Dr. Phyllis Kanki, Principal Investigator, Harvard PEPFAR and Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health
Title of Talk: Innovative Partnerships for Global Health, the Harvard PEPFAR Experience
Dr. Phyllis Kanki is a Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health. A virologist with recognized expertise in the pathogenesis and molecular epidemiology of HIV in Africa, she has led AIDS research programs in Senegal for more than 20 years.
Building on the successes of prevention methods in Senegal, Dr. Kanki established and led the AIDS Prevention Initiative in Nigeria (APIN) program in Nigeria, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. APIN worked to develop and scale-up effective HIV prevention methods including PMTCT programs.
Since 2004, Dr. Kanki has led the Harvard President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) providing prevention, care and HIV antiretroviral therapy in Nigeria, Botswana, and Tanzania. To date, in addition to the capacity building for clinical, laboratory and research capabilities, the program has provided treatment for over 115,000 AIDS patients.
Serving on a number of committees and editorial boards both internationally and in the U.S., Dr. Kanki has also authored over 175 publications, including serving as an editor and contributor to the first and second editions of AIDS in Africa. She was also an editor and contributor to the AIDS in Nigeria, A Nation on the Threshold and most recently, A Line Drawn in the Sand: Responses to the AIDS Treatment Crisis in Africa. Dr. Kanki holds a doctorate in veterinary medicine from the University of Minnesota and a doctorate of science in virology from Harvard University; she is a member of the Institute of Medicine.
Dr. Peter Singer, Professor of Medicine, Sun Life Financial Chair in Bioethics and Director at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network and University of Toronto
Title of Talk: Canada’s Role in Global Health
Singer's research is on life sciences and the developing world – how technologies make the transition from “lab to village”. In 2007, Singer received the Michael Smith Prize as Canada’s Health Research of the Year in Population Health and Health Services. He is the Foreign Secretary of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the US Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and TWAS (The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World). He has published over 270 research articles, received over $50 million in research grants, and trained over 70 students. Singer is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges for Global Health Initiative, and has advised the UN Secretary General's Office, the Government of Canada, several African governments, and Pepsico Inc. on issues related to global health. He studied internal medicine at University of Toronto, medical ethics at University of Chicago, public health at Yale University, and management at Harvard Business School. He is a former chairman of Branksome Hall School.
Dr. Jody Heymann, Founding Director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill University
Title of Talk: Spawning Accountability for a Better WoRLD
Abstract: Dr. Jody Heymann Abstract [.pdf]
Jody Heymann is the Founding Director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy, the WORLD Global Data Centre, and the Project on Global Working Families. An internationally renowned researcher on health and social policy, Dr. Heymann holds a Canada Research Chair in Global Health and Social Policy. She has authored and edited over 150 publications, including Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder (Harvard Business Press, forthcoming), Raising the Global Floor (Stanford University Press, 2009), Trade and Health (McGill University Press, 2007), Forgotten Families (Oxford University Press, 2006), Healthier Societies (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Unfinished Work (New Press, 2005). Heymann has led the development of a unique graduate and undergraduate multidisciplinary training program that bridges research and policy development with students gaining experience in 18 countries.
Dr. Heymann established and leads the first global initiative to examine social policy in all 192 UN nations. This initiative provides an in-depth look at how social policies affect the ability of individuals, families and communities to meet their health needs across the political, economic and social spectrum worldwide.
Deeply committed to translating research into policies and programs that will improve individual and population health, Dr. Heymann has worked with leaders in North American, European, African, and Latin American governments as well as a wide range of intergovernmental organizations including the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, UNICEF, and UNESCO. Central to her efforts are bridging the gap between research and policymakers, and Dr. Heymann’s research has been presented to heads of state and senior policymakers around the world.
Dr. Henri Rothschild, President and CEO, International Science and Technology Partnerships Canada (ISTPCanada)
Title of Talk: The Growing Importance of Global Technology Partnerships
Dr. Henri Rothschild has over 30 years of leadership experience in the planning and execution of national and global science and technology (S&T) initiatives that address Canadian innovation objectives. He is currently President & CEO of three strategic and complementary S&T organizations in Canada’s system of innovation: Precarn, an appointment in 2009; International Science and Technology Partnerships Canada (ISTPCanada), an organization he helped to create in 2007; and the Canada-Israel Industrial R&D Foundation (CIIRDF), which he has managed since its inception in 1994. Prior to CIIRDF, Dr. Rothschild held a number of positions of increasing responsibilities associated with the management and commercialization of research, reaching the level of Assistant Deputy Minister, Science and Technology, and later Chief Scientist at Industry Canada. Dr. Rothschild has served as director of the University of Toronto’s Innovation Foundation where he was interim President and CEO from 1998 to 1999, Canadian member of the scientific delegation to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) 1974-81, Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the International Human Frontiers Science Program, as well as having held leading positions in many other international organizations such as the OECD. In December 1999, Dr. Rothschild was the recipient of the 10th Anniversary Medal of the International Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP), an award presented at the White House.
