Spotlight on Dr. Brett Thombs

With this issue of the spotlight, we would like to congratulate Dr. Brett Thombs who is the recipient of the 2014 Principal’s Prize for Outstanding Emergent Researchers. This award was created in 2013 to encourage and celebrate McGill’s most outstanding earl-career researchers, as well as to provide them with an advantage as they apply for external awards by adding a prestigious internal distinction to their list of accomplishments.

Dr. Thombs is an investigator in the Division of Psychiatry Research and an Associate Member of the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Community Studies, and the Department of Medicine at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital. He is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Member of the Department of Medicine, the Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, and the School of Nursing of McGill University. Dr. Thombs is internationally known for his work on behavioral health psychology, which focuses on the illness experience of patients, including the etiology, assessment, and treatment of interrelated somatic and psychological symptoms that are common in medical illness, particularly cardiovascular and rheumatic diseases. An important part of his work involves the evaluation of behavioural health services, such as detection and treatment of depression, as well as methods of research reporting. Dr. Thombs has authored more than 110 peer-reviewed articles, many of them in top medical journals, has served as a peer-reviewer for over 40 journals, is on the editorial boards of five journals, and serves as an associate editor and statistical editor. Dr. Thombs is the principal investigator or a co-investigator on several grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Fonds de la recherche en santé Québec (FRSQ). He has been awarded a New Investigator Award from the CIHR (2008-2013), a Chercheurs-boursiers, Junior I award from the FRSQ (2008-2012), an American College of Rheumatology Research and Education Foundation Health Professional Investigator Award, the Canadian Psychological Association’s President’s New Researcher Award, the Canadian Psychological Association Health Psychology Section Early Career Award, and the 2010 Jewish General Hospital Award for Excellence in Psychosocial or Clinical Research. Dr. Thombs was the lead author of an international team that published an article in JAMA about depression screening in cardiovascular care settings, which was a finalist for the 2009 BMJ Group Research Paper of the Year Award.

**The “Spotlight”is an on-going departmental news capsule which spotlights a member of our faculty, their involvements and accomplishments. Should you wish to nominate someone for the series, please submit to communications.psychiatry [at] mcgill.ca (). **