IAB Members (September 2011 - August 2012) – Biographies
Richard Massé, MD, FRCPSC, MSc (Chair)
Associate Professor
Department of Social and Preventive Medicine
Faculty of Medicine
University of Montreal
Dr. Richard Massé is the former Director of the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal. He has a Doctorate in Medicine from Sherbrooke University and a Master Degree in Epidemiology from McGill University. He is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in Community Medicine.
Dr. Massé has dedicated most of his career to Public Health. He has held different positions in the past, including serving as Assistant Deputy Minister responsible for Public Health at the Ministry of Health and Social Services and Chief Medical Officer for the Province of Quebec (1998-2003). He also served as the President and CEO of the Quebec National Institute of Public Health (2003-2008).
Before that, Dr. Massé occupied the position of Medical Officer of Health at the Community Health Department of the Montreal General Hospital (1989-1993) and Coordinator of the Infectious Diseases Unit at the Public Health Direction in Montreal (1993-1997). He also worked as a primary health care physician at the CLSC Lac Etchemin and has some international experience serving in Africa.
Susan Kirkland, PhD (Vice-chair)
Professor
Department of Community Health and Epidemiology and
Faculty of Medicine
Dalhousie University
Dr. Susan Kirkland is a in the Departments of Community Health and Epidemiology and Medicine at Dalhousie University. Dr. Kirkland completed both her Bachelor of Science degree in Kinesiology and Health Studies and her Masters degree in Health Behaviour at the University of Waterloo. She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Toronto with a concentration in Epidemiology.
Her research lies in the areas of chronic diseases and aging. She is particularly interested in the epidemiologic investigation of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis, and the interplay between gender and the genetic, social, cultural and economic determinants of health. Dr. Kirkland has been instrumental in the development of a number of large scale initiatives, including the Maritime Centre of Excellence for Women's Health and the Atlantic Interdisciplinary Research Network for Social and Behavioural Issues in Hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS. She has been involved in the design and analysis of a number of longitudinal studies, including the Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study, the Canadian Heart Health Surveys and the Canadian Study of Health and Aging. She is currently one of three principal investigators leading the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, funded by CIHR and CFI. This 20-year study of 50,000 Canadian men and women over the age of 45 examines the interplay between social and physical environments, genetics, lifestyle and behavioral factors, and the health care system on the process of aging and their influence on disease, health, and well-being.
James Blanchard, MD, MPH, PhD
Professor
Department of Community Health Sciences
University of Manitoba
James F. Blanchard is an epidemiologist and public health specialist who obtained his medical degree from the University of Manitoba in 1986. He subsequently received a Master of Public Health (1990) and Ph.D. in Epidemiology (1997), both from the Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a Professor of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba (Canada), and Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology and Global Public Health (awarded in 2004).
Since 2001, Dr. Blanchard has been living and working in Bangalore, India to support the implementation of HIV/AIDS programs on behalf of the University of Manitoba. Between 2001 and 2006 he was the Resident Coordinator of the India-Canada Collaborative HIV/AIDS Project (ICHAP), which is a 5-year project based in the states of Karnataka and Rajasthan designed to build capacities to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since December 2003, he has been the Project Director for the "Sankalp" Project, which is a 5-year focused HIV/AIDS prevention project in Karnataka funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under "Avahan", its India AIDS Initiative. In addition to his project-related work, Dr. Blanchard has provided technical assistance and strategic advice to a number of government and non-government associations, including the governments of Canada, India and Pakistan, the Canadian International Development Agency and the World Bank. Prior to his work in India, Dr. Blanchard was Manitoba's Provincial Epidemiologist and Head of the Manitoba Collaborative Epidemiology Unit (1992-2000). In that role he developed an applied program of surveillance and research of both communicable and non-communicable diseases. He helped establish internationally recognized research programs in inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes, and continues to conduct research in these areas.
Ted Bruce, MA
Executive Director, Population Health, Vancouver Coastal Health
As Executive Director for Population Health with Vancouver Coastal Health, Mr. Bruce is responsible for the development of the health authority's strategy to address the social determinants of health and reduce health inequities. Working with the senior executive team and public health leadership, Mr. Bruce is responsible for the development of innovative approaches to health authority leadership, partnership, advocacy and policy development to improve the health of various populations.