Dr. Rothschild has a Bachelor of Science from the Université de Montréal, and a Masters and PhD of Science from Purdue University.
Dr. Eliane Ubalijoro, Adjunct Professor of Practice for Public-Private Sector Partnerships at McGill University’s Institute for the Study of International Development
Title of Talk: Grounding African Drug Discovery and Development locally: innovation challenges and opportunities
Éliane Ubalijoro is an adjunct professor of practice for public and private sector partnerships at McGill University’s Institute for the Study of International Development, where her research interests focus on innovation in global health, sustainable development in relation to girls’ and women’s empowerment. Dr. Ubalijoro is also a member of the non-profit group: The Innovation Partnership (TIP). TIP specializes in the understanding, better use and management of intellectual property to foster innovation and creativity. Previously, she was an assistant professor in McGill’s Faculty of agricultural and environmental sciences. She is a member of the presidential advisory council for Rwandan president Paul Kagame. She is involved in various capacity building initiatives to harness the bioeconomy for Africa. She was a scientific research and development director for five years at a Montreal-based biotechnology company. Dr. Ubalijoro is researching links between gender, sustainable development, biodiversity management, and peace building. She is also involved in an initiative to establish a Pan African Natural Products Library. The initial funding for this project co-led with Professor Timothy Geary, the director of McGill’s Institute of Parasitology was funded through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to establish an anti-parasitic drug discovery platform in Africa.
Dr. Michael Clarke, Director, Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and Director, Research on Health Equity, International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
Title of Talk: Strategic Partnerships for Global Health at Canada's International Development Research Centre
Michael Clarke received his PhD from the Department of Pathology, University of Guelph in 1982 after having worked as a teacher and field biologist in Sierra Leone, West Africa for three years. He went on to a post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr Terry Pearson at the University of Victoria, British Columbia where he carried research on the molecular biology of African trypanosomes, the etiological agent of African sleeping sickness. In 1986 he took up a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the then Faculty of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario. He continued his research on African trypanosomes focusing on the molecular and biochemical aspects of antigenic variation in these pathogens using both laboratory-based methods and computational approaches. Computational biology became an increasing focus of the research and in 2002 Clarke was named the Assistant Dean, Information Technology in the UWO Faculty of Medicine.
During this time, Clarke was appointed to the Board of Directors and to the Scientific Advisory Board of Procyon Biopharma, London Ontario, from 1999 to 2003.
In 2003-2004 he took a sabbatical year of research in the Laboratory for Food-borne Zoonoses in Guelph, Ontario then under Health Canada. The work at LFZ, in the laboratory of Dr Roger Johnson, was examining the molecular aspects of the human immune response to infection with pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli, that arose from the outbreak of E coli in Walkerton in the Spring of 2000.
In 2004, Clarke moved to the University of Ottawa where he took up the position of Director of eCurriculum in the Faculty of Medicine and continued teaching in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology. In 2007 he moved to the International Development Research Centre as Director, Information and Communications Technologies for Development and in May 2009 took on the addition role of Director, Research on Health Equity.
Dr. Kishor Wasan, Professor & Distinguished University Scholar, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of British Columbia and CIHR/iCo Therapeutics Research Chair in Drug Delivery for Neglected Global Diseases
Title of Talk: Development and Evaluation of a Novel Oral Amphotericin B Formulation for the Treatment of Systemic Fungal Infections and Drug-Resistant Visceral Leishmaniasis
Abstract: Dr. Wasan abstract [.pdf]
Dr. Kishor M. Wasan is a Distinguished University Scholar Professor & Chair of Pharmaceutics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. In the 15 years that Dr. Wasan has been an independent researcher at UBC, he has published over 180 peer-reviewed articles and 220 abstracts in the area of lipid-based drug delivery and lipoprotein-drug interactions. His work was recently highlighted in the January 2008 Issue of Nature Reviews, Drug Discovery.
Dr. Wasan was one of the recipients of the 1993 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Graduate Student Awards for Excellence in Graduate Research in Drug Delivery, the 2001 AAPS New Investigator Award/Grant in Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutics Technologies, the 2002 Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada New Investigator Research Award and recently was named an AAPS fellow in 2006. In addition, Dr. Wasan was awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research University-Industry Research Chair in Pharmaceutical Development (2003-2008), was named a University Distinguished Scholar in April 2004 received the 2007 AAPS Award for Outstanding Research in Lipid-Based Drug Delivery and the 2008 AFPC-Pfizer Research Career Award. In April 2009 Dr. Wasan was named CIHR/iCo Therapeutics Research Chair in Drug Delivery for Neglected Global Diseases. Currently Dr. Wasan's research is supported by several grants from The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, several pharmaceutical companies and the National Cancer Institute of Canada-Clinical Trials Group.
Dr. Alan Evans, James McGill Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Biomedical Engineering, McGill University and Director of the Montreal Consortium for Brain Imaging Research
Title of Talk: Towards a global brain imaging network
Professor Alan Evans did his undergraduate training in physics at Liverpool University in the U.K. He completed his PhD in biophysics, studying the 3D folding patterns of protein structure and the binding of co-factors and substrates to enzymes. He then spent 5-year at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. in Ottawa, working on the physics and biochemical analysis of positron emission tomography (PET) data.
