Researchers & Clinicians
LAH is a dynamic family of all those passionate about our mission to design research and translation projects that creatively bridge gaps in the airways disease landscape. We are growing and welcome new members. If interested, please contact Dr. Carlsten.
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Dr. Ryan Allen
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Ryan Allen is a professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.  He holds a Master’s degree in environmental engineering and a Ph.D. in environmental health, both from the University of Washington in Seattle, USA.  Dr. Allen’s research program is focused on air pollution exposure assessment methods, the evaluation of interventions to reduce air pollution exposures and health effects, and the impacts of early-life air pollution exposure on human growth and development.

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Dr. Celine Bergeron
MD

Bio

Dr. Celine Bergeron graduated from medical school at Laval University, followed by internal medicine, respiratory medicine fellowship. She completed a master degree in experimental medicine during her respiratory fellowship and subsequently a research fellowship at Meakins-Christie Laboratories, McGill University. Her research interest were focused on severe asthma pathology and lung transplantation between 2003 and 2015. In 2005, she was appointed as professor at University of Montreal, as respiratory physician staff at the CHUM and as clinician-scientist at the CRCHUM. She has participated in graduate and undergraduate teaching, and served as Medical director of the asthma education center of CHUM and been a member of the human research ethic committee of the CHUM. In 2015, she joined Vancouver General Hospital and the University of British Columbia as a Respiratory Physician, and clinical associate professor with lung transplantation as a primary focus, and still continues to be involved in teaching, severe asthma care as well as clinical research trials.

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Dr. Brittany Bingham
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Brittany Bingham, MPH, Ph.D. is of mixed ancestry and a proud member of the Shíshálh nation. She is the inaugural Director of Indigenous Research at the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity (CGSHE) and an Assistant Professor in Social Medicine at UBC. She has worked in various capacities in research with Indigenous communities and policy for over 15 years. She is passionate about community-driven research, Indigenous research methods, health equity, Indigenous women’s health, Indigenous housing and homelessness, cultural safety, and reconciliation. Brittany has overseen Indigenous cultural safety and humility efforts across research practices at CGSHE/UBC.

 

In her previous role as the Director of Indigenous Research VCH, Dr. Bingham was the Indigenous lead for a newly launched Access to Responsive Justice Project, which focuses on access to responsive and restorative justice for marginalized and racialized women, including Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people, who experience gender-based violence across communities in B.C. Dr. Bingham was also awarded funding from Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research on “Informing the COVID-19 Response for Vancouver’s Urban Indigenous Population Using Community-Driven Methods and Big Data Analytics”.

 

Brittany has previously overseen Canadian Institutes of Health Research projects jointly led by First Nations Health Authority (FNHA) and Simon Fraser University (SFU) examining co-decision-making among key partners in the transformation of First Nations governance in B.C. She has also held a number of high-level Indigenous advisor roles including Aboriginal Policy Analyst with the B.C. Ministry and led Indigenous research with Fraser Health teams and VCH Aboriginal Health.

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Dr. Joan L. Bottorff
Ph.D., RN, FCAN, FCAHS, FAAN

Bio

Dr. Joan L. Bottorff is a Professor in the School of Nursing and Director of the Institute for Healthy Living and Chronic Disease Prevention at UBC’s Okanagan Campus. Her research focuses on the development of gender-sensitive health promotion approaches focusing on smoking cessation, physical activity and healthy eating. For example, she has developed programs to support men’s smoking cessation (e.g., QuitNow men). In addition, her research has also explored approaches for supporting smoke-free families by focusing on preventing relapse to smoking during the postpartum period, and supporting fathers’ smoking cessation (e.g., Dads in Gear Indigenous). Dr. Bottorff’s program of research, supported by the collaborative work of multidisciplinary teams and the involvement of knowledge users, has also resulted in the development of novel, award winning programs to promote men’s health and new opportunities to reduce the burden of chronic disease. She has received over $20M in research funding, and has over 280 peer-reviewed publications.

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Dr. Michael Brauer
Sc.D.

