AMÉLIE QUESNEL-VALLÉE, DIRECTOR

Amélie Quesnel-Vallée holds the Canada Research Chair on Policies and Health Inequalities. She is an Associate Professor at McGill University, where she is jointly appointed across the Faculties of Arts and Medicine, respectively in the Departments of Sociology and of Epidemiology. She is also the founding Director of the International Research Infrastructure on Social inequalities in health (IRIS) and a founding member of the Centre on Population Dynamics at McGill.

Her research examines the contribution of social policies to social inequalities in health over the life course and has appeared in outlets such as a co-edited book, Le privé dans la santé : Les discours et les faits (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2008), as well as in journals such as the British Journal of Psychiatry, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the International Journal of Epidemiology and Social Science & Medicine. Her research has received numerous awards, including the Population Association of America Dorothy Thomas award and the 2005 American Sociological Association Dissertation Award. She was elected President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on the Sociology of Health (2014-2018) in recognition of her leadership in the field.

Committed to furthering public understanding of science, she is frequently sought by the media to comment on health care policy and population health. She has consulted for Health Canada and Statistics Canada, and has served this government agency as a member of the National Statistics Council since 2014.

ISABELLE VEDEL, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

Dr. Isabelle Vedel is a public health physician and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University. She is also an investigator at the Lady Davis Institute at the Sir Mortimer B. Davis – Jewish General Hospital. She did her post-doctoral fellowship in health service research in chronic disease management (health care services organization, health management, information technology) at McGill University (2012). She has received an investigator award from the Canadian Institute of Health Research and a Dawson Scholar.

Dr. Isabelle Vedel’s research interests are mainly in health care organization and primary health care services for persons with multiple chronic diseases and older patients. Her research work focuses on health services research in chronic disease management, particularly Alzheimer’s or related disorders.

Dr. Vedel’s research agenda currently includes programs on the implementation, evaluation, and organization of health care services for older patients and patients with multiple chronic diseases. She is presently conducting studies on the implementation and impacts of new models of primary care, such as integrated care services and transitional care for complex patients with multiple chronic diseases including Alzheimer’s or related diseases. Dr. Isabelle Vedel is also undertaking research studies on the implementation of health information technologies in the context of chronic disease management.

She has expertise in evaluation, mixed methods research and complex systematic reviews of the literature.

HOWARD BERGMAN

Howard Bergman MD, FCFP, FRCPC is Chair of the Department of Family Medicine, Professor of Family Medicine, Medicine (geriatrics), and Oncology. He was the first Dr. Joseph Kaufmann Professor of Geriatric Medicine from 2001-2015.

From 2009 to 2011, Dr. Bergman served as Vice-President, Scientific Affairs of the Fonds de la recherche en Santé du Québec (FRSQ), Quebec’s health research funding agency. From 1993-2009, he was Director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine at McGill University and of the Jewish General Hospital. In 2001-2002, he was interim Physician-in-Chief and Chief of the Department of Medicine of the Jewish General Hospital. He is an investigator at Solidage: the McGill University/Université de Montréal Research Group on Frailty and Aging as well as at the Bloomfield Centre for Research on Aging at the Lady Davis Institute, Jewish General Hospital. He is Adjunct Professor in the Université de Montréal School of Public Health, Invited Professor, Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine at the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland (until 2012). He is also adjunct full Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel where he was appointed to the  International Academic Review Committee.

Dr. Bergman is a fellow of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS). He is a past President of the Canadian Geriatrics Society which awarded him the Ronald Cape Distinguished Service Award, a past Scientific Director of the FRSQ Quebec Network for Research in Aging, a Past President of the Consortium of Canadian Centers for Clinical Cognitive Research (C5R) and a past Chair of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Ageing of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). He is a fellow of the American Geriatrics Society. He is internationally recognized for his research on integrated care, frailty and chronic disease with over 160 publications as well as numerous reports and book chapters. The main thrust of Dr. Bergman’s work in health services research and policy has been on aging, chronic disease and frailty and on the promotion of primary care in general and primary medical care in particular.

