- Tasha Ayinde
- Jill Baumgartner
- Timothy Evans
- Jonathan Kimmelman
- Charles Larson
- Arijit Nandi
- Olivia Oxlade
- Louise Pilote
- Robert Platt
- Alexandra Schmidt
Tasha Ayinde
Tasha Ayinde is Associate Director, Administration, responsible for seven departments within the McGill Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, including: Global Health Programs, McGill Centre for Viral Diseases, Social Studies of Medicine, Institute for Health and Social Policy, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health and McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity and the School of Population and Global Health. Ms. Ayinde oversees the strategic operations and administration of the departments and serves as senior advisor to the chairs and directors. A graduate of Simon Fraser University, British Columbia and McGill University, Montreal, Ms. Ayinde also holds a Master of Public Policy and Public Administration degree from Concordia University.
Ms. Ayinde has worked within the higher education sector for the past fourteen years. Her research and professional interests include health policy, organizational development, issues related to governance and program evaluation. Prior to joining McGill University, she worked as a human resource consultant in her own firm, servicing public and private organizations and held management positions within the British Columbia provincial government, private sector and not-for-profit groups. Ms. Ayinde has actively participated and sat on various steering committees such as the Faculty of Medicine's Think Dangerously Strategic Planning Initiative, Family Medicine Task Force and the Dean of Medicine Global Health Task Force. She formally sat on the Administrative Excellence Project Team, the Executive Committee for the Institute of Public Health and Population Health and the Dean of Medicine Awards of Excellence Selection Committee. Ms. Ayinde is the Co-Chair, Global Health Group, Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada and was most recently appointed as Co-Chair, Policy and Advocacy Committee for the Canadian Coalition of Global Health Research (2020).
Jill Baumgartner
Dr. Jill Baumgartner is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics & Occupational Health at McGill University. She also is an Associate Member of the McGill School of Environment. Dr. Baumgartner studies exposure to environmental pollutants and their effect on human health in the context of urbanization and development. She holds a joint Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences and Environment & Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Masters in Population and International Health from Harvard University. She was a Global Renewable Energy Leadership Fellow at the Institute on the Environment (University of Minnesota) from 2011-2013 and a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University in 2012.
Timothy Evans
Jonathan Kimmelman
Dr. Jonathan Kimmelman is a James McGill Professor in the Biomedical Ethics Unit / Social Studies of Medicine. He has cross-appointments in Experimental Medicine, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, and Human Genetics. Kimmelman holds a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, and joined McGill in 2005. His research revolves around the ethical, social and policy dimensions of translational research. He received the Institute of Genetics Maud Menten New Investigator Prize, a CIHR New Investigator Award (2008) and a Friedrich Bessel- Humboldt Award (2014). Kimmelman chaired the ethics committee of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, 2008-2010, and chairs the ethics committee of the International Society of Stem Cell Research. He also served on the CIHR Stem Cell Oversight Committee, is a current member of the Gene and Cell Therapy DSMB of U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and has been a member of two U.S. Institute of Medicine committee reports. His book, Gene Transfer and the Ethics of First-in-Human Trials: Lost in Translation, was published by Cambridge University Press. In 2018, he was named as a Hastings Center Fellow.
Charles Larson
Dr. Charles Larson completed his medical degree and subsequent specializations in Pediatrics and Preventive Medicine & Public Health at McGill University. Spanning more than 30 years, Dr. Larson’s academic career has primarily focused on capacity building and implementation research to support the scaling up of life-saving interventions for children under the age of five. From 1989 to 1992 Dr. Larson directed the McGill-Ethiopia Strengthening Community Health Project, before returning to Canada where he directed the McGill Global Health Office within the Faculty of Medicine and led a five-year McGill Population and Child Health project in Chelyabinsk, Russia. In 2002, Dr. Larson moved to Bangladesh where, on secondment from McGill, he directed the Health Systems and Infectious Diseases Division at the International Centre for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). In 2008, he joined the Department of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia as Professor and Director of BC Children’s Hospital Centre for International Child Health. In 2015, Dr. Larson returned to Montreal where he joined the Department of EBOH and the McGill Global Health programs, for which he currently serves as the interim director. Dr. Larson is also and the National Coordinator of the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research (CCGHR).
Arijit Nandi
Dr. Arijit Nandi holds a Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Global Health. He is an Associate Professor at McGill University appointed at the Institute for Health and Social Policy, and the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, where he serves as the Epidemiology Program Director.
