The Techna Institute

Dr. David Jaffray graduated from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 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, London, Ontario in 1994. Following graduation, he took a position as Staff Physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, 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, Ontario as Head of Radiation Physics and a Senior Scientist within the Ontario Cancer Institute. Dr. Jaffray holds the Fidani Chair in Radiation Physics and is a principal in the STTARR Innovation Centre of the University Health Network. He is appointed as 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 over the past 10 years has been in the development and application of image-guided radiation therapy. He has over 5 patents issued and several licensed, including, kilovoltage cone-beam computed tomography for image-guided radiation therapy. Dr. Jaffray has in excess of 120 peer-reviewed publications in the field, in excess of 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 a member at large of the Science Council of the AAPM and has an active 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. His current research interests focus on the development of novel approaches of targeting and applying radiation therapy and translating these advances to clinical practice.

Dr. Lukasz Brzozowski is a recipient of the 2003 Governors General Gold Medal for his work on semiconductor, organic, and nanostructured optical devices. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Toronto. He conducted research at the Sunnybrook Research Institute in medical devices for imaging applications. Dr. Brzozowski held management positions in the development, marketing, legal, and regulatory departments at Novadaq Technologies Inc. and was a Manager, Project Management at MDS Pharma Services, Global Central Lab and Centralized Cardiac Services. Prior to joining Techna he was a Director of Photovoltaics Research Program at the University of Toronto. Dr. Brzozowski has over 25 peer reviewed publications including Science and Nature Photonics and his work has been cited 500 times.

Dr. Joseph Cafazzo is the Clinical Core Lead for Design and Engineering at Techna. Therein, he leads two research initiatives, The Centre for Global eHealth Innovation and Healthcare Human Factors. The Centre for Global eHealth Innovation is a state-of-the-art research facility devoted to the evaluation and design of healthcare technology, hosting seventy researchers and staff. Dr. Cafazzo has been an active researcher of the use of technology to facilitate patient self-care of complex chronic conditions such as diabetes, end-stage renal disease, and congestive heart failure. He is also active in ethnographic research related new modes of patient care mediated by technology, such as the Hospital-at-Home, and the Personal Health Record (PHR). Additionally, he is Senior Director of UHN Healthcare Human Factors - the largest group of its kind devoted to the application of human factors engineering to problems of healthcare delivery and patient safety. He has advised and conducted research for public sector policy makers and private sector medical technology companies on the design and safety of technology in healthcare. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, and the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, where he teaches and conducts research in the areas of human factors, clinical engineering, and health informatics. In 2010 he was the recipient of the Career Scientist award by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.

Gunther Eysenbach is a Senior Scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the Toronto Research Institute/Toronto General Hospital and Division of Medical Decision Making and Health Care Research. He also holds an academic appointment as Professor at the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, and is Visiting Professor at the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He studied medicine in Munich and Freiburg in German, and obtained a Master in Public Health from Harvard University. Dr Eysenbach is recognized by many as one of the leading researchers in the field of eHealth, consumer health informatics, and Internet & Medicine. He is author of a textbook for computers in medicine (which he wrote at the age of 24), editor of a loose-leaf book on computers for physicians, founding publisher and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, a leading global eHealth journal. Dr. Eysenbach has authored more than 120 publications, including almost 40 book-chapters as well as several pioneer studies and comments on cybermedicine, e-health and Consumer health informatics, published in respected international journals such as JAMA, BMJ, and the Lancet. He founded and headed the first research group on cybermedicine and eHealth worldwide at the University of Heidelberg between 1999 and 2001, where his main research interest was consumer health informatics, and came to Canada in March 2002 to help building up the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto. The research group at the Centre led by Dr. Eysenbach is pursuing projects from a wide area of disciplines including consumer health informatics, population health technology, usability of ehealth systems, electronic and Open Access publishing, knowledge synthesis and knowledge translation. The Internet plays a central role in most of his projects. His group is applying methods from the behavioral sciences, public health and clinical epidemiology, human factors engineering, and artificial intelligence (semantic web, natural language processing) to the design and evaluation of medical Internet and eHealth applications. Specific areas of interest are technology applications for behavior change, and mobile applications and social media / Web 2.0 applications for health professionals and consumers. A current CIHR-funded project dealt with mining and analyzing twitter data collected during the H1N1 pandemic to research the application of social media and mhealth for public health, and was featured in the CIHR annual report 2011. Other projects include a Personal Health Record (PHR) cum self-tracking project for the "quantified self" community dubbed "Healthbook", and an exploratory project to give patients at UHN access to portions of the health records through Microsoft Healthvault / Telus Healthspace. As Co-Director for Communications and Knowledge Transfer at Techna he has an interest in research social networking and expertise mining, is leading the development of the Techna website, and is heading an epublishing unit within Techna (dubbed UHN epress). Dr. Eysenbach has received numerous awards and distinctions. He has been called “one of the most productive researchers, editors, and publishers in the online health field.” (Ferguson Report's Distinguished Achievement Award) and in 2004 received the Janssen-Cilag Future Award, referred to as the German "health care Nobel prize". In addition, Dr. Eysenbach's pioneering work on "Infodemiology", presented at the 2006 AMIA Annual Fall Conference in Washington D.C. in November, won a Distinguished Paper Award. In 2011, he was inducted as fellow into the prestigious American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), an achievement which represents "recognition by peers of sustained and significant contributions to the field of biomedical informatics" and an honor which he shares with only a handful of other Canadiansr.