Mr. Bruce is Past-President of the Public Health Association of BC. The Public Health Association is a voluntary, non-profit association dedicated to preserving and promoting the public's health. Under Mr. Bruce, the Association's priorities were to expand the capacity of the public health workforce and to advocate for policies that reduce health inequities in BC.
Mr. Bruce has over twenty-five years of experience in various policy development, planning and leadership positions in a range of public sector organizations including two provincial government ministries, a professional regulatory organization and health service delivery organizations at both municipal and regional levels. He has worked extensively with community groups to initiate health promotion efforts that address the needs of marginalized people and increase the involvement of communities in health care decision-making.
Mr. Bruce is an Adjunct Professor of Clinical Practice in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. He has served on a number of Advisory Boards including The CAPTURE Initiative and the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy, one of six national collaborating Centres established by the Public Health Agency of Canada. He has served in various capacities on the executive of the Vancouver regional group of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC) and the National Board and National Executive of IPAC. He served on the Board of the Canadian Center for the Analysis of Regionalization and Health in 2004 and 2005.
Prior to his current role, Mr. Bruce was Executive Director of the VCH Primary Health Care Network and before that Regional Director of Health Systems Policy and Community Involvement for Vancouver Coastal Health. From 1998 – 2001, Mr. Bruce was Vice President of Systems Development and Performance for the North Shore Health Region.
Mr. Bruce has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Regina.
David Butler-Jones, MD, MHSc, CCFP, FRCPC, FACPM
Chief Public Health Officer
Public Health Agency of Canada
Dr. David Butler-Jones is Canada's first Chief Public Health Officer. He heads the Public Health Agency of Canada which provides leadership on the government's efforts to protect and promote the health and safety of Canadians.
He has worked in many parts of Canada in both Public Health and Clinical Medicine, and has consulted in a number of other countries.
Dr. Butler-Jones has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and has been involved as a researcher in a broad range of public health issues. He is a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Manitoba as well as a Clinical Professor with the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Medicine.
From 1995 to 2002, Dr. Butler-Jones was Chief Medical Health Officer and Executive Director of the Population Health and Primary Health Services Branches for the Province of Saskatchewan.
Dr. Butler-Jones has served with a number of organizations including as: President of the Canadian Public Health Association; Vice President of the American Public Health Association; Chair of the Canadian Roundtable on Health and Climate Change; International Regent on the board of the American College of Preventive Medicine; Member of the Governing Council for the Canadian Population Health Initiative; Chair of the National Coalition on Enhancing Preventive Practices of Health Professionals; and Co-Chair of the Canadian Coalition for Public Health in the 21st Century.
In recognition of his service in the field of public health, York University's Faculty of Health bestowed on Dr. Butler-Jones an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
Dr. Roy Cameron, PhD
Executive Director
Centre for Behavioural Research and Program Evaluation
Professor
Applied Health Sciences
University of Waterloo
Roy Cameron is the Executive Director of the Centre for Behavioural Research and Program Evaluation (CBRPE) and a Professor in Applied Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. He trained at the University of Waterloo (MA in English, PhD in Clinical Psychology) and Duke University Medical Center (Clinical Internship).
Dr. Cameron's aspiration is to contribute to improved health of Canadians. To that end, in his CBRPE role, his focus is on developing capacity that enables leaders in research, evaluation, policy, and practice to work together to plan, study, and continually improve policies and programs that promote health. His own research in has been mainly in tobacco control.
Dr. Cameron played a lead role in initiating the Canadian Tobacco Control Research Initiative, and the Population Health Intervention Research Initiative for Canada. He also built research capacity through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Pan Canadian Training Program in Tobacco Research. Previously focused solely on linking the tobacco research community to tobacco control policy leaders, this program has expanded training to other areas in population health through a recent CIHR funding renewal.
Dr. Cameron has received honours for his career contributions from a number of organizations, including the National Cancer Institute of Canada (Diamond Jubilee Award) and the University of Waterloo (University Professor designation).
Norman Daniels, PhD
Professor of Population Ethics
Professor of Ethics and Population Health
Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Norman Daniels is Mary B. Saltonstall Professor and Professor of Ethics and Population Health at Harvard School of Public Health. Formerly Goldthwaite Professor, Chair of the Tufts Philosophy Department, and Professor of Medical Ethics at Tufts Medical School, where he taught from 1969 until 2002, he has degrees from Wesleyan (B.A. Summa, 1964), Balliol College, Oxford (B.A., First Honors, 1966), and Harvard (Ph.D., Plympton Dissertation Prize, 1971). He has written widely in the philosophy of science, ethics, political and social philosophy and medical ethics. He has published over 150 articles in anthologies and journals and he has published over 10 books.