Bio

Dr. Michael Brauer is a Professor in the School of Population and Public Health at The University of British Columbia and an Affiliate Professor and Principal Research Scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where he leads the Environmental Risk Factors team for the Global Burden of Disease.  Dr. Brauer received Bachelor’s Degrees in Biochemistry and Environmental Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctorate in Environmental Health from Harvard University.  His research focuses on linkages between the built environment and human health, with specific interest in transportation-related and biomass air pollution, the global health impacts of air pollution and the relationships between multiple exposures mediated by urban form and population health. He has participated in monitoring and epidemiological studies throughout the world and served on numerous committees, including those advising the World Health Organization, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, the World Heart Federation, the US National Academies, the Royal Society of Canada, the International Joint Commission and governments in North America and Asia.  His contributions to environmental health have been acknowledged by a number of career achievement and publication awards.

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Dr. Emily Brigham
MD, MHS

Bio

Dr. Emily Brigham is an Assistant Professor in the Respiratory Division at the University of British Columbia and is a Research Scientist at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute as well as a practicing Respirologist at Vancouver General Hospital. Dr. Brigham received her professional degrees at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and Public Health, completing her residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital where she was subsequently hired as faculty. She has been awarded highly competitive research awards through the National Institutes of Health, including a National Service Research Award, a Mentored Clinical Research Scholar Award, and most recently a Mentored Patient Oriented Research Career Development Award. Her research is focused on: (1) the impact of diet and other metabolic factors on respiratory health in airways disease, (2) how these factors may augment or mitigate the symptomatic and inflammatory response to air pollution and other pro-inflammatory exposures, and (3) ways to translate these findings into action to improve respiratory health, particularly within vulnerable populations. Alongside her research, Dr. Brigham served in a clinical leadership role as Medical Director of the Pulmonary Clinics at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital and Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Post-Acute COVID-19 Team (JH PACT) prior to joining the University of British Columbia and the Legacy for Airway Health in the summer of 2021.

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Dr. Pat Camp
BSc (PT), MSc, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Pat Camp is a clinician-scientist at St. Paul’s Hospital. Her clinician-scientist appointment position is jointly supported by the University of British Columbia Department of Physical Therapy and the Providence Health Care Research Institute. Dr. Camp’s research is focused on three main themes: Pulmonary Rehabilitation for Hospitalized Patients with an Acute Exacerbation of COPD (AECOPD); Pulmonary Tele-Rehabilitation (with a specific focus on Indigenous health); and Knowledge Translation and Quality Assessment for Pulmonary Rehabilitation.

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Dr. Stephanie Cleland
Ph.D., MSPH

Bio

Dr. Stephanie Cleland is the Legacy for Airway Health Chair in Promotion of Lung Health and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She is also a Research Scientist at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. Dr. Cleland’s research uses environmental epidemiology, exposure assessments, and health impact assessments to investigate how climate change-related environmental exposures, such as wildfire smoke and extreme heat, adversely impact human health. Her work leverages novel statistical approaches and innovative datasets to understand what levels, durations, and types of exposure are most harmful to human health, identify vulnerable populations, and evaluate approaches for reducing adverse effects. She holds a Ph.D. and MSPH in Environmental Sciences and Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BS in Computer Science and Community Health from Tufts University. She conducted her dissertation research as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) research fellow at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

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Dr. Jacquelyn Cragg
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Cragg is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Collaboration for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) at UBC, and Principal Investigator at the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD). She received her MPH and Ph.D. from the UBC School of Population and Public Health. Dr. Cragg holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Open Data Science and was the North American recipient of the L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women International Rising Talents award. Dr. Cragg’s research uses epidemiological and data science techniques to understand disease progression and improve health outcomes.

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Dr. Sonya Cressman
BSc, Ph.D., MBA

Bio

Dr. Cressman is a Health Economist and Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University. She works with patients to make cancer control more efficient. Dr. Cressman believes that digital health and predictive technology can help prevent cancer and make early lung cancer detection programs easier to access. She is a member of international research consortia and working groups in the area of lung cancer screening and has received national awards for her research from the Canadian Cancer Society. Her research has supported the rapid adoption of genomic technologies at BC Cancer and the province’s new lung cancer screening program. She holds a Ph.D. from UBC and an MBA from the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University.

