TRANSFORM HF 2024 Fall Network Event

Name: TRANSFORM HF 2024 Fall Network Event
Start: 2024-11-08T08:00:00-05:00
End: 2024-11-08T13:00:00-05:00
Location: Faculty Club

November 8 @ 8:00 am - 1:00 pm EST

Are you passionate about health equity, cutting-edge innovation, and transforming the lived experience of heart failure? You don’t want to miss our Fall 2024 Network Event!

We are excited to once again bring together our network of clinicians, scientists, trainees, people with lived experience, industry reps, and community partners for a dynamic morning!

You can expect to catch local and international perspectives on the latest topics in digital health innovation, from sustainability to designing for equity. PLUS meet your future collaborator/mentor/co-founder through structured and informal networking.

Space is limited, register today!

TRANSFORM HF Network Events engage the audience

Craig Simmons and Heather Ross, TRANSFORM HF Co-Leads

Trainees at a TRANSFORM HF Network Event

Agenda

8:00-8:30 AM
Registration & Breakfast

Join us bright and early to enjoy breakfast with some familiar faces and new connections! ☀️

8:30-8:45 AM
Opening Remarks

Our Co-Leads are excited to welcome everyone to TRANSFORM HF’s 7th Network Event! How many have you attended? 🤔

Dr. Craig Simmons

Dr. Craig Simmons is a Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Industry and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto (UofT), Lead of the Translational Biology and Engineering Program, and Co-Lead of TRANSFORM HF.

Craig leads a talented group of researchers and students to discover new treatments for heart valve, heart muscle, and blood vessel diseases, including strategies to regenerate cardiovascular tissues using stem cells and biomaterials. His group also creates novel microfluidic platforms to model vascularized tissues and organs for improved drug testing.

Dr. Heather Ross

Dr. Heather Ross is Head of the Division of Cardiology and Loretta A. Rogers Chair in Heart Function at UHN. She is also Site Lead for the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research, Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and Co-Lead of TRANSFORM HF. In December 2020, she was named to the Order of Canada.

As the founder of TestYourLimits.ca, Heather is dedicated to improving heart health and research in heart failure. She was named one of the top 100 modern day explorers by Canadian Geographic in 2015.

Dr. Craig Simmons

Dr. Heather Ross

8:45-9:30 AM
Keynote Address: Sustainability in Digital Health

Did you know that the health sector is responsible for ~5% of global greenhouse emissions! While digital health can help lessen this impact by reducing travel and waste associated with in-person care, innovations may also increase the sector’s energy-driven carbon footprint.

Dr. Fiona Miller will provide the Keynote Address, drawing from her rich experience leading and supporting efforts to improve the resilience and sustainability of health systems through research, education, practice change, and policy development. Her talk is guaranteed to inspire new thinking and action on sustainable digital innovation! 🌎

Dr. Fiona Miller

Fiona A. Miller, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy in the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She is the Founding Director of the UofT Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health & Sustainable Care and runs a national initiative for climate action and awareness in healthcare, funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada: CASCADES.

Dr. Fiona Miller

9:30-10:30 AM
Networking Activity

Meet your future collaborator! Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers, Managing Director of the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) and facilitator extraordinaire, will lead you through an activity that helps you build connections with clinicians, researchers, trainees, people with lived experience, industry representatives, and community partners who have shared interests. 🤝

Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Danielle Taschereau Mamers is the Managing Director of the CDHI. Danielle received her PhD in Media Studies from the University of Western Ontario in 2017 and is the author of Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing  (Fordham UP, 2024). Alongside her work with CDHI, Danielle facilitates strategic planning, partnership ideation, networking events, and team building sessions. As a visual thinker with a career in words, she sneaks in images and illustrations wherever she can.

Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers

10:30-10:45 AM
Break

Time to refuel! ☕

10:45-11:45 AM
Panel Discussion: Remotely Managing Heart Failure in Uganda

Cardiovascular disease is on the rise in Uganda, accounting for roughly 10% of deaths and overwhelming national healthcare systems. To address this issue, UHN partnered with the Uganda Heart Institute and Yale University to co-develop and implement the Medly Uganda program: a self-care mobile health tool designed to address heart failure in Uganda. This panel will discuss the process of deploying digital health tools in low-resources settings, opportunities for health education, and the power of collaboration – come ready to learn and ask questions! 🇺🇬

Dr. Isaac Ssinabulya

Dr. Isaac Ssinabulya, MD, is a Cardiologist at the Uganda Heart Institute, Lecturer with the Department of Internal Medicine at Makerere University, and Co-Director of the Uganda Initiative for Integrated Management of Non-Communicable Diseases.