A member of the Institute of Medicine, a Fellow of the Hastings Center, a Founding Member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and of the International Society for Equity in Health, he has consulted with organizations, commissions, and governments in the U.S. and abroad on issues of justice and health policy, including for the United Nations, WHO, and the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine. He served as a member of the Ethics Working Group of the Clinton White House Health Care Task Force (Spring 1993), as a member of the Public Health Service Expert Panel on Cost Effectiveness and Clinical Preventive Medicine, as a member of a National Academy of Social Insurance study panel on the social role of Medicare, and as a member of a Century Fund task force on Medicare reform.
He served four years as a founding member of the National Cancer Policy Board, established by the Institute of Medicine and the Commission on the Life Sciences, and on the Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundation project on Medicine as a Profession, and on the International Bioethics Advisory Board of PAHO. He served recently on an IOM Committee on the use of Cost Effectiveness Analysis in regulatory contexts. He is currently on the Ethics Advisory Board of the CDC and on the advisory board of the Institute for Population and Public Health of the Canadian Institute of Health Research. He has held Fellowships and Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Retirement Research Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and others. He held a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator's Award for the period 1998-2001, as well as a Rockefeller Foundation grant for the international adaptation of the benchmarks. In 2010 he was awarded the Everett Mendelsohn Award for mentoring graduate students by the Harvard Graduate Student Association.
Timothy Evans, MD, D.Phil
Dean
James P. Grant School of Public Health
BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dr. Tim Evans, of Canada, is currently Dean of the James P. Grant School of Public Health at the BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. From 2007 to 2010, Dr Evens served as Assistant Director General for the World Health Organization. From 2003 to 2007, Dr. Evans served as the Assistant Director-General for Evidence and Information for Policy. He has a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Ottawa and a D.Phil in Agricultural Economics from the University of Oxford, as well as a Doctor of Medicine from McMaster University in Canada.
Dr. Evans trained in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard University. He was an assistant professor of international health economics at the Harvard School of Public Health. From 1997-2003, Dr Evans was Director of Health Equity at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Debra Lynkowski, LLB
Chief Executive Officer
Canadian Public Health Association
Prior to coming to CPHA, Ms. Lynkowski was the Director of the Canadian Stroke Strategy, the first national strategy in Canada focusing on stroke prevention and care. From 1993 to 2002, she worked with the Canadian Diabetes Association, first as Executive Director of the Alberta/NWT Division, and subsequently as the National Director of Public Policy and Government Relations in Ottawa. Ms. Lynkowski also worked at Health Canada in what is now the Public Health Agency of Canada as a Senior Policy Advisor at the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control.
In addition to her extensive experience in health and the voluntary sector, Ms. Lynkowski holds a law degree from the University of Alberta.
Jeff Masuda, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Environment and Geography
University of Manitoba
Dr. Jeff Masuda is a health geographer and specialist in community-driven knowledge translation who obtained his MSc in Health Promotion Studies and his PhD in Human Geography at the University of Alberta. After graduating, Jeff undertook postdoctoral fellowships at the McMaster Institute of Environment and Health as well as two CIHR Strategic Training in Health Research programs, including the University of Toronto's Health Care, Technology, and Place and UBC's Partnering in Community Health Research. Major themes under his program of research include environmental health justice, health promotion interventions, cities and health equity, dissemination, and transmedia methodologies.
One of Jeff's primary career motivations is to make environmental health research more responsive to the needs and priorities of society's most socially marginalized populations. Jeff is currently a CIHR New Investigator in the area of Knowledge Translation (2010-2015) and is founding Director of the Centre for Environmental Health Equity (www.cehe.ca), a knowledge translation platform for enhancing linkages between community, research, and policy in order to address socioenvironmental inequalities in health. In this role, Jeff currently co-leads with the Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and the Environment a two-year study focused on enhancing knowledge translation capacity for addressing environmental health inequities that affect children living in urban areas. As an Allergen NCE Investigator Jeff conducts research to improve peer support among low-income and Aboriginal children with allergies and asthma. Jeff is an award-winning teacher and is well known for his expertise in integrating social theory, participatory action research, and arts aligned research methodologies focusing on gaining a better understanding of the spatial context of environmental health problems affecting vulnerable and marginalized populations. For this work, he received the Julian M. Szeicz Award for Early Career Achievement from the Canadian Association of Geographers.