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Dr. Kevin Duan
MD, MS

Bio

Dr. Kevin Duan is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Respiratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia. He received his medical degree from the University of Michigan School of Medicine and a Master of Science in Health Services from the University of Washington School of Public Health. He completed internal medicine residency and a chief resident year at the University of California, San Francisco, followed by pulmonary and critical care fellowship and research training at the University of Washington. Dr. Duan is a health services researcher, studying health system organization, health policy, and health economics. His overarching goal is to identify how the health system can be optimized to improve health outcomes and value for patients with respiratory diseases. He has received funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the US National Institutes of Health.

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Dr. John Fleetham
MD

Bio

Dr. Fleetham is a UBC Professor of Medicine and a Clinician-Scientist with a special interest in obstructive lung disease and sleep disordered breathing. He has an extensive publication record with over 160 peer reviewed papers and 20 book chapters. His research has been acknowledged by a variety of awards including a Visiting Fellowship to Oxford University, Canadian Medical Association Honorary Membership, Queen’s University Peter Munt Lectureship, UBC Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Medical Lecturer and Vancouver Hospital Award for Bringing Clinical Renown. He has served in leadership positions in the American Thoracic Society, American Academy of Sleep Medicine, Canadian Thoracic Society, and Canadian Sleep Society. At UBC, he has served two terms of Associate Head of the UBC Department of Medicine and was Head of the UBC/VGH Respiratory Divisions for 12 years. He is currently the Head of the Vancouver Coastal Health Sleep Disorder Program and on the advisory boards for BC Lung Association, Canadian Lung Association and CIHR Institute of Circulatory and Respiratory Health.

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Dr. Heather Gainforth
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Heather Gainforth is an ICORD Principal Investigator, Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan, and a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar.  Completing her M.S.c and Ph.D. in Kinesiology at Queen’s University, Dr. Gainforth completed her post-doctoral research at University College London in the Centre for Behaviour Change. Dr. Gainforth leads the Applied Behaviour Change Lab within UBC Okanagan’s CFI-funded Centre for Health Behaviour Change. Dr. Gainforth’s research program aims to investigate how evidence-based behaviour change research is applied in the real world and to advance the science and practice of integrated knowledge translation (IKT). Dr. Gainforth leads the SSHRC-funded research partnership that co-developed the first integrated knowledge translation (IKT) guiding principles for conducting spinal cord injury (SCI) research in partnership (www.iktprinciples.com).

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Dr. Amanda Giang
BASc (Eng), MS, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Amanda Giang is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability and Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Campus. Her research group uses models and data science tools to explore policy questions related to pollution, climate, and energy (and their intersections), with the goal of supporting decision-making for more sustainable, just, and healthy futures. Key areas of interest include air pollution and environmental injustice, and the air quality and climate impacts of energy transitions. Dr. Giang holds a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, a MS in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a Ph.D in Engineering Systems from MIT. She was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Program on Science, Technology and Society.

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Dr. David Granville
Ph.D., FAHA

Bio

Dr. Granville is a Professor and Associate Dean, Research, VCHRI, UBC, and Executive Director, VCHRI. His early research at QLT Inc. supported the FDA approval of Visudyne® as the first treatment for age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly. At Scripps he identified a novel therapeutic approach for reducing ischemia and reperfusion injury that led to the formation of Radical Therapeutix. Since returning to UBC, his lab has filed 32 patents that have been licensed to industry. He is also a co-Founder/CSO of viDA Therapeutics. He is currently focused on identifying therapeutic targets that contribute to aging and chronic diseases.

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Dr. Jordan Guenette
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Guenette is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC, Director of the Cardiopulmonary Exercise Physiology Laboratory at St. Paul’s Hospital, and the Associate Director of the UBC Centre for Heart Lung Innovation. The primary aim of Dr. Guenette’s research program is to better understand the physiological factors that limit exercise tolerance in individuals with chronic respiratory diseases with the goal of developing more effective rehabilitation interventions to improve exercise performance and quality of life. His team conducts both mechanistic exercise physiology experiments and clinical trials in patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD), cystic fibrosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Dr. Guenette has received a number of awards and distinctions for his research including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Clinical Rehabilitation New Investigator Award, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Award, Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology New Investigator Award, and the UBC Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Achievement Award for Overall Excellence. Dr. Guenette’s laboratory is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, CIHR, and the British Columbia Lung Association, among others.

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Dr. Tillie-Louise Hackett
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Hackett is an Associate Professor and the Vice-Chair of Research in the Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology & Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hackett is a Principle Investigator at the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, St. Paul’s Hospital, where she was formally the Associate Director 2013 – 2018 and has been the Director of the James Hogg Lung Registry since 2014. Dr. Hackett is an internationally-recognized research leader in ultra-resolution biomedical imaging modalities and human in vitro models to investigate and treat the pathobiology of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which daily affect the ability of over 4.5 million Canadians to breathe. Dr. Hackett has demonstrated that understanding the pathobiology of early disease lesions can drive new global strategies for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of chronic lung diseases like COPD that currently have no cure (Dransfield M, the global Lancet COPD Commission, 2019). Dr. Hackett’s reputation as an international leader in her field has been formally recognized by over 37 awards, including the Parker B. Francis Fellowship (2012), Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award (2014), the UBC Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Researcher Award (2018), and she was named an Inaugural American Thoracic Society Fellow (100 awarded), as a mark of distinction and recognition for her accomplishments and dedication to the society and field of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine in 2018. Dr. Hackett has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles ranks in the top 0.2% of 157,339 published authors worldwide on obstructive lung diseases (Expertscape.com).

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Dr. Sarah Henderson
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Henderson is a Senior Scientist in Environmental Health Services at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). She is also an Associate Professor in the University of British Columbia (UBC) School of Population & Public Health.

 

At the BCCDC, Dr. Henderson leads a program of applied research and surveillance to support evidence-based policy for the province. This role requires her to be a generalist rather than a specialist, and her work spans a wide range of topics, including air pollution from all provincially relevant sources (wildfire smoke, residential wood smoke, industry, road dust, shipping and vehicles), extreme weather events, radon gas, food safety, water quality and exposures managed by the Drug and Poison Information Centre (DPIC).

 

Most of her work requires the collection, processing, integration, analysis and visualization of large health and environmental datasets. Her team works exclusively with the computing environment R, and takes a leadership role in R training across BCCDC and UBC.

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Dr. Kyla Hildebrand
MD, FRCPC, MScCH, (HPTE)

Bio
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Alison Hoens
M.Sc., BScPT

Bio

Alison Hoens holds several positions: (1) Physical Therapy Knowledge Broker and Clinical Professor within the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine Department of Physical Therapy, (2) Research, Education, and Practice Coordinator for Physiotherapy at Providence Healthcare (PHC) and (3) Knowledge Translation Lead for the School of Population and Public Health Centre for Clinical Epidemiology & Evaluation. Additionally, she is an Affiliate Knowledge Broker for Arthritis Research Canada and a Research Associate at the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences. From 2017-2019, she was the Knowledge Translation Specialist for the Methods Clusters at the BC SUPPORT Unit.

 

She has facilitated partnerships in over 60 projects with more than 400 researchers, clinicians, decision-maker, and patients, associated with more than $13 million in research funding and development of 22 resources that have been accessed over ¼ million times worldwide.

 

Website: http://physicaltherapy.med.ubc.ca/physical-therapy-knowledge-broker/

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Dr. Kate Johnson
MSc, Ph.D.

Bio

Kate Johnson is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Division of Respiratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia. She completed her Ph.D. in health outcomes research in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in health economics at the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute at the University of Washington. Dr. Johnson specializes in health services research, cost and comparative effectiveness evaluation with applications to asthma and COPD. She uses real-world evidence from clinical and health administrative databases to understand disease trajectory and patterns of care, followed by simulation modeling to evaluate healthcare interventions for reducing the burden of disease on patients and the healthcare system. The overarching goal of her research is to identify and promote innovative and effective health interventions that are personalized to individuals and cost-effective for the healthcare system.

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Dr. Milan Khara
MBChB, CCFP, Dip. ABAM

Bio

Dr. Khara is a UK trained physician, who joined Vancouver Coastal Health in 2003 having previously worked as an Addiction Medicine Consultant at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. Certified in 2006 by the American Society of Addiction Medicine, his current work primarily focuses on treating tobacco use disorder but increasingly extends into other areas of tobacco control.

 

Clinical commitments include leading the Vancouver General Hospital Smoking Cessation Clinic where individuals with tobacco use disorder are offered evidence-based treatment. He also acts as an adviser to the Office of The Chief Medical Health Officer at VCH on wider tobacco control matters. Dr. Khara has been involved in training health care professionals and students throughout Canada to optimally treat tobacco use disorder, speaking at many medical gatherings and also as part of the CAMH TEACH project. More recently, he has led initiatives to combat the growing problem of electronic cigarettes in high schools, speaking both with educators and students in a variety of settings. He has also worked in an advisory capacity with the government of Nunavut to assist in their tobacco control initiatives. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Medicine.

 

Dr. Khara’s research efforts have mainly focused on “hard to treat” populations and have been published in scientific medical journals. He has also been actively involved in many areas of tobacco control advocacy including providing expert testimony in a number of legal challenges to smoke-free legislation. These include the 2014 challenge by the Vancouver “hookah houses” and, most recently, cases relating to multi-unit dwellings. He also appeared as an expert witness before the Standing Committee on Health in order to contribute to the development of a federal regulatory framework for electronic cigarettes.

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Dr. Darryl Knight
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Darryl Knight joined Providence Health Care as Vice-President, Research and Academic Affairs in 2019. His role also includes accountabilities as President, Providence Health Care Research Institute; Professor, Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia; and Associate Dean, Research, Faculty of Medicine, UBC. Dr. Knight obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia in 1993. In 2004, he was recruited to UBC as the Canada Research Chair in Airway Disease. He was recruited back to Australia in 2013 and was Professor and Head of School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy at the University of Newcastle. Continuing this pattern, Dr. Knight was recruited back to Canada in 2019 taking up his current role.

 

Dr. Knight is a cell biologist with an international reputation in the area of lung and airway remodelling. His research career has focused on understanding how abnormal epithelial cell-fibroblast interactions influence the severity and chronicity of respiratory diseases. To date, he has published over 166 peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters (h-factor 55; 9120 citations – Google Scholar, May 2019).

 

Dr. Knight has a strong track record of obtaining research grant funding (>$20 million), including leading a successful application for $7 million from the CFI in 2012. He is regularly invited to present his work and chair sessions at major national and international meetings.

 

Dr. Knight has strong research leadership credentials. From 2009-2012 he was the Associate Director of the UBC James Hogg Research Centre and sat on the executive of the Institute for Heart and Lung Health. He sits on several national and international scientific research committees, and is on the editorial board of 5 international journals. Dr. Knight has been primary supervisor for 7 Post-doctoral fellows, 17 Ph.D. and 2 MSc students and over 18 Graduate students.

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Dr. Janice Leung
MD

Bio

Dr. Janice Leung completed her Bachelor’s Honours degree in History and Science at Harvard University and Doctor of Medicine degree at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Leung is an American Board certified Pulmonary Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Critical Care Medicine specialist, and a Canadian Royal College certified fellow in Respirology and Internal Medicine. In 2015, she completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship with Dr. Don Sin at the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation (HLI) and was appointed Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of Respiratory Medicine within the UBC Department of Medicine. Dr. Leung is currently a respirologist at St. Paul’s Hospital specializing in HIV-related airways diseases and a Principal Investigator at HLI where she runs a translational airway biology laboratory. She is the recipient of a CIHR Early Career Investigator Award and a Michael Smith Health Professional Investigator Award. Her research has been supported by funding from the BC Lung Association, Genome BC, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Recent funding has supported work in HIV airway biology and in cannabis-related lung injury.

