Faculty Highlights

Nav Persaud is the Canada Research Chair in Health Justice and staff physician at St Michael’s Hospital. His main interest is interventions that promote health equity or fairness and he leads the CLEAN Meds trial of free essential medicine distribution.

Reto M. Baertschiger joined the Division of General and Thoracic Surgery in August 2019 with a special interest in paediatric surgical oncology and liver tumor treatment and research. Reto Baertschiger was appointed as a Scientist-Investigator in the Genetics & Genome Biology Program at the SickKids Research Institute. He started his lab under the mentorship of Dr. David Malkin, senior scientist and oncologist, and studies the micro-environment of paediatric liver tumors and the interaction of the native liver, its stroma and the tumor environment. He joined the IMS faculty as associate member in the Fall 2019. Dr. David Gomez is an acute care and trauma surgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital and a Scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute. He is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Surgery as well as an Adjunct Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. His research interests include the evaluation of enablers and barriers of access to timely and quality emergency surgery.

Ewan Goligher MD PhD is a clinician-scientist in the Department of Medicine, University Health Network and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Interdepartmental Division of Critical Care Medicine, University Health Network. His laboratory studies mechanisms of lung and diaphragm injury from mechanical ventilation in the clinical setting and develops and tests interventions to prevent these injuries with the goal of accelerating liberation from mechanical ventilation and reducing long-term disability after critical illness.

Dr. Stephanie Lheureux is a clinician investigator focusing on how to improve the care of women diagnosed with gynecological cancers by developing effective treatment options that are founded upon a strong understanding of disease biology. She is the principal investigator of different clinical trials with an emphasis on translational research. Dr. Alfonso Fasano is a Professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of Neurology) at the University of Toronto. He is staff neurologist and co-director of the Surgical Program for Movement Disorders at Toronto Western Hospital in Ontario, Canada. He is also a Clinician Investigator at the Krembil Research Institute and at KITE – Toronto Rehabilitation Hospital, both in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Fasano leads the Core E (closed-loop capabilities) of the CenteR for Advancing Neurotechnological Innovation to Application (CRANIA).

Jacob Vorstman is a child psychiatrist and works as a clinician scientist at SickKids. His ambition is to further insights into the genetic architecture underlying neurodevelopmental disorders, in particular autism, intellectual disability and schizophrenia, as well as to improve methods to measure human behavior.

Melanie Penner, MD MSc FRCP(C) is a developmental paediatrician at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation

Hospital, a clinician investigator at the autism research centre in the Bloorview Research Institute, and the Bloorview Children’s Hospital Foundation Chair in Developmental Paediatrics. Her research interests are in expanding and enhancing the care provided to children with autism spectrum disorder and their families in the community.

Dan Felsky received his PhD in neuroimaging-genetics from IMS in 2016 and pursued three years of postdoctoral work in neuroimmunology and bioinformatics at Harvard Medical School and Columbia University. Dr. Felsky has recently joined the Krembil Centre of Neuroinformatics at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health as the Head of Whole Person Modelling, studying the interactions of genomic and environmental factors in psychiatric and neurological illness.

Dr. Brige Paul Chugh is a Medical Physicist at the Odette Cancer Centre. His current clinical and research interests are in cancers of the central nervous system, stereotactic radiosurgery and MR-guided radiation therapy. He is developing novel MRbased methods for treatment planning and motion management by leading students and postdocs in this research area, as well as collaborating with industry partners. Dr. Haykal joined the University Health Network and the Toronto General Hospital in 2018. Her clinical focus is on complex oncological reconstruction and microsurgical reconstruction of the breast, head and neck and extremity. Her research focuses on tissueengineered techniques for tracheal reconstruction and the immunology of vascularized composite allotransplantation.

Dr. Colin Hawco works in the field of cognitive neuroscience, functional brain imaging, and psychiatry. His work is especially focused on the things that make us unique as individuals, and how we can explore the range of individual variability to better understand mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Mahavir Agarwal, MBBS, MD, PhD, is a Clinician-Scientist in the Schizophrenia division at CAMH and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on investigating the interrelationship between cognitive and metabolic abnormalities in schizophrenia, and the effect of antipsychotics on these outcomes. To complement his research interests, he works at the Mental Health and Metabolic Clinic and the Clozapine Clinics at CAMH, which focus on applying pharmacological interventions to improve cognitive and metabolic outcomes in individuals with serious mental illness.

Vinod Chandran MBBS MD DM PhD, is a rheumatologist and clinician-scientist based at the Krembil Research Institute, University Health Network and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie in the genetic and molecular epidemiology of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, and his translational research program is focused on developing proteomics and metabolomics-based screening and prognostic tools for psoriatic arthritis.