Biography

Dr. Shea completed a one-year fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital in Menopause and Reproductive Mental Health in 2017. She is certified menopause practitioner through the North American Menopause Society. Prior to that she completed a BSc at the University of Maryland (2000), her medical degree at the University of Ottawa (2011) and her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Toronto. She also earned an MSc in Neuroscience and Behavioural Sciences at McMaster University in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Medical Sciences in 2007 from the University of Toronto.

Biography

Dr. Kristin Horsley received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Calgary and PhD in Clinical Health Psychology from McGill University, with a focus on understanding how psychological factors interact with blood pressure and the hypertensive disorders of pregnancy to impact birth outcomes. Kristin is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at McMaster University working on perinatal mental health research, programming, and initiatives. Kristin has a specific interest in understanding the psychological consequences of severe maternal morbidity, and how to improve access to mental health screening, psychosocial assessment, and evidence-based treatments for this at-risk group. Dr. Horsley is a passionate advocate for the meaningful integration of clinical psychologists into high-risk obstetrical settings to improve knowledge translation from psychology to medicine, increase organizational research capacity, and improve clinical care.

Biography

Dr. Susan Ellis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at McMaster University and Chief of the Department and Active Medical Staff at St. Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton. She completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at McMaster University.
Throughout her career, Dr. Ellis’ dedication to education has earned her several awards including the McMaster Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology Certificate of Excellence for Sustained and Continuous Pursuit of Excellence in Obstetrical Teaching.

In 2014 she attended the Mayo Clinic for Instructor Development: Simulation-Based Education Design and Debriefing. She led the development of the postgraduate simulation program and is a dedicated simulation educator and researcher. In her role as Chief, her team implemented an interprofessional and multidisciplinary in-situ simulation program.

Biography

Genevieve is a Research Coordinator in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and recently completed her Master of Public Health (MPH) at McMaster University. She is especially interested in women’s health and bridging communication and access gaps in healthcare.

Prior to beginning her MPH, Genevieve obtained her HBSc in Global Health and Physical & Environmental Geography from the University of Toronto. She went on to intern with the IBVM Loreto Generalate NGO with Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Consultative Status at the United Nations in New York City. While working alongside the United Nations, she gained a hands-on introduction to youth and women’s health advocacy. Notably, Genevieve took the lead in the research and composition of written and oral advocacy statements submitted to the 63rd Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and co-chaired a youth-led Side Event during the 57th Session of the of the United Nations Commission for Social Development.

Genevieve hopes to pursue studies in medicine and further specialize in women’s health and communications with the goal of empowering women and girls to be proactive and knowledgeable about their health at all stages of life.

Biography

Dr. Serena Gundy completed her medical school, core internal medicine training and fellowship in General Internal Medicine at McMaster University. She then went on to pursue subsequent fellowships in Obstetric Medicine at Mt Sinai Hospital at the University of Toronto and Auckland City Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand.

Dr. Gundy is an active staff member of Hamilton Health Sciences and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at McMaster University. She is an attending physician on the Internal Medicine Inpatient Clinical Teaching Unit at the Juravinski Hospital as well as at McMaster University Health Centre where her primary focus is around the care of medically complex patients who are pregnant or contemplating pregnancy. Her outpatient practice is primarily comprised of referrals from family physicians, medical subspecialists, midwives and general obstetricians at any stage of pregnancy. Dr. Gundy also participates in the high-risk obstetric clinic seeing women with multi-system illnesses in consort with their high-risk Obstetricians.

As an Obstetric Medicine physician, Dr. Gundy has a particular interest in post-partum follow-up and care transitions. She runs a women’s vascular health clinic which focuses on short and long-term risk modification for women who have experienced a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy, such as preeclampsia. She is also interested in the optimization of medical care for women with high risk pre-existing medical illnesses and the reduction of complications from pregnancy-related health conditions in low resource settings.

