Researchers

Dr. Maberley performs research in population health and the medical and surgical management of macular disease, diabetic retinopathy, and high myopia. He has most recently co-led the Diabetic Retinopathy Goal Group of Diabetes Action Canada (a CIHR SPOR initiative), assisted in the development of the Preceyes Robotic Vitreo-retinal Surgical System (Technical University of Eindhoven) and in modelling blood flow through retinal microvascular pathologies (University of Amsterdam).

His laboratory, located within the Alberta Diabetes Institute, works to understand the cellular machinery that controls production of the important blood sugar controlling hormones insulin and glucagon by islet cells from human organ donors. Dr. MacDonald directs the Alberta Diabetes Institute IsletCore, one of the world’s largest sources of human pancreas research tissue, and co-founded the Canadian Islet Research and Training Network.

Dr. Mahmud’s research focuses on clinical and lifestyle-based interventions in youth with diabetes, including the early evaluation and prevention of diabetes-related complications. He is the lead investigator for the Adolescent Type 1 diabetes Treatment with SGLT2i for hyperglycEMia & hyPerfilTration (ATTEMPT) study, a double-blind, randomized control trial evaluating adjunct-to-insulin therapy using Sodium-glucose transport protein 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors on renal and glycemic outcomes.

Dr. Manca’s research is focused on obtaining and using data for research and to improve care through prevention, screening and better management. She is the Director of the Northern Alberta Primary Care Research Network (NAPCReN), a network contributing data to the Canadian Primary Care Research Network (CPCSSN). Dr. Manca is also a Co-Founder of the BETTER Program and a Director of the BETTER Institute, a non-profit organization aimed to improve chronic disease prevention and screening in primary care.

Dr. Despoina Manousaki received her MD from the University of Athens, Greece, her post-graduate training in pediatrics in Switzerland (University Hospitals of Geneva) and in pediatric endocrinology in Canada (Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal). Subsequently, she obtained a PhD in genetic epidemiology from McGill University. Dr. Manousaki’s research focuses on the genetics of complex disease in childhood.

Robin Mason is committed to enhancing the understanding of, and commitment to, the integration of an intersectional sex and gender lens (SGBA+) in all health research. To this end, she has designed educational materials and activities to engage students, trainees, patients and other community members, as well as established researchers in considering the impact of sex, gender and other identity-related factors in their studies. Dr. Mason has been working on issues of gender-based violence and medical education for 20 years and has contributed to the development of policies at the local, provincial and national level.

Dr. McGavock’s research program focuses on the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes in youth, with a particular focus on physical activity. Studies in his lab range from studying the effectiveness and implementation of urban trails on cardiometabolic disease, to clinical trials of novel behavioral interventions for adolescents living with diabetes to the application of causal methods to uncover early life origins of adolescent cardiometabolic diseases.

She has over 25 years of experience, working in both hospitals and private practice-based settings managing foot related complications. She is currently a member of the St. Michael’s Hospital Interdisciplinary Wound Care Team, specializing in the high-risk foot, limb salvage and advanced wound care. She enjoys teaching health care professionals from all disciplines and actively teaches Masters’ students from University of Western Ontario, chiropody students from Michener Institute Chiropody Program and medical fellows from University of Toronto.

Her primary research focuses on the integration of telehealth treatments for mental health and addictive disorders into everyday clinical practice. One of her key areas of interest involves investigating the incorporation of remote health coaching into the care of individuals with diabetes. Her goal is to provide support for healthy behaviors and emotional well-being in this population. Furthermore, Dr. Melamed has contributed as a co-author to the Mental Health chapter of the 2023 Clinical Practice Guidelines published by Diabetes Canada.

The overall objective of Dr. Michaud’s research program is to evaluate the impact of interventions targeting cardiometabolic health on brain structure and function as well as the consequent impact on cognition. Her research program contains projects that employ brain MRI techniques in combination with behavioral and metabolic measurements.

Dr. Murphy’s professional activities include co- chair of the Communications Committee of the Canadian Society of Vascular Nurses, Associate Core Faculty Member and Course Examiner of the Master Clinical Science of Wound Healing graduate program at Western University, Panel Member of the 2013 RNAO Best Practice Guideline Update: Diabetic Foot Ulcers, Stakeholder of the current RNAO Best Practice Guideline Update: Pressure Ulcers. Christine is a frequent manuscript reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals and a speaker at national conferences.