In 2000-2001, Dr. Bergman was a member of the “Clair Commission”, an independent Commission set up by the Quebec government to propose reforms to the health care system. His work in that Commission was instrumental in the recommendation on primary care reform. He is recognized as the «author» of the recommendation on the creation of Family Medicine Groups (GMF).

In 2009, at the request of the Quebec ministry of health, he tabled the Quebec Alzheimer Plan. Now working with the Ministry of Health in the implementation of the plan, Dr. Bergman has also set up The Canadian Team for healthcare services/system improvement in dementia care, a multidisciplinary team involving stakeholders dedicated to the evaluation and implementation of initiatives to improve the capacity of primary care to diagnose and treat older persons with Alzheimer’s disease, and their caregivers.

In 2010, Dr. Bergman also chaired the Initiative for the Development of a Personalized Health Care Strategy for Quebec, bringing together university researchers, industry, health system managers, and government which led to an initial Quebec government commitment of $10 million to be matched by industry.

Dr. Bergman is a member of the Board of Directors of the Quebec Institut national d’excellence en santé et en services sociaux (INESSS-the equivalent of NICE in England. He is co-Chair of the National Guidance and Implementation Committee of the pan-Canadian public health program on family violence. Until recently, a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). In 2102, he advised the Ontario Ministry of Health in setting up Health System Research Fund Research competition (a $65 million Program) and chaired the inaugural scientific review panel. He advised and chaired the review panel for the Ontario SPOR $11 million competition. He serves as consultant to Regional Health Boards and ministries of health in Canada and other countries as well as to industry.

DANIEL WEINSTOCK

Daniel Weinstock studied Political Science and Political Philosophy at McGill University, where he received a BA and an MA, between 1980 and 1986. He received a DPhil in Political Philosophy from Oxford University, where he studied between 1986 and 1991. From 1988 to 1989, he was a visiting doctoral student at Harvard University. He completed postdoctoral work in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, before joining the faculty of the Department of Philosophy of the Université de Montréal in 1993. From 2002 to 2011, he was the Founding Director of the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal. In 2012, he became a Professor in the Faculty of Law and in the Department of Philosophy of McGill University. In 2013, he was appointed as Director of McGill’s Institute for Health and Social Policy. His term as Director began on August 1, 2013. He has held Visiting Appointments at Université Lyon III, at the Australian National University, at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto, Japan), and at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain.

His research interests have spanned widely across a wide range of topics in contemporary moral and political philosophy – from the just management of ethnocultural and religious diversity in modern liberal democracies, to state policy with respect to children, families, and educational institutions. His main research interests at present have to do with the problem of health equity, and with issues of justice and inclusion as they arise in the organization of modern cities. The guiding thread of his research has been to connect philosophical and ethical argument with institutional reasoning. It is marked by the firm conviction that moral and political philosophers have paid insufficient attention to the institutional parameters that both enable and constrain the realization of normative ideals. His attention to institutional specificity has led to his being called upon quite regularly to serve on public policy commissions in areas as diverse as public health (he was the Founding Director of Quebec’s Public Health Ethics Committee), education, end-of-life medical care, and “reasonable accommodation.”

His work and teaching have been recognized by a number of major prizes. In 1997 he was awarded a teaching prize by the Faculté des arts et des sciences de l’Université de Montréal for his innovations in developing ethics and public policy courses for the health sciences, and in 1998 he received a teaching prize awarded by the Université de Montréal to its most distinguished teachers at the University-wide level. He has held both a Tier I and a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Université de Montréal.

In 1998, he was awarded a fellowship both to the Rockefeller Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and to the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He spent the 1998-1999 academic year as a Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton. In 2004, he was made a Prize Fellow of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation, and in 2008, he received the Prix André-Laurendeau from the Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences. He received the prix du dialogue intercultural, Institut intercultural de Montréal in 2011 and in 2017 he was awarded the Charles Taylor Prize for Excellence in Policy Research at the Broadbent Institute’s Progress Summit.