His research focuses on implementing mHealth approaches for non-communicable disease self-management in his home country of Uganda.

Dr. Sarah Haines

Sarah Haines is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering and is the Director of the Indoor Microbiology and Environmental Exposures (IMEE) Lab.

Dr. Haines’ interdisciplinary research integrates building science, engineering, and microbiology to analyze connections between the built environment and human health. Her work examines critical issues impacting vulnerable communities, with a focus on co-developing solutions in housing and drinking water in First Nations communities. She has been a faculty mentor for the Reach Alliance since 2022 serving as a mentor for Team Philippines and Team Uganda.

Reach Alliance Team

As part of their Reach Alliance case study, a team of student researchers visited Kampala this past summer to explore how the mobile and community connections developed through Medly Uganda can be used to improve health education in Uganda on cardiovascular disease.

The team consists of: David Li, Kajol Aggarwal, Tracy Dusabimana, Zainab Azim, and Nathan Feltmate.

Dr. Sahr Wali

Dr. Sahr Wali is a Scientific Associate at the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Her collaborative research seeks to bridge the values from culture and innovation to advance the equitable provision of health interventions She currently leads a portfolio of research in partnership with communities in Northern Ontario and Uganda to support a community-first, digitally enabled avenue for cardiac care. Her collaborative research seeks to challenge the traditional approaches to digital health innovation, by incorporating sources of Indigenous methodologies and graphic medicine within the user-centered design process.

Dr. Isaac Ssinabulya

Dr. Sarah Haines

Reach Alliance Team

Dr. Sahr Wali

11:45 AM-12:15 PM
Interdisciplinary Research: Digital Health Meets Health Equity

Hear from two of the teams funded by TRANSFORM HF-supported EMHSeed & XSeed grants! These unique awards are meant to promote multi-disciplinary research and catalyze new innovative partnerships.

Drs. Ofer Levi and David Lindell will introduce you to their novel model for capturing variations in skin pigmentation to mitigate bias in light imaging – a key component in non-invasive heart function monitoring tools. 💡

Dr. Enid Montague and graduate student Ruben Tjhie will present their findings on equity failures in digital remote monitoring tools and devices and discuss new approaches to usability evaluation that facilitate the inclusion of marginalized users. 📱

Dr. David Lindell

David Lindell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research combines optics, emerging sensor platforms, machine learning, and physics-based algorithms to enable new capabilities in visual computing. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is a recipient of the 2021 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Dissertation Honorable Mention Award, the 2023 Marr Prize, and a 2024 Google Research Scholar Award.

Dr. Ofer Levi

Dr. Ofer Levi is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Dr. Levi received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel in 2000, and worked in 2000-2007 as a Postdoctoral Fellow and as a Research Associate at the Departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, CA. He was a Visiting Professor at Stanford University in 2007-2018. He served as an Associate Editor in Biomedical Optics Express (OSA) and is a Fellow of OSA, and a member of IEEE-Photonics, and SPIE. Dr. Levi led industry and academic teams in developing optical imaging systems, miniature sensors, and biomedical applications for the past 25 years and consulted to several companies in these areas.

His recent research areas include biomedical imaging systems and optical bio-sensors based on semiconductor devices and nano-structures, and their application to bio-medical diagnostics, in vivo imaging, and study of bio-molecular interactions.

Dr. Enid Montague

Dr. Enid Montague is a human factors engineer with expertise in human-automation interaction in health care. Dr. Montague researches appropriate automation between physicians, patients and technologies and designing systems for health equity, and patient safety. She uses mixed methods in naturalistic settings to model human technology interaction and develop guidelines for human-automation that is efficient, effective and safe for patients and health care providers.

Ruben Tjhie

Ruben Tjhie is a graduate student pursuing a Master of Applied Science in Industrial Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Enid Montague and Dr. Joe Cafazzo. His thesis aims to advance equity in the practice of usability engineering with a focus on health technologies. To his graduate studies, he brings five years of industry experience as a software engineer working on digital health and privacy. He also earned his Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto.