Objectives

To explore the challenges of building “The Big Machine” – the mechanisms that enable the use of big data to improve healthcare.
To build academic and industrial partnerships to develop solutions to maximize discoveries from the data generated by the healthcare system.

Location

MaRS Auditorium
101 College Street . Toronto . Ontario
M5G 1L7

Schedule & Speaker Bios

Below is the event schedule for Techna 2015: The Big Machine: Healthcare Built to Learn. Here you can view the agenda and speaker bios by clicking the event times below. Video recordings of individual speeches will be available on this page after the event within each segment. The Techna 2015 Symposium will feature a live tweeting system for participants to add comments in parallel to the discussions and presentations.

Videos of the Day

To view the video playlist of the full day at Techna Symposium please click the button below.

Agenda

8:00-8:40 – Breakfast and Registration

8:40-8:45 – Morning Greeting

David Jaffray

Executive Vice President, Technology & Innovation, UHN; Director, Techna Institute, UHN

Dr. David Jaffray graduated from the University of Alberta with a B.Sc. in Physics (Hons.) in 1988 and completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Western Ontario in 1994. Following graduation, he took a position as Staff Physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at William Beaumont Hospital in Michigan where he instigated a direction of research that garnered funding from the NIH and from congressionally-directed funding programs. Dr. Jaffray became a Board Certified Medical Physicist (ABMP – Radiation Oncology) in 1999. In 2002, Dr. Jaffray joined the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto as Head of Radiation Physics and a Senior Scientist within the Ontario Cancer Institute. David holds the Fidani Chair in Radiation Physics, is the Director of the Techna Institute for Health Technology Development at the University Health Network and recently became the Executive Vice President of Technology and Innovation at the University Health Network. He is a Professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology, Medical Biophysics, and Institute for Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. His primary area of research has been in the development and application of image-guided therapy. He has over 5 patents issued and several licensed, including, kilovoltage cone-beam computed tomography for image-guided radiation therapy. Dr. Jaffray has >200 peer-reviewed publications in the field, >100 invited lectures, and holds numerous peer-review and industry sponsored research grants. He sits on numerous scientific and research boards and has contributed to the NIH and CIHR grant review process for several years. He is an active member of the AAPM and teaching role in workshops and annual meeting of the American Society of Therapeutic Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). He has an active interest in commercialization and led the development of a variety of commercial products including software and hardware for QA and the development of small animal irradiator systems for basic research. He has successfully supervised over 20 graduate students and fellows.

Dr. Jaffray has won each of the major prizes in the field of the medical physics, including, the Sylvia Sorkin-Greenfield Award, The Farrington Daniels Award, and the Sylvia Fedoruk Award. In 2004, Dr. Jaffray was identified as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 and was recognized by The University of Western Ontario with their Young Alumni Award in 2004. His current research interests focus on the development of imaging technologies and methods with a focus on image-guided interventions, including radiation therapy, drug delivery, and surgery.

8:45-9:00 – Opening Remarks

Peter Pisters

President and CEO, UHN

Dr. Peter W. T. Pisters, MD, MHCM, CPE, FACHE, FACS was appointed as President and CEO of UHN (Toronto General, Toronto Western, Princess Margaret Hospitals and Toronto Rehab Institute) in January 2015. Dr. Pisters is an internationally known tenured Professor of Surgery at MD Anderson. Dr. Pisters has held a number of clinical, administrative and leadership positions at MD Anderson from 1994 to 2014 with his most recent executive responsibilities being the management of 6 MD Anderson centers for care across metropolitan Houston.

Prior to this role, he was Medical Director of the regional cancer centers, Clinical Consultant for the Center for Global Oncology (now known as MD Anderson Cancer Network), Section Chief for Sarcoma Surgery with a specialty focus in the management of sarcoma and gastrointestinal cancer patients. Dr. Pisters was with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 1992- 1994, serving as Chief Administrative Fellow in the Department of Surgical Oncology.

He completed his internship and residency at New York University School of Medicine Center – Bellevue Hospital. Dr. Pisters is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. He holds an M.SC. in Health Care Management from Harvard University and is a 2015-15 Executive Fellow in the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program of the U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology agency.