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Dr. Kelly McNagny
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Kelly McNagny is a full professor in Medical Genetics and Biomedical Engineering, the Associate Director of the Canadian AllerGen Network Centre of Excellence, and Co-Director of its Biomarkers and Bioinformatics Platform and fills leadership roles in the Canadian Stem Cell Network Centre of Excellence (Sub-Chair of the Trainee Education Committee). His work focuses on stem cell behavior, innate immune responses, inflammatory disease, kidney disease, cancer biology and therapeutics. In 2015 he also served as the Scientific Director of the Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD), a National Centre of Excellence aimed at translating early stage scientific discoveries into therapies. He obtained a BSc in Biology and Biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts in 1984, and subsequently a Ph.D in Cellular Immunology at the U of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 1990. At UAB he worked with Dr. Max D. Cooper (Howard Hughes Medical Institute and National Academy of Sciences) and his research focused on cell surface proteins that regulate B cell maturation and homing. He then moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany where he performed his postdoctoral studies in the lab of Dr. Thomas Graf from 1991 to 1996. There his work focused on transcriptional control of hematopoietic stem cell maturation and cell fate. He performed some of the first studies to identify transcription factors that regulate the gene expression and differentiation of eosinophils, which are known to play a major role in allergic and asthmatic responses. In addition, he identified a number of novel hematopoietic stem cell surface proteins (the CD34 family) and began analyzing their function. He continued his studies at the EMBL as a semi-independent, Visiting Scientist from 1996 to 1998 prior to starting his own laboratory at The Biomedical Research Centre, at UBC in Vancouver. He has garnered several awards including the 2004 Showell-Pfizer Junior Faculty Award from the American Association for Immunology, a MSFHR Career Investigator Award.

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Dr. Renelle Myers
MD, FRCPC

Bio
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Dr. Anne-Marie Nicol
Ph.D.

Bio

Anne-Marie Nicol is passionate about indoor air quality and how it impacts people’s health. She is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She also works as a Knowledge Translation Scientist at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health (NCCEH). She is a board member of the Canadian Association of Radon Scientists and Technicians and also a team member of Health Canada’s Take Action on Radon program.

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Dr. Sharla-Rae Olsen
MD

Bio

Dr. Sharla Olsen is a practicing respirologist / internist at the University Hospital of Northern British Columbia in Prince George where she has resided since 2010. She completed her MD at the University of Manitoba and her residency training and fellowship at the University of Alberta. Dr. Olsen is the Director of Site Specific Learning for internal medicine at UHNBC and enjoys clinical teaching and mentoring residents and students. She is passionate about improving lung health for residents of Northern BC and is excited to join the Legacy for Airway Health team.

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Dr. Julia Pritchard
MD

Bio

Dr. Julia Pritchard is a practicing respirologist at Kelowna General Hospital and Clinical Lecturer with the University of British Columbia. Her clinical practice is focused on patients with severe asthma in addition to general respirology. She is a graduate from UBC Medical school with specialty training in Internal Medicine and Respiratory Medicine from the University of Calgary. Dr. Pritchard is passionate about multidisciplinary comprehensive care for asthma management and is working towards many quality improvement goals for asthmatic patients throughout Interior Health. Outside of medicine she enjoys being outside enjoying all the Okanagan has to offer.

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Dr. Noah Quastel
LLB, LLM, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Quastel currently holds the position of Director, Law & Policy, Healthy Indoor Environments Program at the BC Lung Association. He is a practicing lawyer and member of the Law Society of British Columbia. He also holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography. Dr. Quastel has done research on environmental issues in the built environment, housing, and radon exposure law and policy.

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Dr. Bradley S. Quon
MD, MSc, MBA, FRCPC.

Bio

Dr. Quon is a clinician-scientist with expertise in biomarker research, clinical epidemiology, and clinical respirology/cystic fibrosis. Dr. Quon received his BSc at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Microbiology and Immunology. He completed the combined MD/MBA program at McGill University. Subsequently, he completed residency training in Internal Medicine and fellowship training in Respirology at UBC. Following completion of clinical training, he undertook two years of formal clinical research training in cystic fibrosis at the University of Washington. He is currently Associate Professor of Medicine and Principal Investigator at the UBC Centre for Heart Lung Innovation. His primary area of research focus is on blood biomarkers of disease activity in CF. He holds a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Award and is currently the Medical Director of the CF Canada Clinical Trial Network (CF CanACT).

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Dr. Chris Rauscher
B.Sc (Pharm), MD, FRCP(C), M.HSc.