Dr. Ruth Ndjaboue’s research aims to clarify the complex relationships between psychosocial factors, health factors and active aging in a way that takes into account aging people who could otherwise be excluded or marginalized. My multidisciplinary training allows me to develop projects combining interdisciplinary and intersectional concepts and expertise, as well as biostatistical, qualitative, and/or technology-related approaches.

The focus of her program of research is health- and social-care integration for older adults with clinical complexity and their caregivers. The themes of Melissa’s program are to understand the factors, correlates, and outcomes of clinical complexity for different populations of older adults across different health-care settings.

Mathieu Ouimet is a professor in political science at Université Laval in Quebec City. His areas of expertise include (but is not limited to) the use of research evidence in policymaking and research methods, notably social network analysis, one of the methods used by the HTA & Network Analysis group to evaluate the Network.

Dr. Monica Parry is a Nurse Practitioner (Adult) with over 35 years of cardiovascular (CV) clinical experience. Her clinical expertise has laid the foundation for a program of research to reduce the burden of CV disease and its complications. Dr. Parry is a member of the Banting & Best Diabetes Centre and is Core Faculty and a Collaborating Investigator with the Collaborative Program in Resuscitation Science, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. She is interested in sex and gender issues and is currently leading a research team to develop and test at heart: A WebApp for Women with Heart Disease.

Dr. Bruce Perkins’ research platform, research leadership, clinical practice, and advocacy work has focused entirely on strategies to improve the lives of those, like himself, living with type 1 diabetes. Using cohort and trial methods, his research has focused on; 1) early biomarkers and mechanisms of diabetes complications, and 2) complications prevention through artificial pancreas technologies and add-on-to-insulin drug therapies.

Dr. Poitras is an expert in knowledge mobilization and patient-engagement in the context of primary care of chronic diseases. Her research is focused on nursing practice, primary care health service organization, patient-reported measures, and patient engagement. She is co-leading a national initiative funded by Service Canada to support the development of the scope of practice of primary care nurses in family medicine clinics.

He leads a multidisciplinary team of research staff and trainees focused on rigorously drawing from – and contributing to – behavioural and implementation science to support the health and well-being of patients, the public, and supporting health providers in the health care system to provide high quality care. This group partners with interest holders including patients, people with lived experience and health system decision makers and health providers, and with a strong commitment to equity-focused research.

Dr. Pritlove is a critical qualitative methodologist and health services researcher with expertise in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). She employs patient-oriented research methodologies in her work on Type 1 Diabetes, partnering with patients and communities to improve the quality, safety, access, and person-centered nature of diabetes care.

Dr. Rabasa-Lhoret is an endocrinologist at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) and holds two research chairs. His research program on type 1 diabetes primarily focuses on reducing the frequency and impact of hypoglycemia. He is also actively involved in advocating for the rights of people living with diabetes, in training healthcare professionals, and in scientific communication for the general public.

Dr. Valeria Rac’s research is focused on program and network evaluations and complex interventions in chronic disease management, working closely with patients and their family members, community partners, innovators, researchers and government/policy-makers. Using a variety of evaluative approaches to assess our healthcare system, she and her team provide rapid, timely feedback to all involved stakeholders that contribute to the establishment of a learning healthcare system.

She is an applied health services researcher with interests in primary healthcare, interprofessional teams, health equity and learning health systems. She works in collaboration with researchers, evaluators and policy makers to improve care for people with barriers. Her community based primary care experience includes leadership roles in research, policy, planning, performance, accountability and quality improvement.

Dr. Paula Rochon is the founding director and lead of Women’s Age Lab, the first research centre to focus on older women in the world, based at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. Through a focus on sex and age disaggregated data collection, Women’s Age Lab aims to support the healthy aging of women by reimagining a system and society where older women and their distinct well-being and health needs are recognized and addressed

Dr. Ronksley’s research focuses on patients with multiple chronic conditions. Specifically, his research aims to improve our understanding of the subset of chronic disease patients that drive health care utilization and spending. Using novel data-linkage methodologies, his work explores the clinical (co-morbid) profiles of patients with multi-morbidity, how they engage with the health care system, and whether care pathways can be modified to improve health outcomes for patients.