Dr. Irish graduated with his M.D. degree in 1984 from the University of Toronto. He completed residency training at UCLA and at the University of Toronto. He completed his Master’s of Science degree under the supervision of Dr Alan Bernstein where he studied molecular biology of head and neck malignancies. He completed the American Head and Neck Society fellowship in head and neck oncology in 1991 and joined the staff of the University Health Network in 1992. He is currently Chief of the Department of Surgical Oncology at the Princess Margaret Hospital/University Health Network and Mt. Sinai Hospital, Toronto, and is full Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Toronto. He is Lead, Access to Care and Strategic Funding Initiatives for the Surgical Oncology Program at Cancer Care Ontario and is responsible for the Cancer Surgery Wait Times portfolio. Dr. Irish focuses primarily on head and neck oncology and surgical reconstruction of the head and neck region. His research interests range from basic science studies in head and neck cancer to patient education intervention trials to outcome studies in head and neck cancers. More recently he has headed a multidisciplinary program in Guided Therapeutics at UHN. He has over 160 peer review publications and over 20 book chapters and has over $2M in peer review funding for his research through the NCIC and CIHR.

Dr. Igor Jurisica is a Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute, University Health Network, Associate Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Adjunct Professor at the School of Computer Science, Queen's University, and a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies. He earned his Dipl Ing degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Slovak Technical University in 1991, MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1993 and 1998, respectively. He currently holds a TIER I Canada Research Chair in Integrative Cancer Informatics. Dr Jurisica's research focuses on integrative computational biology, and representation, analysis and visualization of high dimensional data generated by high-throughput biology experiments, in the context of Cancer Informatics. Of particular interest is the use of comparative analysis for the mining of integrated different datasets such as protein-protein interaction, gene expression profiling, and high-throughput screens for protein crystallization.

Dr. Metser graduated with his M.D. degree in 1991 from the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel. He completed his residency training at the University of Tel Aviv and fellowships in Abdominal Imaging at the University of Toronto and Positron Emission Tomography at McMaster University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Radiology at the University of Toronto and the clinical lead and corporate PET expert at the Joint Department of Medical Imaging (University Health Network, Mount Sinai Hospital and Women's College). He also serves as a clinical expert in Ontario’s Special Access PET Program and the Ontario Provincial PET Steering Committee, where evidence-based review of the literature and of ongoing provincial trials form the basis for new clinical indications for the provinces PET program. Dr. Metser's research focuses on clinical applications of functional imaging in oncology, fusion imaging (PET/CT and PET/MR), novel radiopharmaceuticals targeting tumors and multiparametric response assessment to therapy. He has published over 60 peer review publications, and book chapters and is a reviewer for a few of the field's leading medical journals. He is a member of the Radiological Society of North America, American Roentgen Ray Society, Society of Nuclear Medicine and is a Corresponding Fellow of the European Society of Gastrointestinal and Abdominal Radiology.

Dr. Morra is the clinical director of the General Internal Medicine Inpatient Unit at the Toronto General Hospital, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto and a member of the Collaborative for Health Sector Strategy affiliated with the Rotman School of Management. He is an award winning teacher and is the manager theme director for the undergraduate curriculum in the Faculty of Medicine. As the former medical director of informatics at Mount Sinai Hospital, he was the physician leader in the successful implementation of clinical documentation, physician order entry and the development and deployment of numerous web-based clinical IT projects. He is one of the founding members of the Centre for Innovation and Complex Care (CICC). A center dedicated to studying how to improve the entire process of care for patients with multiple problems. Its purpose is to engage patients and clinicians to identify problems with current healthcare practices and develop solutions for addressing them. As the current IT director in the Department of Medicine, he has implemented a new educational and administrative portal and piloted a new web based application for storage and reporting of faculty academic information at St. Michaels Hopsital. Dr. Morra was the physician lead in the ED-GIM project which has recently been awarded a 3M Quality award for innovation in healthcare.