9:00-9:45 – Keynote Speaker

Evren Eryurek

Software Chief Technology Officer, GE Healthcare

Evren Eryurek is the Software Chief Technology Officer for GE Healthcare, near $20 billion segment of GE. GE Healthcare is a global leader in delivering healthcare clinical, business, and operational solutions with its medical equipment, information technologies, life sciences and service technologies covering settings from physician offices to integrated delivery networks.

Evren leads software technology programs across the entire GE Healthcare portfolio focused on driving customer success and on helping providers deliver improved patient outcomes through GEHC applications. His responsibilities include overseeing the application development, NPI execution, creation of a harmonized H e a l t h c a r e software architecture & platform; delivering, harnessing and maintaining common services across the portfolio; driving global strategy and engineering capabilities; developing and delivering Cloud, Mobile and Analytics technologies for clinical, financial and operational customer outcomes; and leading software development as a function including its governance, processes, tools and execution.

Evren is championing several initiatives across GE Healthcare including Predix for Healthcare platform & applications, Cloud & Mobility first design, Software User Experience, B i g D a t a Analytics, Microservices based solutions, and the adoption of Agile methodologies in the software development process. He is a member of GE’s Software & Services Council.

Evren began his GE career at GE Transportation, where he served as General Manager of the Software and Solutions business. He led the development of GE’s Movement Planner system, which helps railroads solve capacity issues by better managing the movement of trains. Before joining GE in 2005, Evren was with Emerson Process Management group for over 11 years, where he held several leadership positions and was responsible for developing new software-based growth technologies for process control systems and field devices, coordinating cross-divisional product execution and implementation.

A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Evren holds a master’s and doctorate degree in Nuclear Engineering. He holds over 60 US patents, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.

9:45-10:45 – Session 1: Data Sources

Lydia Lee

Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, UHN

Lydia Lee is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for University Health Network (UHN), a leading multi-site teaching hospital in Toronto specializing in acute care, rehab care, complex continuing care and long-term care. Lydia has been at UHN for more than eleven years serving in different leadership roles focusing on information management strategy, clinical systems integration, performance improvement, patient safety and health system redesign.

In addition to her UHN responsibilities, Lydia is the Integrated Chief Information Officer for the Shared Information Management Services (SIMS) – a collaboration of health care provider organizations that span the continuum of care in Toronto. These organizations work together to transform health care delivery by leveraging information management and technology. Lydia is formerly the Past President of the Board of Directors of COACH, Canada’s Health Informatics Association, a national association dedicated to developing and promoting health informatics professionals and leadership within the Canadian health system.

Previously, Lydia has held numerous positions in healthcare administration and management consulting. Lydia received her B.A. in Economics from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and her M.B.A. in Finance and Management from the University of Texas.

Hospital for Sick Children

Dr. Jennifer Stinson is the Mary Jo Haddad Nursing Child in Child Health and an Advanced Practice Nurse in the Chronic Pain Program at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto. Her major clinical research interests are in the area of pain and symptom management and the use of e-health (internet) and m-health (mobile phones) technologies to improve the assessment and management of pain and other symptoms in children with chronic illnesses.

She has published 78 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals such as Pain. In recognition of her important work in the area of pain, disease self-management and e-health, Dr. Stinson has received a Career Scientist Award from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (2009-2011), Canadian Arthritis Network Investigator Award (2011-2013) and the top new investigator award in Canada – The Peter Lougheed CIHR New Investigator Award (2013-2018). She also received the Canadian Pain Society Early Career Award in May 2012 and the International Association of the Study of Pain Childhood SIG Early Career Award in June 2015.

Hugo Aerts

Director at CIBL, Harvard University

Hugo is based at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School where he is Director of the Computational Imaging and Bioinformatics laboratory (CIBL). His research interest is radiomics – a field that harnesses high-throughput analysis of different imaging modalities (such as PET, CT and MRI) to provide insights into tumor biology.

Imaging-based techniques have traditionally been restricted to the diagnosis of cancer and staging of cancer. But technological advances are moving imaging modalities into the heart of patient care. Radiomics uses imaging assays to develop biomarkers which complement those derived from biopsies. The ultimate goal of the CIBL lab is to use radiomics to improve personalized medicine strategies by allowing clinicians to monitor disease in real time as patients move through treatment.

