Careers in Precision Health: Facts and Snacks
Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives/NeuroSphere and The Desjardins Centre for Advanced Training/RI-MUHC have come together to offer graduate students a series of two seminars dedicated to precision health and professional development.
Speakers from both industry and academia will share their experience and provide insights on the different ways precision medicine is applied in various fields. They will discuss their own professional paths and offer different career-development perspectives on precision health and medicine. The presentations will be followed by Q&A and networking sessions with the guest speaker(s).
Seminar 2—December 8, 2022
Speakers:
Touhid Rashid Opu—Senior Manager, Personalize my Treatment Initiative, Exactis Innovation
Ruth Sapir Pitchhadze—Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, McGill University
Noam Ship—Medical Advisor for Mental Health at Boehringer Ingelheim, Canada
The presentation will:
- Summarize the defining characteristics of precision medicine, including how it facilitates new health solutions.
- Identify the range of tools and methods applied in developing precision-medicine solutions.
- Evaluate the different applications of precision medicine.
- Indicate the different roles that exist to support the development of precision-medicine solutions (i.e., show how individuals with different backgrounds—engineering, computer science, biomedical science, psychology, etc.—can find jobs in the field).
Speakers
Dr. Ruth Sapir-Pichhadze
Dr. Sapir-Pichhadze is a clinician scientist and transplant nephrologist at the McGill University Health Centre. She completed training in General Internal Medicine, Nephrology and Kidney Transplantation at the University of Toronto. Thereafter, she enrolled in the Eliot Phillipson Clinician Scientist Training Program and received a PhD in Clinical Epidemiology and Health Care Research at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. She is leading a CIHR, FRQS and Genome Canada funded research program, which focuses on the application of personalized medicine strategies for the prevention of immune-mediated injuries. Specifically, she is interested in identifying genetic determinants of donor and recipient compatibility in an effort to optimize organ-allocation schemes, inform personalized surveillance schedules, and establish individually-tailored therapeutic regimens in kidney transplant candidates and recipients.
Dr. Touhid Opu
Dr. Opu obtained his MD from the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) and completed his MSc in Experimental Medicine at McGill University.
Following his graduation in 2017, he started his career at the RI-MUHC Centre for Innovative Medicine (CIM) as the Oncology Clinical Research Coordinator. He joined Exactis Innovation—a pan-Canadian precision oncology research network—as a Clinical Research Associate in 2019 and soon moved into a Project Manager position for oncology trials. At present, he is the Senior Manager of the Personalized My Treatment (PMT) initiative, a cancer registry of over 8000 patients across 16 hospitals in Canada. His expertise lies in the management of biomarker-driven cancer clinical trials, including interventional (phase I-III), observational and real-world evidence (RWE) studies.
Dr. Noam Ship
Noam Ship studied Chemistry at McGill University and received his PhD in Biological Chemistry at the University of Toronto. During his career in Industry he has contributed to the development of a variety of treatments for Psychiatry and Neurology including pharmaceuticals, biologics and digital technologies.
RI-MUHC Contact Information
Contact: Emily Bell
Organization: Desjardins Center for Advanced Training (DCAT)
Email: emily.bell [at] mcgill.ca