Dr. Murphy is currently the Vice Chair and Chief of Medical Imaging at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario. He was formerly the Director of Interventional Neuroradiology at John Hopkins University. Before Johns Hopkins, Dr. Murphy served as the Director of Research in the neuroradiology section of the Albany Medical College in New York for seven years. He is considered to be one of the most innovative specialists in the use of radiology guidance in the treatment of vascular brain and spine disorders. His research focuses on the use of imaging techniques to guide surgical intervention, particularly brain aneurysms and carotid artery disease. Dr. Murphy attended University College, and earned his medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons, both in Dublin. After his medical internships at the Teaching Hospital of the Royal College of Surgeons, he continued his postdoctoral training at the Albany Medical Center, where he completed both an internship and residency in radiology. Dr. Murphy also completed a residency in radiology at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. He was awarded two fellowships, one in neuroradiology at the University of Michigan Medical Center, and the other in interventional neuroradiology at the Hospital Cantonal of the University of Geneva in Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Murphy’s numerous accolades for both his research and clinical activities include the Gold Medal in Medicine and Surgery from the James Connolly Memorial Hospital in Dublin, the Gold Medal and McDonnell Prize in Surgery from the Charitable Infirmary in Dublin, Ireland, the Roentgen Fellow Outstanding Research Award from the Radiology Society of North America, and “Prix du jubilee” from the Swiss Society of Medical Radiology. Dr. Murphy is a member of the Radiological Society of North America, the American Society of Neuroradiology, the Society of Cardiovascular, the American Society of Interventional and Therapeutic Neuroradiology, and Interventional Neuroradiology; he also serves on the American Heart Association Council on Stroke. In addition, Dr. Murphy has extensive international medical volunteering experience, including founding a Primary Health Care Clinic at a Tibetan refugee camp in Southern India.

Dr. Rossos is currently the Chief Medical Information Officer at the University Health Network and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He serves on a number of committees including the Clinical Advisory Committee for The Colorectal Cancer Screening Program of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC), and the Professional Advisory Committee of the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN). He co-chairs the University Health Network Electronic Health Record Clinical Advisory Committee reporting to the Medical Advisory Committee. 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, chairs and serves on a number of local and national committees while holding executive positions within the Centers for Global eHealth and Innovation in Complex Care (CICC) at UHN. His educational contributions have been formally recognized with the W.H. Anderson Teaching Award from The Toronto Hospital in 1995-6, the University of Toronto Louis J. Cole Faculty Teaching Award for excellence in the field of gastroenterology in June, 2007, and the University Health Network/Mount Sinai Teacher of the Year Award for 2007-2008. During his recent term as Program Director of the University of Toronto Division of Gastroenterology he successfully introduced a curriculum including an interactive website and videoconferenced teaching rounds to support the internationally recognized multi-site academic program. He successfully completed his term as Chair of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Gastroenterology Examination Board in September, 2006 overseeing the merger of the Royal College and Collège des médecins du Québec (CMQ) while completely revising the examination process to include an examination blue print, a standardized patient program, and a multi-media OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) format to improve the objectivity and fairness of the examination.

Dr. J. Paul Santerre is one of the world’s leading authorities in the area of polymer biodegradation studies and synthesis of polyurethane materials. He serves as a consultant for leading medical device manufacturers on material design and technical expertise in the field. As Director of the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) at the University of Toronto, Dr. Santerre provides leadership to more than 80 research engineers and scientists throughout the greater Toronto area that are engaged in discovery and product development in the areas of neuroscience and sensory stimulation, biomaterials and tissue engineering, molecular systems biology and nanotechnology, as well as medical device and drug delivery system design. His research program is focused on investigating the relationship between polymers and bio-degradation processes in the body in order to advance the design of new materials for tissue engineering, implants and medical devices. Prior to starting at U of T in 1993, Professor Santerre was the lead materials engineer on the artificial heart program at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. At U of T, he served as co-director of CIHR’s training network for Network for Oral Research Training and Health (NORTH) and was Associate Dean, Research in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry. Currently, Professor Santerre holds appointments as full professor in the Division of Biomaterials within the Faculty of Dentistry, the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry and the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. Professor Santerre also founded a U of T biotech start-up company called Interface Biologics Inc, which develops catheters and drug-polymer coatings for medical devices. In 2004, Professor Santerre was inducted as a Fellow, Biomaterials Science and Engineering (FBSE) for lifetime achievement, and in 2009 became a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. In March 2010, he received the Julia Levy Award from the Canadian Society for Chemical Industry for translation of knowledge to product, and most recently was appointed as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Santerre has carried out work on more than 65 peer-reviewed, funded grants and contracts totaling more than $14M in research activity. His group has published more than 135 peer-reviewed papers in leading biomaterial and polymer journals which have generated 59 patents in the field of biomedical and membrane technologies.

