demonstrates leadership in engaged scholarship.
Kimberlyn McGrail, MPH PhD
Professor, Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, School of Population and Public Health
Scientific Director, Population Data BC
Scientific Director, Health Data Research Network Canada
Kimberlyn McGrail is a Professor in the UBC School of Population and Public Health and Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, and Scientific Director of Population Data BC and Health Data Research Network Canada. Her research interests are quantitative policy evaluation and all aspects of population data science. In 2019-2020 she participated as a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Task Force on AI4Health and from 2020-2022 she was a member of the Expert Working Group for the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy. She is currently a Canadian representative to with the Global Partnership for AI as part of the data governance working group, and sits on a number of other data-related advisory committees. She holds a PhD in Health Care and Epidemiology from the University of British Columbia, and a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan.
Tara Sampalli
Senior Director, Implementation Science and Evaluation, Global Health Systems Planning, Nova Scotia Health
Dr. Tara Sampalli is the Senior Director of Implementation Science and Evaluation, and Global Health Systems Planning at Nova Scotia Health. Dr. Sampalli has a BEng from Bangalore University, India, a Master of Applied Science in Biological Engineering and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies specializing in Health Informatics from Dalhousie University. She has also successfully completed the Scottish Improvement Leadership Program.
Tara has held multiple important roles in the health authority and has made significant contributions in each of these roles. In her current role at Nova Scotia Health, she leads the Implementation Science Team, and the Network of Scholars and is working with many key partners in the province to support the Learning Health System strategy. Tara also holds an Assistant Professor position at the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University.
Through her many roles in the organization, Tara has combined her diverse educational background very effectively and has been instrumental in supporting multiple priority initiatives that have gone on to win provincial, national, and international quality awards. She has also secured numerous research grants and published several key articles related to health system improvements and transformations. She has a deep passion for working with patients and community partners.
Erin Strumpf, PhD
Associate Professor, McGill University
Erin Strumpf, PhD, is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. She is a member of the Department of Economics and the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, and a founding member of McGill’s Public Policy and Population Health Observatory (3PO). Prof. Strumpf's research focuses on evaluating the impacts of health and social policies on the health of individuals and populations, as well as on the performance of the health care system. She uses methods for causal inference, principally quasi-experimental designs, to estimate the effects of interventions and reforms in real-world settings and actively collaborates with decision makers to generate relevant, usable knowledge to improve population health and health care system performance. Prof. Strumpf was a Researcher in Residence at Quebec's Institut national d'excellence en santé et en services sociaux (INESSS) (2019-2020) and a board member of the International Health Economics Association (2020-2022). Prof. Strumpf holds a PhD in Health Policy (Economics) from Harvard University and a BA from Smith College.
Jocelyne (Jo) Voisin
Assistant Deputy Minister
Strategic Policy Branch
Health Canada
Jo Voisin is Assistant Deputy Minister at Health Canada's Health Policy Branch, which is responsible for pan-Canadian health system policy, as well as the department’s strategic policy functions. In her many years working at Health Canada, Jo was instrumental in shaping policy directions in health care through bilateral agreements with provinces and territories, advancing work to improve how health data is used and shared to benefit Canadians and supporting Canada’s health workforce. She also played a key role in supporting Canada’s response to the COVID pandemic. Jo has occupied several executive leadership positions at Health Canada and in other federal departments, including in youth employment policy, health product regulation and public health. Jo also worked in social policy at the Privy Council Office, and in economic policy at Treasury Board Secretariat and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. Jo is an avid weekend and vacation cyclist, as well as an artist.
Verna Yiu, MD, FRCPC
Provost and Vice-President (Academic)
University of Alberta
Dr. Verna Yiu is one of Canada’s most respected healthcare leaders. She led the country’s largest provincewide health care system that protects and improves the quality of life for 4.4 million Albertans for over 6 years.
In her tenure, Dr. Yiu was able to build trust and confidence not only with Albertans but internally with the 100K+ employees of the organization. In Dr. Yiu’s 6 year tenure as President/CEO, AHS was named as one of the Canada’s Top 100 Employers for 4 consecutive years along with other employer awards including Best Diversity Employer, Best Employer for Young People, and Alberta’s Top 70 Employer. Other accomplishments include optimizing integration of care within the province, so much so as to receive acknowledgement from the International Society of Integrated Care that AHS was in the top 5 most integrated systems in the world. Other accomplishments during her tenure included: improving efficiencies such that growth expenditure for AHS reduced by more than 50% while still maintaining quality and safety of care; led and received the support from government to implement the first province wide clinical information system called Connect Care that will transform how care is delivered for Albertans (which remains on time and on budget if not for COVID19), and led AHS in 2019-2022 in its response to one of the worse public health crisis we will ever know in our lifetime, COVID19.
Dr. Yiu has spent more than 2 decades in leadership roles, spanning from leadership roles in academia at the University of Alberta including being the first female interim dean of the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the U of A to that within AHS. She is known to embrace a servant leadership motto where ensuring the success of others inevitably leads to everyone’s success. In July 1, 2022, Dr. Yiu was appointed Provost and VP Academic (Interim) for the University of Alberta and on January 1, 2024, was appointed in the permanent position.
Dr. Yiu has won numerous awards including: Global Woman of Vision in 2019, being ranked second on the Medical Post’s 2021 Power list of physicians in Canada (behind only Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer) and most recently in 2022, Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (in recognition of significant contributions to AB, and Physician of the Year award from the Edmonton Zone Medical Staff Association.
A professor of Pediatrics in the division of pediatric nephrology at the U of A, Dr. Yiu is an alumni of both University of Alberta and Harvard University. She continues to work on the front lines, providing care to young patients and their families at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton.
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