Gary Palmer

Chief Medical Officer, NantHealth

Dr. Palmer is the Chief Medical Officer at Nanthealth. Previously, he was the Senior Vice President, Medical Affairs, at Foundation Medicine. He is a veteran of the pharma and biotech industry. Before Foundation Medicine, he was Vice President of Medical Affairs at Genomic Health where he directed the medical aspects of the Oncotype DX Breast Cancer Assay.

After Genomic Health, he served as Chief Medical Officer of On-Q-ity, a circulating tumor cell company. Prior to Genomic Health, Dr. Palmer had extensive experience in the pharmaceutical industry, including roles as Executive Director at Kosan Biosciences and at Salmedix, Inc. where he spent time in early drug development. Previously, he spent five years at Amgen where he was involved in the development and commercialization strategies of Neulasta and Aranesp.

Before his roles in industry, Dr. Palmer served as a medical oncologist in both academia and in the community setting. Dr. Palmer was director of the Medical Breast Service at the University of California, Davis, Cancer Center and Chief of Medical Oncology at the Mercy Health System, Sacramento, California. For nine years he was on the adjunct faculty of the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management where he taught “Management of Biotechnology” to MBA students.

Dr. Palmer is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale University and a graduate of the Stanford University School of Medicine. He did his internal medicine training at the Boston City Hospital and his oncology fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital He has a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of California, Davis, and a Masters in Public Health (MPH) from U.C.L.A. As well, Dr. Palmer holds a J.D. degree and is admitted as an attorney to the State Bar of California.

10:45-11:00 – Break

11:00-12:00 – Session 2: Federation

Prateek Dwivedi

Cancer Informatics, Techna Institute, UHN

Prateek (Teek) Dwivedi is an entrepreneurial-minded executive with 15 years of experience in technology management. His history in the private sector has proven to be an important asset for his work in healthcare. He incorporates lessons learned from the finance, telecommunications, sports and entertainment, and IT industries.

Teek runs the Cancer Informatics strategy for Princess Margaret Cancer Centre where he is responsible for ushering in a new platform that integrates all clinical and research environments. He was the Chief Information Officer at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, where he was responsible for technology infrastructure, application deployment and management, health records, and admitting and registration.

Teek has a keen interest in simplifying the clinician experience with mobile technology to foster an ever-increasing focus on patients. This pursuit led to the creation of VitalHub, a platform that provides mobile access to the EMR, bringing together over 65 applications. Teek has a MASc in Systems Design Engineering from University of Waterloo.

Peter Jones

Industry Lead for Healthcare, Microsoft Canada

Peter Jones joined Microsoft Canada in October 1999. He brings (25+) years’ experience in the information technology industry with the last 8+ years focused on helping modernize the Canadian healthcare system through better Digital health. He has a proven track record in sales, strategic planning and business management. He is involved in a number Health Informatics groups like COACH, CHIEF, and is an active ITAC Health board member.

Francis Jeanson

Manager, Informatics and Analytics, Ontario Brain Institute

Francis joined OBI in the spring of 2013 to help design and implement the Brain-CODE neuroscience informatics platform. After gaining experience as a software developer, Francis pursued a Masters in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems at the University of Sussex which he completed in 2008 followed by a PhD in Cognitive Science with a focus in neural coding theory at Carleton University. Francis possesses a long standing interest in intelligence and the brain, knowledge representation and computer modelling. Today, he is excited to work with OBI and hopes to see flourish the enormous potential that the Brain-CODE neuroinformatics platform can offer for multidimensional brain research. Francis is also actively engaged in the analytics technology and open data community with special interest in the fields of health and science.

Josh Gray

Vice President of athenaResearch, athenahealth

Josh Gray is Vice President of Research for athenahealth, a healthcare information technology and services company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts. Among his responsibilities are overseeing data analytics for the 44,000 providers using athenahealth software, developing partnerships with leading academic researchers and foundations, and tracking the impact of health care reform.

Prior to joining athenahealth, Josh occupied senior research positions at the Advisory Board Company, a health care consultancy in Washington, DC, and worked as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Health Care Services from the Wharton School of Business and an BA in History from Brown University.