In 1984, he moved to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) at McGill University in Montreal to continue his PET research. His research interests include multi-modal brain imaging with PET and MRI, image processing and large-scale brain database analysis.
He has published 350+ peer-reviewed papers and holds numerous NIH and CIHR grants. During his 25 years at the MNI, he has held numerous leadership roles, most notably as director of the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre (BIC) during the 1990’s. Dr. Evans is a founding member of the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM). He was one of the founders of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), serving in numerous positions on the OHBM Council since 1995. He chaired the 4th International Conference on Human Brain Mapping in 1998. He is a regular participant in numerous NIH workshops, panels and initiatives related to brain imaging research. He is on the scientific advisory board of numerous research programs in this field. In 2003 he received a Senior Scientist Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He is currently the P.I. of the Montreal Consortium for Brain Imaging Research (MCBIR), a $35M multi-center initiative to network the BIC with 6 other institutions engaged in research in psychiatry, neurology, development and aging, cognitive neuroscience, brain development and drug addiction and large-scale brain data processing.
Dr Evans is also Founder and Director of Biospective Inc., (www.biospective.com) a Montreal-based company that specializes in image analysis for clinical and pre-clinical pharmaceutical studies.
Dr. Hamish Fraser , Director of Informatics and Telemedicine at Partners in Health and Assistant Professor, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Title of Talk: Using the OpenMRS electronic medical record system to strengthen health care delivery in Rwanda
Dr. Fraser is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He trained in General Medicine, Cardiology and Knowledge Based Systems in the UK and completed a fellowship in Clinical Decision Making and Cardiology at MIT and the New England Medical Center.
His work has led to the migration of medical informatics tools and expertise from developed countries to some of the most challenging environments in the developing world. As the Director of Informatics and Telemedicine at Partners In Health for almost ten years, he leads the development of web-based medical record systems and data analysis tools and pharmacy systems to support the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV in Peru, Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi and the Philippines.
Dr. Fraser is a co-founder, with colleagues from the Regenstrief Institute at the University of Indiana and the South African Medical Research Council, of an international collaboration to develop flexible, open source medical record system platform for use in developing countries- the OpenMRS collaborative. OpenMRS is now used to support patient treatment in five PIH projects, and at least 15 other countries. Dr. Fraser has a strong interest in the evaluation of medical information systems in developing countries and has carried out studies in Peru, Haiti and Rwanda. He was recently elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.
Title of Talk: “My Word”: Storytelling and Digital Media for Health Promotion and Research in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut
Abstract: Dr. Edge and Ms. Harper abstract [.pdf]
Dr. Victoria Edge, Senior Epidemiologist, Public Health Agency of Canada and Adjunct Professor, Department of Population Medicine, University of Guelph
Dr. Victoria Edge is a senior epidemiologist who has worked for Health Canada, and now the Public Health Agency of Canada, since 2000. Currently with the Office of Public Health Practice, Dr. Edge works in population health assessment and scenario analysis related to public health issues. Her degrees include a BSc (Wildlife Biology), an MSc (Applied Biostatistics) and a PhD (Epidemiology).
As an adjunct professor with the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, she is a co-supervisor/committee member for several graduate students. In this role, Dr. Edge has worked primarily on public health related research primarily in Canadian Inuit communities, with work related to surveillance, infectious diseases (zoonotic, waterborne, foodborne), climate change, and ecohealth approaches. Research projects have investigated different methodologies in enhancing the capture of community health and environmental health data. One such community-led project that Dr. Edge is involved in is the use of Digital Storytelling as a way to utilize digital media to document and share stories about the effects of climate change on human health.
Dr. Edge is also a co-lead of the Public Health Program with the Canadian Water Network Centre of Excellence, which allows for promoting a public health perspective in encouraging innovative and multi-disciplinary research of water-related issues in Canada.
Ms. Sherilee Harper, PhD Candidate, Department of Population Medicine, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph
Sherilee Harper is a PhD student and a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar (CIHR) in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph. She is currently the Co-Director of the Changing Climate, Changing Health, Changing Stories Project, a community-based, participatory, and interdisciplinary project examining the impacts of climate change on human health and well-being in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut. Her MSc thesis was entitled Weather, Water, and Health in the Context of a Changing Climate in Nunatsiavut Canada and (i) investigated associations between weather, water, and health variables, (ii) evaluated the ‘EBook’ Health Registry, and (iii) co-created and implemented an educational program to further develop local weather-water-health knowledge and understanding in Nunatsiavut. Sherilee has received numerous scholarships, awards, and grants to support this work, and has presented at national and international conferences. She has worked contractually for the Public Health Agency of Canada on public health, scenario analysis, and EcoHealth projects. Her current areas of research interest include EcoHealth, public health, climate change, waterborne-disease, public health surveillance, Aboriginal health, and capacity development.