Biography

Dr. Frey is Professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, Academic Head of the Mood Disorders Program, and Medical Director of the Women’s Health Concerns Clinic at St. Joseph’s Healthcare (www.stjoes.ca/whcc). He completed his M.D. and specialization in Psychiatry at the FFFCMPA and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Dr. Frey completed a Research Fellowship at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, working with brain imaging in bipolar disorder. Subsequently, Dr. Frey did a Postdoctoral Fellowship in brain imaging at the Montreal Neurological Institute (McGill University), where he conducted a PET imaging study correlating serotonin synthesis and 5HT1A receptor binding in the human brain. Dr. Frey is also a former recipient of a CIHR fellowship award in women’s mental health. Currently, Dr. Frey has more than 250 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and his h-index is 43 according to the Web of ScienceTM, and 55 according to Google Scholar.

Biography

Dr. Van Lieshout is a perinatal psychiatrist with a PhD in research methods interested in how pregnancy and early postpartum exposures affect brain development in ways that increase the risk of mental disorders across the lifespan.

His work has used observational and experimental methods in humans to examine how maternal perinatal depression, maternal pre-pregnancy adiposity, and preterm birth affect fetal and infant neurodevelopment.

His current focus has been on increasing access to psychotherapies for women with depression during pregnancy and the postpartum period, and determining how to tailor these treatments to optimize infant neurodevelopment.

He has published over 160 peer-reviewed manuscripts, has an h-index of 29, and has secured over $25 million in research funding.

Biography

Harry completed a criminology degree at Western University, where he founded the Student Projects Committee and established the Online Student Exhibition at the McIntosh Art Gallery. Prior to joining Greenspace, Harry helped scale and lead the consumer sales team at eSight, TIME Magazine’s “2017 Invention of the Year” and the 2017 Canadian Innovation Awards “Breakthrough Technology of the Year”. Harry is a member of Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada.

Biography

Dr. D’Souza is appointed as a Staff Physician in Maternal and Fetal Medicine and as Assistant Professor in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. He holds an MD from the University of Mumbai and an MSc in Clinical Epidemiology (Epidemiology and Biostatistics) from the University of Toronto.

Dr. D’Souza won the 2014 J.W Knox Ritchie Research Award for his paper “Unfractionated Heparin, placental ultrasound and placental histopathology”, and the 2014 Institute for Health Policy Management and Evaluation best oral presentation award for “The management of epilepsy in women planning pregnancy”. More recently, he won the 2015 Gillian Hawker Poster Award for best PhD poster ‘Anticoagulation in pregnant women with mechanical heart valves’ and 2015 University of Toronto Chair’s Summer Studentship award for “Eliciting preferences of pregnant women for combined maternal and fetal health states arising from the use of anticoagulation in pregnancy.’

Prior to this, he won the Harold Malkin (First) Prize in 2012, awarded by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (UK) for best original research conducted by a UK trainee.

In 2015, the University of Toronto offered him the Junior Faculty Research Merit Award, towards research compensation for 2015-2017. He was also named a Lee B Lusted Award Finalist by the Society of Medical Decision Making for ‘The Management of Epilepsy in Women Contemplating Pregnancy: A Decision Analysis Model’.

His most significant publications focus on microcirculatory changes in small-born infants, caesarean sections upon maternal request for non-medical indications and the management of women with medical disorders in pregnancy.

Dr. D’Souza has published more than 15 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Biography

My research focuses on the interplay between modifiable psychosocial and behavioural (e.g. exercise) factors and health status in various chronic illnesses and in relation to depression in populations at risk, guided by a biopsychosocial framework. This has laid the foundation for the knowledge-transfer phase of my program which focuses on tailoring and evaluating evidence-based e-health interventions to empower individuals with the knowledge and skills needed to optimize their health and wellness. My research activities focus on: 1) maternal and paternal mental health during the transition to parenthood – identifying predictors and developing e-health psychoeducational interventions (see http://publications.mcgill.ca/reporter/2015/10/expectant-dads-get-depres…) ; 2) delineating the role of behavioural and psychosocial variables on health outcomes and quality of life in patients with chronic conditions; and 3) developing and testing gender-tailored tools to help individuals initiate and sustain healthy lifestyle behaviours over the lifespan.