12:00-1:00 – Lunch and Expo

1:00-2:00 – Session 3: Machine Learning

Igor Jurisica

Senior Scientist, Ontario Cancer Institute

Professor Igor Jurisica is the Tier I Canada Research Chair in Integrative Cancer Informatics, Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Professor at the University of Toronto and Visiting Scientist at IBM CAS. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the School of Computing, Pathology and Molecular Medicine at Queen’s University, the Computer Science at York U, and an Honorary Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research focuses on integrative computational biology and the representation, analysis and visualization of high-dimensional data to identify prognostic and predictive signatures, drug mechanism_of_action and in-silico repurposing of drugs.

His interests include prediction and analysis of protein interactions networks, modeling signaling cascades and high-throughput protein crystallography. He has published extensively on data mining, visualization and cancer informatics, including multiple papers in Science, Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, J Clinical Oncology, and has over 8,496 citations since 2010. He has been included in Thomson Reuters 2014 & 2015 lists of Highly Cited Researchers, and The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014 Report.

Andre Dekker

Division Leader at MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht University

Dr Andre Dekker is a board-certified medical physicist at MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht, The Netherlands since 2005. He led for numerous years the department of Information and Services that manages medical informatics and ICT and is now responsible for all Research and Education activities at the hospital. From 2008, he started and is the principal investigator of the GROW-Maastricht University research division of MAASTRO Knowledge Engineering. His research focuses on two main themes: 1) global data sharing infrastructures; 2) machine learning on this data for decision support systems. The main scientific breakthrough has been the development of a Semantic Web and ontology based data sharing and distributed learning infrastructure that does not require data to leave the hospital. This has reduced many of the ethical and other barriers to share data.

Dr Dekker has authored over 80 publications in peer reviewed journals covering informatics, imaging, radiotherapy, tissue optics and heart disease and holds 6 awarded patents. He has held visiting scientist appointments at the Christie Hospital NHS trust; University of Sydney Australia; Liverpool and Macarthur Cancer therapy centres Australia; Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District Australia; Universita Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, Italy; Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, USA and the Princess Margaret Hospital in Canada.

Anna Goldenberg

Hospital for Sick Children

Dr. Goldenberg is a Scientist in Genetics and Genome Biology program at the SickKids Research Institute and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Dr Goldenberg trained in machine learning and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, with a post-doctoral focus in computational biology. She is an expert in developing machine learning approaches for biological data, network methods for Big Data and most recently, data integration of omics and clinical data.

The current focus of her lab is on developing methods that capture heterogeneity and identifying disease mechanisms in complex human diseases. Her translational focus is on methods that efficiently combine many types of patient measurements to refine diagnosis, improve prognosis and personalise drug response prediction for cancer patients.

Russ Greiner

Professor, Computing Science, University of Alberta

After earning a PhD from Stanford, Russ Greiner worked in both academic and industrial research before settling at the University of Alberta, where he is now a Professor in Computing Science and the founding Scientific Director of the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning, which won the ASTech Award for “Outstanding Leadership in Technology” in 2006.

He has been Program Chair for the 2004 “Int’l Conf. on Machine Learning”, Conference Chair for 2006 “Int’l Conf. on Machine Learning”, Editor-in-Chief for “Computational Intelligence”, and is serving on the editorial boards of a number of other journals. He was elected a Fellow of the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) in 2007, and was awarded a McCalla Professorship in 2005-06 and a Killam Annual Professorship in 2007.

He has published over 200 refereed papers and patents, most in the areas of machine learning and knowledge representation, including 4 that have been awarded Best Paper prizes. The main foci of his current work are (1) bioinformatics and medical informatics; (2) learning and using effective probabilistic models and (3) formal foundations of learnability.

2:00-2:15 – Break

2:15-3:00 – Debate: Big Data for Health: Boom or Bust?

Veillette Christian

Toronto Western Hospital, UHN

Dr. Christian Veillette is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Orthopaedic Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Toronto. He is a staff surgeon for shoulder and elbow reconstructive surgery at Toronto Western Hospital and University Health Network, and the University of Toronto Sports Medicine Program at Women’s College Hospital. Dr. Veillette is a nationally and internationally recognized leader and innovator in minimally invasive shoulder and elbow surgery.

Dr. Veillette has won many academic and research honours and awards. He is a recognized leader in orthopaedic informatics being awarded the Canadian Orthopaedic Association Award of Merit for leadership and innovation in orthopaedic informatics, technology and communications.