Louise Potvin, PhD
Professor
Department of Social and Preventive Medicine
Université de Montréal
Scientific Director
Centre Léa-Roback sur les inégalités sociales de santé de Montréal
Louise Potvin completed her doctorate in Public Health from Université de Montréal and post doctoral training in program evaluation. She is currently professor at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Université de Montreal and Scientific director of the Centre Léa-Roback sur les inégalités sociales de santé de Montréal. She holds the Chair on Community Approaches and Health Inequalities. This Chair aims at documenting how public health interventions in support to local social development contribute to the reduction of health inequalities in urban settings. Her main research interests are the evaluation of community health promotion program and how local social environments are conducive to health. She was a member of the WHO-EURO Working Group on the Evaluation of Health Promotion. She is a member of the Canadian Reference Group on the Social Determinants of Health and of the WHO Scientific Resource Group on Health Equity Analysis and Research. She is a globally elected member of the Board of Trustees of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. She has published 5 books and more than 200 papers and book chapters.
Jeannie Shoveller, PhD
Professor
School of Population and Public Health
University of British Columbia
Professor Shoveller holds the CIHR/PHAC Applied Public Health Chair in Improving Youth Sexual Health in the School of Population & Public Health at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She also holds a Senior Scholar Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree and her Master of Arts degree, both with a specialty in health education, from Dalhousie University. Prof. Shoveller obtained a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at University of British Columbia in 1997, and completed postdoctoral training at the BC Research Institute for Children's and Women's Health. She assumed her current faculty position in 1999.
Professor Shoveller's research program addresses the theme of reducing health and social inequalities among young people. She has written extensively about social context and structure as determinants of health, with a particular emphasis on investigating the impacts of gender, culture and place as key determinants of young people's sexual health. She continues to serve on several peer review committees for CIHR and other Canadian and international health research funding agencies as well as peer-reviewed journals. Prof. Shoveller is a member of several international collaborative networks, including an appointment as a Collaborating Professor at the Institute of Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro and the Institute for Studies in Public Health, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Margaret Whitehead, PhD
W.H. Duncan Chair of Public Health
Faculty of Medicine
University of Liverpool
Professor Margaret Whitehead holds the W.H. Duncan Chair of Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. She is also the Head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on the Social Determinants of Health.
Professor Whitehead earned her Bachelor of Biology in 1970 at York University and her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm in 1997. She was elected Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom in 2001.
For the past 20 years, Dr. Whitehead's key research interests have involved social inequalities in health and in health care - and what can be done to reduce them. To this end, she has been part of various national and international efforts, which include sitting on the UK Government's Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health (the Acheson Inquiry), and being a founding member of the Global Health Equity Initiative funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and SIDA. Currently, she is a member of two European Union networks related to international experiences on inequalities; one evaluates the impact on inequalities of complex interventions, while the other one traces the health inequalities impact of public policies and political context.
Her books related to the above include: The Health Divide, published together with the seminal Black Report, which has become a Penguin non-fiction best-seller; Tackling inequalities in health: an agenda for action; and Challenging inequities in health: from ethics to action. The policy briefing documents she co-wrote for the WHO have been translated into over 20 languages.
Armine Yalnizyan, MIR
Senior Economist
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Armine Yalnizyan has written about labour markets and public finance for over 20 years since receiving her Masters of Industrial Relations from the University of Toronto. After 10 years as program director with the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, she authored a ground-breaking report in 1998 on income inequality in Canada, entitled The Growing Gap. She reprised the topic of income inequality after the national economy had experienced 10 years of strong economic growth, releasing the report The Rich and the Rest of Us in 2007. Armine joined the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives as senior economist in 2008. Over the years she has served on advisory groups to Ministers at the federal and provincial levels with respect to labour and income support policies. She is the honoured first recipient of the Atkinson Foundation Award for Economic Justice, and received the Morley Gunderson Prize from the University of Toronto in 2003. Armine is a founding member and steering committee member of the Progressive Economics Forum and the Alternative Federal Budget. She also serves on the boards of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and the Canadian Association of Business Economists.