Working At Techna
What it’s been like working at Techna for the past 10 years and our teams’ major successes
Data Science Team
Who We Are
The Data Science team is a multi-disciplinary team that supports the Cancer Digital Intelligence (CDI) Program, by building informatics resources and developing innovative data science methods to advance cancer research, optimize patient care and improve patient outcomes. The Data Science team focuses on tools that enable the FAIR Principles of data in healthcare, standardization and aggregation of big data and the translation of AI in Health.
Our Team
Tran Truong, Benjamin Grant, Anton Sukhovatkin, Mickey Ng, Tirth Patel, Melissa Kozak, Sharon Narine, Paige Gilbank, Pietro Andreoli, Srimathi Jayasimman,
Our major successes
Engineering Team
Who We Are
We focus on multi-disciplinary engineering and technology development.
Our Team
What is it like to work at Techna?
Working at Techna is fast paced. There are lots of challenging and rewarding opportunities. We have a great engineering team that’s always learning and pushing themselves, and engaging end users that are generous with providing many insights and input across project lifecycles.
Our major successes
Finance Team
Who We Are
Arthur Wong, Elyse Li, Jung Ahn, Ida Bejelia, Mansi Panchamia
Our Work
As a part of RFS and in partnership with Techna and UHN Research and Innovation Cores, our team supports all finance-related matters at Techna Institute, Techna Technology Development Team, and the Cores.
What is it like to work at Techna?
It’s challenging working with a number of stakeholders, but very rewarding as we get to know and work with many talented folks. My thanks to the management team for making our work easy — everyone is taking accountability for their portfolio, this allows us to grow and become better! Thank you to my team for the hard work and dedication, and making Techna fun to work at!
Our Major Successes
My team works collaboratively with all the Techna managers on finance-related support. This includes invoicing, financial reports, forecasting, and budgeting. Our role is to provide appropriate guidelines and models to help guide decision making. Techna team has a strong financial performance.”
Health Informatics Research Team
Who We Are
The Health Informatics Research (HIR) team has extensive experience working in close collaboration with clinicians and scientists to develop innovative IT solutions to improve the quality of complex care and enable clinical research.
HIR has led the design, development and deployment of many local, national and international Health IT initiatives. These solutions include point-of-care outcomes collection, electronic clinical documentation, data workflow and integration, data modelling and health ontologies, patient reported outcome systems, and virtual care technologies.
Our Team
Tran Truong, Justin Liu, Yuliya Gavrylyuk, Chris Hamill, Viet Tran, Katherine Sue, Lynette Chen, Alex Zisman
Our major successes
Marketing and Communications Team
Who We Are
How it started
The Techna Web & Marketing team started with a simple problem: a brand-new institute needed its own webpage, as well as other design tasks, such as a logo, posters, and signage. The new website impressed many people, who asked how they could get a website that looked like that, and we saw an opportunity.
Our team soon began working on websites and design projects for other groups, allowing Techna to build a team of designers, programmers, editors, and writers so that it would have their skills as a resource for projects when needed, while covering our time through external projects the rest of the time.
What we’ve done so far
Our team has designed and launched many websites for research groups and companies, and created marketing materials and posters to help promote UHN’s services, teams, and projects. Our design expertise has also been called upon to create the posters and pamphlets for Techna’s annual Symposium, and to help design the user experience for major Techna and UHN software development projects such as Cancer Informatics. We completed numerous special projects for UHN, including the Renewing UHN strategic review and infographics for proposals to major donors.
Our expertise
When a start-up company needed a technical manual for their software platform, they turned to Techna to help write and design it. Techna had the right combination of expertise — scientific/technical writing, editing, and design — and was able to provide the expertise and experience of full-time employees on a freelancer contract basis.
What is working at Techna like for us?
For Techna’s Web & Marketing team, working at Techna is a mix of the freelancer gig life and a steady day job: we have a regular full-time job, but get to work on a variety of interesting projects for a mix of internal and external clients.
Quantitative Imaging for Personalized Cancer Medicine (QIPCM) Team
Who We Are
QIPCM is a research core within TECHNA Institute that collaborates with their clients to optimize solutions as per client needs to drive multi-center imaging trials and attain critical success factors that are within the requisite guidelines of the regulatory authority.
The inception of QIPCM took place in 2013. Several of QIPCM members have been with UHN for while. In addition, QIPCM actively collaborates with several members of TeamUHN.
Our Team
Julia Publicover, Brandon Driscoll, Tina Shek, Michael Andersen, Jenny Lee, Shailaja Sajja, Ivan Yeung, Harry Keller, Doug Vines, Catherine Coolens and Edward Taylor
What is it like to work at Techna?
There’s usually someone with the domain expertise you need 1-2 casual introductions away to guide you in the right direction!
Working at TECHNA is never boring! In a typical day you can collect and analyze medical images from a multi-centre clinical trial, attend a research symposium on the latest trends in artificial intelligence and then 3D print a life-size replica of a bladder. The variety of work going on around the various TECHNA cores is really astounding!
Working in a team environment to build something much bigger than I could on my own.
A highly collaborative environment where your contributions are valued and everyone is happy to share their knowledge.
Fast paced and innovative! There are so many smart and creative people at UHN that we are never short on amazing new projects.
Being a part of an environment that is constantly evolving to solve the relevant healthcare problems in creative ways is truly rewarding. With unique talents and skillsets, everyone at TECHNA comes together to form a beautiful mosaic.
Our Services
QIPCM provides a host of services, which include imaging data de-identification and transfer, centralized storage with remote access, imaging protocol development, novel image analysis tools development, as well as imaging data curation and feature extraction for large-scale imaging research studies.
Our major successes
From its inception in 2013 to current times, QIPCM has achieved various milestones towards solving problems relevant to the imaging research community.
Transformatics Team
Who We Are
The Transformatics team partners with multi-disciplinary stakeholders – clinical, research, industry – to bring forward solutions to meet clinical and research needs. The team leverages expertise in health informatics, technology innovation and project management to bring forward clinical transformation. This past year, we’ve reflected on how best to describe our work and rebranded to be the Transformatics team.
Our Team
Linda Eum, Paige Gilbank, Melissa Kozak, Kelly Lane, Agata Misiura, Sharon Narine and Meera Vignarajah
How we feel about working at Techna?
Techna has a culture of continuous learning and growth. In professional development and in the variety of projects we take on, the challenges are welcome and learning is celebrated. The approach to teamwork is all about collaboration, being open-minded to new ideas, and sharing in each other’s wins – we grow together and succeed together. And of course, we lunch together! Team socials often involve trying out different restaurants in Toronto.
We get to work on all sorts of projects, at different phases and throughout the innovation pipeline. There’s always a variety of task types and new projects are ripe with opportunity – we could be lending project management expertise for a project just getting off the ground, working on building out technology to solve a clinical need, or assisting with current processes with an existing technology. And our partners in these projects vary from front-line clinical staff to senior leadership, UHN researchers to external vendors. Often times we are the bridge between these stakeholders. We wear different hats in different projects – what we try on next might be something completely new, which keeps us on our toes.
Our major successes
Our team’s successes lie in the breadth of our skillset across the team and the commitment to projects across ideation to implementation phases. Our team has built relationships with the clinical and research groups we’ve worked with, creating a reputation of excellence in rapid response, technology co-development, operations, as well as project initialization.
INTERVIEW WITH LUKE BRZOZOWSKI
Interview for Techna’s 10th Anniversary