A former Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University, Arijit received a PhD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In his research, Arijit is generally interested in understanding the effects of programs and policies on health and health inequalities in a global context using experimental and quasi-experimental approaches. He is Principal Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded Foundation Scheme grant that supports the multidisciplinary PROSPERED project. PROSPERED brings together an international team of investigators, trainees, and knowledge users to estimate the effects of public policies on health and social inequality. Arijit is also a founding member of the Public Policy and Population Health Observatory (3PO) at McGill, a lab that includes faculty and trainees studying the effects of policies and programs on health and health inequality using quasi-experimental and experimental methods.
Olivia Oxlade
Dr. Olivia Oxlade is the Associate Scientific Director- Management of the COVID-19 Immunity Taskforce- a Government of Canada funded initiative to track the spread of the virus in both the general population and priority populations in Canada, housed at the School of Global and Population Health at McGill University. Dr. Oxlade trained as an epidemiologist, completing her Master of Science degree at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in London UK and her PhD in epidemiology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Oxlade’s research focuses on global health and tuberculosis (TB). From 2015 until August 2020, Dr. Oxlade worked at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, where she served as an Associate Director of the McGill International TB Centre and as Managing Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for TB Research. Over the past decade she has managed many large projects funded by different organizations including USAID, WHO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CIHR and the Public Health Agency of Canada. Most recently, she provided oversight to a large CIHR funded research program focused on TB prevention at the RI-MUHC and managed a multi-centre international trial with sites in Africa, Asia, Brazil, and Canada.
Louise Pilote
Dr. Louise Pilote is a Professor of Medicine at McGill University where she holds a James McGill chair. She is a practicing general internist and led the McGill division of general internal medicine from 2006-2016. She is a recognized sex and gender scientist, a leader in sex and gender-based cardiovascular research and a pioneer in comparative effectiveness research. She developed new methodologies to analyze gender as a variable to understand the association between gender, sex, and cardiovascular risk factors and outcomes.
As a clinician scientist, Dr. Pilote has directed several research initiatives that led to important new insights into the determinants of premature coronary disease. With support from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Dr. Pilote led the GENESIS team which clarified the role of sex and gender in diagnosis, treatment and outcomes in heart disease and build capacity in women’s heart health research. She demonstrated in a sentinel paper that gender mattered when it comes to heart disease: patients with a higher “femininity” score—regardless of whether they were a man or a woman—were more likely to experience a recurrent cardiac event.
Dr. Pilote was one of the four editors of the Canadian Cardiovascular Atlas which mapped Canada in terms of cardiovascular care & outcomes in Canada and one of the first to conduct a registry trial that took advantage of Canadian administrative data to collect outcome data for the Administration data feedback for effective cardiac treatment (AFFECT) trial.
Dr. Pilote recently launched the GOING-FWD consortium a data science, personalized medicine project funded by CIHR and the European GENDER-NET+ initiative, where 30 million patients with chronic disease across Canada and Europe will be analyzed using a sex and gender lens to more precisely predict their risk of clinical and patient-relevant outcomes.
As a co-principal investigator of the CAN-AIM team, funded by CIHR, Dr. Pilote has also harnessed big data to study sex differences in the effectiveness and safety of cardiac drugs and devices.
Robert Platt
Dr. Robert Platt is Professor and Chair of the department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health (EBOH) at McGill University, and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics. He is a Senior Investigator at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre and the Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital, and Investigator at the McGill Pharmacoepidemiology Research Unit, and holds the Albert Boehringer I endowed chair in Pharmacoepidemiology. Dr. Platt is the Executive Co-Lead and leader of the Methods team of the Canadian Network for Observational Drug Effect Studies (CNODES). His research focuses on improving methods for the study of medications using administrative data, with an emphasis on methods for causal inference and a substantive focus on medications in pregnancy. Dr. Platt is an editor-in-chief of Statistics in Medicine and is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Epidemiology and Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. He has published over 350 articles, one book and several book chapters on biostatistics and epidemiology.
robert.platt [at] mcgill.ca
514 398-6259/4503
Alexandra M. Schmidt
Dr. Alexandra M. Schmidt is Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health (EBOH) at McGill University. Currently, she is the Program Director of the Biostatistics Graduate Program.
She is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2020) and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (2010). She was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Medal (2017) from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and the Environment and the Abdel El-Shaarawi Young Investigator Award (2008), from The International Environmetrics Society. She was the 2015 President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.
She is a member of the Environmental Epidemiology Research Group of EBOH, of the Quantitative Life Sciences Program (QLS), and Associate Member of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Her main areas of research are on the modelling of spatial and spatio-temporal processes under the Bayesian framework.
She is the chair of the local organizing committee of the 2022 ISBA World Meeting, which will be held in Montreal, QC, Canada.