Mark Taylor graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science in 1992 and received his M.Sc. in Engineering Mechanics in 1995 from Virginia Tech. He completed his MBA from Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in 2001. Throughout his career he has held several positions in industry, including engineering management of large technical programs at multi-national companies, to entrepreneur with technical start-ups, to developing business strategies and plans for raising capital for both startup and existing corporations. In Feb. 2008, Mr. Taylor joined UHN’s Technology Development and Commercialization office to look after engineering and related commercialization activities for the hospital. Since Mr. Taylor joined UHN, there has been a significant increase in the UHN commercial activity in the medical device area with commercial transactional deal flow arguably in the top tier of North American institutions. This success has solidified the importance of med-tech and related research activity at the hospital. Mr. Taylor regularly attends major global medical device conferences and speaks to several audiences on successful commercialization approaches for hospitals and researchers. Mr. Taylor’s primary interest is in accelerating and increasing commercial outcomes of the local research community based on real results and by example. Mr. Taylor holds one issued patent, several refereed journal publications, and is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ontario.

Dr. Wiljer completed his BA in Humanistic Studies at McGill before earning his PhD at from the University of Toronto, Centre for Medieval Studies. His work focused on ethics and culture in understanding the drivers for community and social change. His work explored the role of literacy and notions of the self and conscience in promoting personal and organizational change. He hold multiple titles with the Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Toronto and is the Director, Knowledge Management and Innovation, Radiation Medicine Program, Princess Margaret Hospital/UHN. He is the Founding Chair of the Canadian Committee for Patient Accessible Electronic Health Records (CCPAEHR), Member of the Executive Council of the American Association for Cancer Education and the Vice President of the Executive Council and an Associate Editor of the Journal for Cancer Education Dr. Wiljer is also the Associate Director of Electronic Living Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Cancer Survivorship Research (ELLICSR). ELLICSR was created as a physical and virtual community where researchers can study an ever-growing population in cancer care: survivors. Dr. Wiljer leads research and development projects that optimize patient empowerment, the patient experience and engagement through novel technologies and collaborations. A number of technologies have been implemented by Dr. Wiljer at the UHN include a virtual tour of Princess Margaret Hospital on its website; www.caringtotheend.ca, a palliative care website dedicated to providing information to patients, caregivers, and providers; a patient portal offering access to personal health information; and social networking platforms to encourage community building among survivors.

Dr. Brian Wilson PhD is a Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute and Professor of Medical Biophysics at University of Toronto. He leads an internationally recognized R&D program in optics-based biomedical applications, with a primary translational/clinical focus. In the past five years, the convergence of optics, nanotechnology and biomedical sciences has been an additional thrust. Dr. Wilson has published 300 peer-reviewed papers in basic, translational and clinical research, and has trained more than 60 graduate students and postdoctoral and clinical Fellows. He has held/holds several international Visiting Appointments (Harvard, USA; Saõ Paulo, Brazil; Fujian, China; Western Australia) and is involved in many national and international collaborations. In the 1990s, Dr. Wilson established the Laboratory for Applied Biophotonics at UHN, a unique partnership model between R&D institutions and industry, and founded and co-directs the Advanced Optical Microscopy Facility at UHN. He has co-founded 2 companies and has served on/chaired the Scientific Advisory Boards of several SMEs and multiple institutions in Canada and internationally. Currently, he serves as Vice Chair of the Advisory Committee on Research for the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute. He holds several awards in biomedical optics (Mark Award, NIH Translational Research Award) and cancer research (Robert L. Noble Prize). In Techna, he serves as the Scientific Lead for the Photonics platform.

Dr. Zheng completed his B.S in Hangzhou University in Hangzhou, China and his Ph.D at State University of New York. Dr. Zheng holds the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum/Brazilian Ball Chair in prostate cancer research. Dr. Zheng''s research focus involves the creation of a unique organic nanoparticle delivery platform capable of transporting cancer therapeutics directly to tumours. This research earned Dr. Zheng UHN'’s 2010 Inventor of the Year Award. This award is presented to a UHN researcher who has made an outstanding and inventive contribution to patient-oriented biomedical research. Dr. Zheng also recently developed a new class of nanoparticles, called porphysomes, which convert light to heat in an energy efficient manner. When accumulated in tumours, porphysomes converted light from a laser and successfully destroyed the tumours through photoablation. His work has appeared in over 100 publications, including prestigious journals like Nature Materials and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.