Bio

Dr. Chris Rauscher is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. He worked as a hospital and community pharmacist and then went on to medical training with Internal Medicine and Geriatric Medicine qualifications. His main clinical practice has been in the community with the frail elderly with multiple chronic health conditions. He has always worked in three streams: clinical, multi-disciplinary team development and systems development. In the early 2000s, he started to work with the Ministry of Health and the Health Authorities on developing systems for chronic disease management, including COPD. This encompassed policy and systems framework development and guidelines and training module development through the BC Guidelines and Protocols Advisory Committee and the Doctors of BC, working on a research to practice information translation approach. He has led a number of projects related to chronic disease management as well as medication management, mainly directed at family physicians, and these projects included implementation and outcomes evaluation.

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Carmen Rempel
RRT, CRE

Bio

Carmen Rempel is a Respiratory Therapist and Certified Respiratory Educator at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) in British Columbia (BC), Canada. She is currently part of the VGH COPD Transition Team that provides intensive case-management and post-hospital care in patients admitted with acute exacerbation of COPD. Prior to this role she was the Airways Educator at VGH providing self-management counseling for asthma, allergy and COPD patients and their families.

 

Carmen has worked in a variety of areas of Respiratory Therapy including, critical care, ward therapy, supervisory, and pulmonary diagnostics. She is an instructor in the BC Spirometry program with RespTrec®: a Canadian Respiratory Training and Educator Course.

 

Carmen is a volunteer with the international program GASP: Global Access to Spirometry Project. The project delivers education, training and support in low-resource settings in South America to nurses and physicians to enable them to diagnose, treat and educate people with COPD and asthma.

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Dr. Jeremy Road
MD

Bio

Dr. Road is a Professor of Medicine at the University of B.C. and a respirologist in the Vancouver Coastal Health Region. He is also the Medical Director of the Lung Function Labs at Vancouver General Hospital and UBC Hospital and the Medical Director of the Provincial Respiratory Outreach Program of B.C. Dr. Road is a past member of the COPD committee of the Canadian Thoracic Society and past Director of the COPD clinic and the COPD pulmonary rehab program at VGH. His research interests include respiratory neuromuscular function, COPD and the role of Nitric Oxide as an antimicrobial agent.

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Dr. Mohsen Sadatsafavi
MD, MHSc, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Sadatsafavi is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the
Associate Director of Research, Collaboration for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at UBC. He received his M.D. degree from Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2002, his MHSc degree in Epidemiology from UBC in 2007, and his Ph.D degree in Health Outcomes Research from UBC in 2012. Dr. Sadatsafavi leads the Respiratory Evaluation Sciences Program, a comprehensive program of outcomes research in chronic respiratory diseases. RESP consists of three inter-related and synergistic themes of 1) burden of disease studies, 2) comparative effectiveness research, and 3) economic evaluation of respiratory health technologies. His work in the first two themes involves sophisticated analysis of clinical and administrative health databases. Through this line of work, RESP has emerged as a leading research group documenting the burden of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in Canada. The third theme involves decision-analytic modeling and computer simulation to predict the cost-effectiveness of existing and emerging respiratory health technologies. For his research, Dr. Sadatsafavi has received New Investigator Salary Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Scholar Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, and Early Research Leaders Initiative Award from the Canadian Respiratory Research Network (CRRN). Dr. Sadatsafavi is the Theme Leader of the Health Economics Platform of CRRN and is a member of the international Respiratory Effectiveness Group.

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Dr. Don D. Sin 
MD

Bio

Dr. Sin is the Director of the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation (HLI), and a Professor of Medicine at University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in COPD and the De Lazzari Family Chair at HLI. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers and has an H-index of 98. Expertscape.com has ranked him as the leading COPD expert in Canada and 2nd in the world (http://www.expertscape.com/ex/copd/p/earth). He has served on the Global initiative for chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) scientific committee since 2009 and is the section editor for the European Respiratory Journal and an editorial board member of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. He obtained his medical degree at University of Alberta and completed his post-doctoral research fellowship at University of Toronto. His research focus is using “omics” data to discover novel biomarkers of disease activity and new therapeutic targets to reduce hospitalization and mortality in patients with COPD.

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Dr. Laura Struik
Ph.D., RN

Bio

Dr. Struik is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health and Social Development at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. Her current research focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of e-Health interventions for tobacco control, from prevention to cessation. She is currently working with a variety of stakeholders and end-users in developing innovative solutions for addressing e-cigarette use among youth and young adults. She brings a gender-sensitive lens to her work, as well as a strong skillset in qualitative research methods.

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Dr. Nardia Strydom
MBChB, CCFP

Bio

Dr. Strydom has been working as a family physician in BC for the last 25 years and loves her job! She enjoys the variety and unexpected nature of family medicine, the connections with her patients and the comprehensive long-term care she can provide. As a “full service family physician” her patients are newborns, seniors and everything in-between. Nardia is a teacher and a learner, and is stimulated by change and its possibilities. She is the Department Head of Family Medicine at Providence Health Care, Regional Department Head of Family Medicine, Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health Care and Regional Medical Director of Primary Care for Vancouver Coastal Health. Her family, friends, gardening, exercise and anything to do with food keep her life in balance.

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Dr. Scott Tebbutt
BA, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Tebbutt is Professor in the Department of Medicine (Respiratory Division), University of British Columbia, as well as Principal Investigator and Director of Education at the Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, St. Paul’s Hospital, Vancouver, Canada. His research program is focused on systems biology of complex disease and other health-related conditions, including asthma, allergic rhinitis, heart failure, and neonatal vaccinology. He is Chief Executive & Scientific Officer of the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF) Centre of Excellence – a not-for-profit organization dedicated to moving research findings into health care, and focused on non-invasive omic biomarkers that can diagnose and/or predict organ failure (heart, lung and kidney). Dr. Tebbutt holds a B.A. in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of East Anglia (Cambridge Laboratory, John Innes Centre).

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Dr. Stephanus F van Eeden
MD, Ph.D., FRCP

Bio

Dr. van Eeden is a Professor within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and a Principal Investigator at the UBC Centre for Heart Lung Innovation at St. Paul’s hospital. He obtained his MD and Ph.D degrees at UBC. He currently holds a CIHR/GlaxoSmithCline Research Chair in COPD. His research focus is on mechanisms of lung inflammation, particularly, lung inflammation caused by infection, cigarette smoking and air pollution. This research covers a broad range of clinical conditions such as pneumonia, chronic bronchitis and emphysema, scleroderma and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The research is multidisciplinary and integrated and includes work at molecular, cellular, organ, intact animal and human levels. Dr. van Eeden’s current clinical translational studies explore the potential utility of wearable electronic devices to continuously monitor subjects with COPD with the aim to identify early signs of acute exacerbations and early treatment of AECOPD to improve long-term outcomes.

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Marvin Wesenberg
RRT, CRE

Bio

Marvin graduated from Thompson Rivers University, as a Respiratory Therapist in 1993 and in 2008 became a Certified Respiratory Educator. For 13 years he worked at Vancouver General Hospital as a core therapist on the spinal cord unit, working with a multidisciplinary team to provide specialized respiratory management. As the opportunities for community-based Respiratory Therapy increased, so did his interest in becoming involved in the community clinic setting. In December 2006 he accepted the opportunity to become a Community Therapist on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. The role has involved spirometry, COPD and asthma education, research, quality improvement projects and implementing a tobacco reduction clinic.

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Dr. Connie Yang
MSc, MD

Bio

Dr. Connie Yang is a pediatric respirologist at BC Children’s Hospital’s in Vancouver where she is the Medical Director of the Pediatric Asthma Program. She completed her respirology fellowship at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and her Master’s Degree at the University of Toronto where she examined the accuracy of diagnostic tests for asthma in children. She is currently the co-chair of the Canadian Thoracic Society Asthma Steering Committee and the chair of the latest Asthma Guideline committee.  She has an interest in improving the management of and ensuring equitable care across the province for children with asthma, cystic fibrosis and interstitial lung disease.

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Dr. Naomi Zimmerman
Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Naomi Zimmerman is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia and is a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability. Prior to joining UBC she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies at Carnegie Mellon University and also holds a Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the measurement of air pollutants in complex environments to better understand the health and climate impacts of new technologies and policies, with a focus on the transportation and energy sectors.