Dr. Veillette’s research focuses on the development of novel uses of information technology and computer science to improve healthcare, research and education including synoptic reporting and advanced clinical documentation in Electronic Health Records (EHR), biomedical knowledge representation, Internet applications in healthcare, consumer informatics and the use of information technology to support outcome and translational research. Dr. Veillette is the Director of the Electronic Data Capture Program within the Techna Institute for the Advancement of Technology For Health.

His team has developed the DADOS Platform, an open web-based platform for electronic data capture in clinical and translational research. The DADOS Platform has been successfully deployed within the Arthritis Program and several different clinical and research programs across UHN and within Ontario and is ideally suited for providing a comprehensive platform for data integration and business analytics.

Benjamin Haibe-Kains

Scientist, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, UHN

Benjamin Haibe-Kains is Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PM), University Health Network, and Assistant Professor in the Medical Biophysics and Computer Science departments of the University of Toronto. Dr. Haibe-Kains earned his PhD in Bioinformatics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), for which he was awarded a Solvay Award (Belgium). Supported by a Fulbright Award, Dr. Haibe-Kains did his postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health (USA). Dr. Haibe-Kains started his own laboratory at the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal (Canada) and moved to PM in November 2013.

Dr. Haibe-Kains’ research focuses on the integration of high-throughput data from various sources to simultaneously analyze multiple facets of carcinogenesis. Dr. Haibe-Kains and his team are analyzing high-throughput (pharmaco) genomic datasets to develop new prognostic and predictive models and to discover new therapeutic regimens in order to significantly improve disease management. Dr. Haibe-Kains’ main scientific contributions include several prognostic gene signatures in breast cancer, subtype classification models for ovarian and breast cancers, as well as genomic predictors of drug response in cancer cell lines.

Andre Dekker

Division Leader at MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht University

Dr Andre Dekker is a board-certified medical physicist at MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht, The Netherlands since 2005. He led for numerous years the department of Information and Services that manages medical informatics and ICT and is now responsible for all Research and Education activities at the hospital. From 2008, he started and is the principal investigator of the GROW-Maastricht University research division of MAASTRO Knowledge Engineering. His research focuses on two main themes: 1) global data sharing infrastructures; 2) machine learning on this data for decision support systems. The main scientific breakthrough has been the development of a Semantic Web and ontology based data sharing and distributed learning infrastructure that does not require data to leave the hospital. This has reduced many of the ethical and other barriers to share data.

Dr Dekker has authored over 80 publications in peer reviewed journals covering informatics, imaging, radiotherapy, tissue optics and heart disease and holds 6 awarded patents. He has held visiting scientist appointments at the Christie Hospital NHS trust; University of Sydney Australia; Liverpool and Macarthur Cancer therapy centres Australia; Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District Australia; Universita Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, Italy; Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, USA and the Princess Margaret Hospital in Canada.

3:00-3:25 – Post-Debate Commentary

Veillette Christian

Toronto Western Hospital, UHN

Dr. Christian Veillette is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Orthopaedic Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Toronto. He is a staff surgeon for shoulder and elbow reconstructive surgery at Toronto Western Hospital and University Health Network, and the University of Toronto Sports Medicine Program at Women’s College Hospital. Dr. Veillette is a nationally and internationally recognized leader and innovator in minimally invasive shoulder and elbow surgery.

Dr. Veillette has won many academic and research honours and awards. He is a recognized leader in orthopaedic informatics being awarded the Canadian Orthopaedic Association Award of Merit for leadership and innovation in orthopaedic informatics, technology and communications.

Dr. Veillette’s research focuses on the development of novel uses of information technology and computer science to improve healthcare, research and education including synoptic reporting and advanced clinical documentation in Electronic Health Records (EHR), biomedical knowledge representation, Internet applications in healthcare, consumer informatics and the use of information technology to support outcome and translational research. Dr. Veillette is the Director of the Electronic Data Capture Program within the Techna Institute for the Advancement of Technology For Health.

His team has developed the DADOS Platform, an open web-based platform for electronic data capture in clinical and translational research. The DADOS Platform has been successfully deployed within the Arthritis Program and several different clinical and research programs across UHN and within Ontario and is ideally suited for providing a comprehensive platform for data integration and business analytics.

