John Balmes
MD
John Balmes
MD
Dr. Balmes received his MD degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1976. After internal medicine training at Mount Sinai and pulmonary subspecialty, occupational medicine, and research training at Yale, he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in 1982. He transitioned to the faculty at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1986 and is currently Professor in the Divisions of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at UCSF and in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. His major academic activities include several collaborative epidemiological research projects, various advisory and editorial committees, Directing the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, and Directing the Northern California Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (a consortium of programs at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UCSF). Since 2008 he has been the Physician Member of the California Air Resources Board.
Sharon Straus
MD
Dr. Straus is a geriatrician and clinical epidemiologist who trained at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford. She is the Director of the Knowledge Translation Program and Physician-in-Chief, St. Michael’s Hospital and Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Toronto. She holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Translation and Quality of Care and has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications and 3 textbooks in evidence-based medicine, knowledge translation and mentorship. She has received national awards for mentorship, research and education.
Teresa To
Ph.D.
Dr. To holds a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics and is a Senior Scientist at the Child Health Evaluative Sciences, the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute. She is a Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto, and an Adjunct Senior Scientist at ICES in Toronto. She is the founder of OASIS, the Ontario Asthma Surveillance Information System and a Canadian representative to the WHO-Global Alliance Against Respiratory Diseases. Dr. To holds a 7-year Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in asthma. Her research program focuses on asthma epidemiology, measuring long-term asthma health outcomes and in developing indicators to measure and benchmark quality of asthma care in the primary care settings.
Sally E. Wenzel
MD
Dr. Wenzel is the Chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, the Director of the University of Pittsburgh Asthma Institute, and a member of the Cellular and Molecular Pathology Graduate Training Program. Dr. Wenzel is considered a global expert in severe asthma. She has pioneered the concept of asthma phenotypes, including the progression to molecular phenotyping. Dr. Wenzel and Dr. Samuel Yousem were the first to identify a new disease, termed asthmatic granulomatosis, which has features of asthma and autoimmune-like disease. Dr. Wenzel’s research interest derives from her clinical experience. She often follows a “bedside to bench” approach, regarding biomarkers and relation to asthma phenotypes and treatment.