Biography

Dr. Simone Vigod is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Women’s College Hospital. Her background includes an Honours BSc in Psychology from McGill University (1999), an MD from the University of Toronto, UofT (2003) and psychiatric residency at UofT (FRCPC, 2009). To build her research program, she undertook a Masters of Science in Clinical Epidemiology from the UofT Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME) and is an Full Member of the School of Graduate Studies at UofT. Dr. Vigod’s research aims to address disparities in health and health care for individuals with psychiatric disorders, with a specific focus on women across the lifespan and on equity in access to treatment for diverse populations. She is a Senior Adjunct Scientist at ICES, (formerly the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences) where she conducts her population-based epidemiological research. Since 2018, she holds the Shirley A. Brown Memorial Chair in Women’s Mental Health Research and is a Senior Scientist at Women’s College Research Institute at Women’s College Hospital where she runs the clinical intervention part of her research program. She has obtained over 15 million dollars in research funding as a principal or co-investigator for research from national and international funding agencies, and has published close to 250 peer-reviewed publications, with several manuscripts in top medical journals, including The British Medical Journal (BMJ), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Her research discoveries have been highlighted at the public level, with significant coverage from international and national media. Dr. Vigod also has a significant presence related to advocacy for quality of care at the provincial and national level that will guide implementation of interventions to improve the quality of mental health care delivery across the country.

Biography

Dr. Cindy-Lee Dennis is a Professor in the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and the Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She holds the Women’s Health Research Chair at Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael’s Hospital. Previously she held the Canada Research Chair in Perinatal Community Health. She is currently the principal investigator of seven large, multi-site studies and is a co-investigator on twenty-four other research projects concerning maternal, paternal, and infant health outcomes with a particular focus on perinatal mental health, breastfeeding and e-health interventions. She holds over $23 million in funding as a principal investigator from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and has over 200 peer-review publications. She is the lead author on eight Cochrane systematic reviews and has provided over 165 invited presentations. She developed the Breastfeeding Self-Efficacy Scale, the most widely used breastfeeding measure in the world that has been translated into over 20 different languages. Dr. Dennis has worked with the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services, the Provincial Council for Maternal and Child Health, and Public Health Ontario to influence policy and improve the care provided to women and their families across the perinatal period.

Biography

Dr. Barrett is the head of the maternal-fetal medicine program at Sunnybrook. In addition to providing general prenatal and obstetrical care, he also specializes in the care of women with high-risk twin and other multiple pregnancies. He is the founder and chair of the Southern Ontario Obstetric Network and of the Alliance for the Prevention of Preterm Birth and Stillbirth in Ontario.

Biography

Dr Iorio is an Associate Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics and Medicine at McMaster University. He is Chief of the Health Information Research Unit with clinical service at the Congenital Bleeding Disorders Clinic at McMaster University Medical Centre (MUMC) and Thrombosis Service at the Juravinski and MUMC.

His main research interest is in targeting research results to individual specificities, joining knowledge translation, risk stratification, and usage of individual patient data databases. He is the principal investigator of three multicentric initiatives: CHESS (Canadian Hemophilia Surveillance Scheme), the Canadian “branch” of the EUHASS surveillance scheme for adverse effects of haemophilia treatment; CBDR (Canadian Bleeding Disorders Registry), the new clinical management software of the network of haemophilia clinics in Canada; and WAPPS-Hemo (Web Available Population Pharmacokinetics Service for Hemophilia), a web-based solution for simplified estimation of individual factor concentrate pharmacokinetic.

Dr Iorio is an Associate Editor for Blood Coagulation Disorders of the Cystic Fibrosis and Genetic Disorders Review Group of the Cochrane Collaboration, and Chair of the Data and Demographics Committee of the World Federation of Haemophilia (WFH).