Shaf Keshavjee

Surgeon-in-Chief, UHN

Shaf Keshavjee is a Thoracic surgeon and Director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program. He is Surgeon-in-Chief, James Wallace McCutcheon Chair in Surgery at University Health Network and Professor Division of Thoracic Surgery and Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Dr Keshavjee completed his medical training at the University of Toronto in 1985. He subsequently trained in General Surgery, Cardiac Surgery and Thoracic Surgery at the University of Toronto followed by fellowship training at Harvard University and the University of London for airway surgery and heart-lung transplantation respectively. He joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 1994 and was promoted to full professor in 2002. Dr. Keshavjee served as the Chair of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at the University of Toronto from 2004 to 2010.

Dr Keshavjee’s clinical practice is in thoracic oncology, lung cancer and lung transplantation. His specific research interest is in lung injury related to transplantation. His current work involves the study of molecular diagnostics and gene therapy strategies to repair organs and to engineer superior organs for transplantation.

Dr. Keshavjee is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and has been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from Ryerson University, as well as an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Queen’s University. He has also received two Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medals. He was awarded the Order of Ontario and also received the country’s highest civilian honour with an appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Peter Rossos

Chief Medical Information Officer, UHN

As Chief Medical Information Officer and staff gastroenterologist, Dr. Rossos’ priorities include strategic alignment of clinical systems with workflow and productivity in order to improve outcomes related to patient safety, quality improvement, education and research. In addition to working closely with local academic leadership and researchers, he contributes to provincial and national efforts to advance the use of information and communication technologies. Dr. Rossos received his M.D. from the University of Toronto in 1986, where he subsequently completed his Internal Medicine, Gastroenterology training, and therapeutic endoscopy fellowship.

He studied Leadership Development for Physicians in Academic Health Centers at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004 and graduated from the Executive MBA Program at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management as a Bregman Scholar in June, 2008. He has achieved international recognition for his innovation and leadership in informatics and telehealth while chairing and serving on a number of local and national committees. Recent projects include serving as Clinical Co-Lead for ConnectingGTA, an information hub to provide better access to information for approximately 750 health care organizations resulting in better care for 6.75 million Ontario residents and leading a national synoptic reporting project for gastrointestinal endoscopy to improve procedural quality and patient outcomes.

3:25-3:30 – Closing Remarks

David Jaffray

Executive Vice President, Technology & Innovation, UHN; Director, Techna Institute, UHN

Dr. David Jaffray graduated from the University of Alberta with a B.Sc. in Physics (Hons.) in 1988 and completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Western Ontario in 1994. Following graduation, he took a position as Staff Physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at William Beaumont Hospital in Michigan where he instigated a direction of research that garnered funding from the NIH and from congressionally-directed funding programs. Dr. Jaffray became a Board Certified Medical Physicist (ABMP – Radiation Oncology) in 1999. In 2002, Dr. Jaffray joined the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto as Head of Radiation Physics and a Senior Scientist within the Ontario Cancer Institute. David holds the Fidani Chair in Radiation Physics, is the Director of the Techna Institute for Health Technology Development at the University Health Network and recently became the Executive Vice President of Technology and Innovation at the University Health Network. He is a Professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology, Medical Biophysics, and Institute for Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto. His primary area of research has been in the development and application of image-guided therapy. He has over 5 patents issued and several licensed, including, kilovoltage cone-beam computed tomography for image-guided radiation therapy. Dr. Jaffray has >200 peer-reviewed publications in the field, >100 invited lectures, and holds numerous peer-review and industry sponsored research grants. He sits on numerous scientific and research boards and has contributed to the NIH and CIHR grant review process for several years. He is an active member of the AAPM and teaching role in workshops and annual meeting of the American Society of Therapeutic Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). He has an active interest in commercialization and led the development of a variety of commercial products including software and hardware for QA and the development of small animal irradiator systems for basic research. He has successfully supervised over 20 graduate students and fellows.

Dr. Jaffray has won each of the major prizes in the field of the medical physics, including, the Sylvia Sorkin-Greenfield Award, The Farrington Daniels Award, and the Sylvia Fedoruk Award. In 2004, Dr. Jaffray was identified as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 and was recognized by The University of Western Ontario with their Young Alumni Award in 2004. His current research interests focus on the development of imaging technologies and methods with a focus on image-guided interventions, including radiation therapy, drug delivery, and surgery.

3:30-4:30 – Networking Session