Dr Rosolowsky is a pediatric endocrinologist with a major interest in type 1 diabetes and education at the University of Alberta. During her training she completed a research fellowship at the Joslin Diabetes Centre. She is an active participant in the Canadian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism and has been a chapter author for the Diabetes Canada Clinical Practice Guideline chapter for management of type 1 diabetes in children.

Dr. Screaton’s research focuses on finding cures for type 1 and type 2 diabetes through understanding how human cells respond to extracellular cues to maintain and ensure their function and survival. A central focus is to better understand how the pancreatic beta cell converts feeding cues into signals leading to insulin synthesis and secretion.

From his earliest research, he has been eager to contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge through carefully executed experiments and ground-breaking published work. For his strong contributions, Sejdić was named the editor-in-chief of Biomedical Engineering Online; an area editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, the highest rated journal in the field of signal processing; and an associate editor of Digital Signal Processing and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Selby’s research focus is on innovative methods to understand and treat addictive behaviours and their comorbidities. He also uses technology to combine clinical medicine and public health methods to scale up and test health interventions. His cohort of 240,000 treated smokers in Ontario is an example.

Dr. Sénéchal’s research interests focus on the impact of physical activity and exercise training on cardiometabolic health in individuals living with obesity.

Dr. Peter Senior’s clinical and research interests focus on type 1 diabetes, islet transplantation, hypoglycemia and diabetic nephropathy. He has been an investigator in a number of clinical trials in both diabetes and islet transplantation ranging from large multicentre studies (e.g., ACCORD) to smaller investigator-initiated trials.

As a health services researcher and clinician-scientist, Dr. Shah seeks to understand and improve the quality of care and long-term outcomes of people with diabetes. He has national and international leadership in several areas of research, including diabetes care in ethnic, immigrant and indigenous populations; long-term cardiometabolic consequences for women following gestational diabetes; and novel models of healthcare delivery to improve outcomes.

Dr. Sherifali’s research focuses on optimizing the management of diabetes and quality of life of people with diabetes across the lifespan. The broad goal of her research program is to engage individuals to effectively self-manage and mitigate the impact of diabetes on their life. Her research will examine health coaching and digital solutions to improve health-related outcomes and extend diabetes self-management.

Dr. Rayzel Shulman’s research program is focused on developing and evaluating health services interventions to improve the health and quality of care for youth living with diabetes. Areas of focus include transition to adult care, preventing DKA at diabetes diagnosis, and reducing socioeconomic disparities in care and outcomes.

Dr. Alexander Singer’s research focuses on using electronic medical records (EMRs) for secondary use, specifically in the areas of disease surveillance, natural language processing, and pragmatic clinical trials based in primary care settings. He is affiliated with several research groups, including the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Choosing Wisely Canada, Diabetes Action Canada, and the Patients, Experience, Evidence, Research network.

Aleksandra is well trained in mixed methods and led the economic evaluation of the DAC tele-retinopathy research project in collaboration with Community Health Centres in Toronto. She has developed a profound interest in the interplay of social theories and economics using the intersectionality framework guided by a health equity lens. Her goal is to mainstream how we conceptualize the impact of programs/interventions with respect to (in)equity and access to care on women, people from lower socioeconomic groups or people from certain cultures or racial backgrounds while remaining focused on economic analysis.

Metabolic complications of obesity and body fat distribution, with a particular emphasis on adipose tissue physiology. Experimental approaches combine cellular biology techniques with biochemistry, genomics, transcriptomics and clinical investigation in humans as well as the study of bariatric surgery.

Her research expertise includes mixed methods and qualitative research, patient engagement and participatory research approaches. Her current research uses participatory approaches to make the health system more equitable and accessible to marginalized populations. She leads various projects that address cultural safety of health care, racism issues in the health system, patient participation in research and health education, as well as reflexivity as a strategy for critical learning.

Dr. Tu is the founder of the Electronic Medical Record Administrative data Linked Database (EMRALD) and has unique insights into the analysis electronic medical record (EMR) data. She has extensive experience and expertise in the use of primary care EMR data, administrative data and the validation of administrative data and EMR data algorithms for the identification of common chronic diseases.

Dr. Bruce Verchere’s research aims to understand how pancreatic islet beta cells function and why they are lost or are dysfunctional in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes and following transplantation. He has made contributions to understanding of islet inflammation, the biosynthesis of beta cell hormones, and the pathophysiology of the beta cell peptide islet amyloid polypeptide.

As a medical doctor and public health specialist, he has led randomized trials to change clinical practice and make impacts at the policy level in areas of antimicrobial resistance, tuberculosis control and diabetes/ hypertension care. He currently leads a pragmatic trial to investigate the effect of employing telemedicine to improve care for diabetes, hypertension and COVID-19 in rural Pakistan.

Her research program is focused on investigating and understanding determinants of outcomes in type 1 diabetes, to ultimately inform novel management strategies. She is the recipient of the 2020 Banting & Best Diabetes Centre New Investigator Award and the 2021 Banting-CANSSI Ontario Discovery Award. As part of her research program in type 1 diabetes, she is leading the development of a new province-wide database.

Dr. Diane Wherrett is the Centre Director of the Canadian site of the NIH multicentre clinical trial group, Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet, and a member of the TrialNet Steering Committee. Dr. Wherrett leads a Canadian research consortium, Canadian Population Screening for Risk of Type 1 Diabetes Research Consortium, CanScreen T1D, funded by CIHR and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to assess the acceptability and feasibility of screening for type 1 diabetes risk in Canadian children, supporting the development of a pilot screening program.

As a certified psychiatric and mental health nurse, Dr. Whitmore’s research focuses on optimizing care and care delivery for those living with chronic conditions and co-morbid mental health challenges. Using applied health research methods, Carly’s research examines the role of relationships as a mechanism for integrating care and improving health-related outcomes for individuals, families, and communities.

With an interdisciplinary background in human factors engineering and social sciences, her research is about how we can achieve human-centredness in health-related domains, including a focus on how best to adapt digital health technology to people rather than expecting people to adapt to technology. She specializes in human-computer interaction in health education, risk communication and decision making, including design methods and system changes to support inclusive user-, human- and patient-centredness.

Dr. Wong is a vitreoretinal surgeon and member of the Canadian Ophthalmology Society, the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Society of Retina Specialists and the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. Numerous awards have been given to him locally and internationally including the American Society of Vitreoretinal Surgeons (ASRS) Senior Award.

Dr. Jane Yardley’s research focuses on exercise (most often weight-lifting) and how it affects people with type 1 diabetes. Exercise is known to make people with diabetes live much longer, much healthier lives. The biggest issue is that it generally complicates blood glucose management and brings with it an increased risk of hypoglycemia (low blood glucose – which can be very dangerous). Fear of going low is the biggest barrier to exercise in this population. She aims to achieve finding a safe and effective way for people with type 1 diabetes to exercise. Lately this has also included some studies on high intensity interval training and fasted exercise, and studies examining the menstrual cycle in an exercise context in women with type 1 diabetes. She has included some work with islet transplant recipients, and people with type 2 diabetes.

She is an academic endocrinologist with special interest in diabetes quality improvement. Her aim is to co-create interventions and improved care processes for preventing and reducing the burden of diabetes in partnership with people with lived experience of diabetes, health care team members, and other system stakeholders.

Dr. Yu research interests focus on the role of patient and clinician behaviour change within knowledge translation for chronic disease management. She is particularly interested in the development of innovative strategies for continuing professional development and patient engagement in diabetes care.

Dr. Ian Zenlea leads a community-based participatory research program that co-designs, implements and evaluates health and social solutions to improve the health and overall well-being of children and families. As a father of three boys and a clinician working alongside children with chronic disease and their families, he appreciates the challenges with our current healthcare system and the impacts of the social and structural determinants of health on the well-being of children and families. Dr. Zenlea envisions a community-driven and community-centred learning health system that fosters thriving and flourishing families in their local communities.