Biography

Elizabeth Alvarez is an experienced family/public health physician and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (HEI) at McMaster University. After completing her medical degree and family medicine residency at the University of Toledo in Ohio, she earned a master’s degree in public health through the Northwest Ohio Consortium for Public Health, and a PhD in Health Policy at McMaster University. She also holds a certificate in cognitive behavioural therapy (CMCBT).

Her research uses policy analysis and qualitative and mixed methods for applied knowledge translation, spanning the role of context in evidence informed decision making, public health topics, sustainable health behaviour change across the lifespan, and multidisciplinary care.

Biography

Jocelynn Cook (PhD) is the Chief Scientific Officer for the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada (SOGC). She has a PhD in Reproductive Physiology from the Medical University of South Carolina. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta and faculty position at the University of Saskatchewan, she was recruited by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to oversee development of the inaugural diagnostic guidelines for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). In the Federal Government, she has held executive positions at Health Canada’s First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, Assisted Human Reproduction Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Now at SOGC, she oversees all work related to Continuing Medical Education, Clinical Practice Guidelines, Research, Accreditation, Global Health and Indigenous Health. Her professional career has focused on issues related to maternal-fetal medicine including substance abuse during pregnancy, preterm birth and maternal mortality.

Biography

Kyle is a Departmental Research Coordinator for the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Kyle has extensive knowledge of McMaster systems and expertly navigates them to ensure project success. Kyle’s graduated from McMaster University with Honours Bachelors of Science – Biology specializing in immunology. Kyle further focused his studies in Political Sciences to give him a strong understanding of policies, procedures and bureaucratic processes. He also completed 3.5 years of French studies while at McMaster allowing for bi-lingual communication skills. Further Kyle completed his certification in phlebotomy in 2022 furthering his clinical research skills. Kyle hopes to continue to research while expanding his skills and further studies in future, and is passionate about improving the lives of humans through any means possible.

Biography

Ghazal is a medical student at Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University. Before medical school, she completed her Master’s degree from Harvard University in Human Development and Psychology and holds an Honours Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto, where she completed a double in Genetics and Psychology and minors in Mental Health and English. Ghazal is a fervent proponent of holistic health with a keen interest in the intersection of mental and physical health across age groups and populations. She is also interested in understanding the role culture, environment, barriers, and SES play in the complex but integral relationship between mental and physical health.

Danielle is one of our three Patient Partners. From the inception of this project, our Patient Partners have vulnerably shared their patient experiences and provided key input on project scope, need, and implementation considerations. Danielle’s contributions to this project to date include providing input on proposed project focus, feasibility, need, and considerations for the demographic characteristics of participants and feedback on recruitment and ethics materials.   

Natalia is one of our three Patient Partners. From the inception of this project, our Patient Partners have vulnerably shared their patient experiences and provided key input on project scope, need, and implementation considerations. They have also reviewed and provided feedback on our research study protocol, consent forms, and study recruitment and promotional materials. We are very grateful for their contributions.

Taylor is one of our three Patient Partners. From the inception of this project, our Patient Partners have vulnerably shared their patient experiences and provided key input on project scope, need, and implementation considerations. They have also reviewed and provided feedback on our research study protocol, consent forms, and study recruitment and promotional materials. We are very grateful for their contributions.

Jewell Kirkopoulos is a Registered Midwife with Mountain Midwifery Care located in Hamilton, Ontario. She is a clinical preceptor for the Midwifery Education Program and holds active staff privileges at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton and Hamilton Health Sciences. Jewell received her BHSc in Midwifery from McMaster University following her undergraduate degree in Environment & Resource Management at the University of Western Ontario. Her interests include inter-professional collaboration in maternity care, workplace culture and its effect on patient care.

Biography

Dr. Samantha Daniel received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Waterloo, an MA in Child Clinical Psychology from the University of Windsor, and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from McMaster University. Samantha recently spent several years working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women’s Health Concerns Clinic at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, focused on perinatal mental health, and currently works in the community as a clinical psychologist. Samantha has a specific interest in understanding and supporting individuals navigating the perinatal transition, particularly in the context of severe maternal morbidity.