Case Advisors
Miin Alikhan
Executive Advisor, IHPME/Gov/ L. Miin Alikhan Advisory Services
Miin Alikhan is currently serving as an executive advisor to provincial ministries of health and agencies, including regional governance bodies and teaching hospitals, providing strategic counsel on complex health system, operational and innovation challenges. From 2014-2017, she served as the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Professional Services and Health Benefits division at Alberta Health, a new department of the government of Alberta. Miin managed approximately one third or $6B of the provincial health care budget and led 240 people. Specifically, she provided strategic leadership and direction of provincial health workforce policies and regulations, health care provider compensation and major agreements and pharmaceuticals and supplemental benefits and oversaw the governance and administration of the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan for 4.2M citizens. In her role, Miin also served as the government’s lead negotiator with the Alberta Medical Association, representative of the province’s 12000 physicians. Before her role as ADM, Ms. Alikhan served as director of the Health Quality Branch in the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, where she oversaw implementation of the Excellent Care for All Act to advance the provincial healthcare quality agenda. This included initiatives linked to outcomesbased health system funding reform and to development of an innovation investment portfolio that yielded the development of programs such as Choosing Wisely Canada and IDEAS Ontario. Her work and achievements at government and as an administrator of a large academic hospital has been widely recognized through publications, speaking engagements and awards, the latter which includes the national 3M Health Care Quality Team Award, and awards for excellence in mentorship and health system leadership. Ms. Alikhan has held clinical and progressively senior roles in healthcare over the past 20 years with specific strengths in policy and strategy, governance and partnership development, quality improvement and measurement and change leadership. Ms. Alikhan is a Certified Health Executive with the Canadian College of Health Leaders, a Certified Patient Safety Officer, and a graduate of the Ivey Executive Program at Western University, the Harvard High Potentials Executive Leadership Program and Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare Advanced Training Program in quality and health services leadership.
Anita Benoit
Assistant Professor, DLSPH
Anita C. Benoit, MSc, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and an Adjunct Scientist at Women’s College Research Institute, Women’s College Hospital. Her research interests include Indigenous women’s health, Indigenous methodologies, research ethics, HIV pathogenesis, health services and intervention research, mental health and life stressors such as racism and other determinants of health.
Leslie Boehm
Professor (Adjunct), IHPME/Trinity College
Leslie Boehm is an adjunct professor at Trinity College and the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Research (IHPME) at the University of Toronto. He has worked in a senior administrative capacity in both hospital and research administration. Through his career he has been involved in academia, teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels. At Sunnybrook Research Institute he started and was board chair of two venture capital funds. Two spin-offs were sold to major US firms. He started other new activities at Sunnybrook, including an academic-industry partnership with Sanofi Aventis that saw them locate the world headquarters of their cancer vaccine project at the Hospital. At TGH he began Telemedicine Canada, which offered continuing health education via teleconferencing. He launched Telemedicine U.S.A. to serve the U.S. He put TGH into a partnership with a major U.S. teleconferencing firm to serve Canada. He launched a national magazine Health Research & Innovation with Rogers Media. He has been published in Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal.
Ashley Clerici
Consulting Manager, Affiliate (consulting)/MNP
Ashley Clerici is a management consultant with MNP LLP, where she leverages her experience and expertise to solve complex problems, to enable strategic decision-making, and to support growth and transformation. Ashley has an Honours Bachelor of Science (HBSc.) degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) from the Ivey Business School at Western University. Ashley is a certified Change Management Practitioner (PROSCI – ADKAR), a Certified Health Executive (CHE) with the Canadian College of Health Leaders, and a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with the Project Management Institute. In her spare time, Ashley enjoys spending time with her family, taking on new culinary challenges, and getting lost in new places.
Beverley Essue
Senior Health Economist & Global Health Systems Researcher, Canadian Partnership Against Cancer/ The George Institute for Global Health
Beverley is a Research Fellow (Health Economics) at The George Institute for Global Health and the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney where she conducts Health Systems and Health Services Research. She has expertise in conducting health policy, equity and household economic impact research. Her research focuses on measuring financial protection within health systems and the associated consequences and economic outcomes of chronically ill populations. This research program aims to improve the care and support available for people with chronic illnesses globally. She currently holds an Ian Potter Foundation post-doctoral fellowship.
Shaza Fadel
Research Fellow, St. Michael’s Hospital
Shaza Fadel earned her PhD in Immunology from Duke University, and then spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow examining the role of cell trafficking during immune responses to influenza at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Thereafter, she broadened her expertise from basic science to public health by earning an MPH in Epidemiology and a certificate in Global Health from the University of Toronto. At CGHR, her research focus is on maternal & child health, as well as vaccine preventable diseases. She is active in the child health and infectious diseases working group.
Rob Fowler
Physician, Sunnybrook, Professor (Status), IHPME
Dr. Rob Fowler is a critical care physician at Sunnybrook Hospital and Director of Clinical Epidemiology and Health Care Research at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health – Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. Rob’s academic interests include access and outcomes of care for critically ill patients and those near the end of life – in a global context. He has had clinical and academic roles in various outbreaks leading to critical illness – the 2003 Toronto SARS crisis, the 2009 influenza pandemic, the recent Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak – and he was a clinical lead for the World Health Organization during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Paul Hamel
Professor, Faculty of Medicine
Paul Hamel is Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology in the faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. In Biochemistry at the University of Toronto in 1986 after his B. Sc. in Biochemistry at the University of Ottawa. He has been a member of the Department of Pathology/LMP since 1992.
Emily Keats
Research Associate, Sick Kids Hospital
Emily C. Keats (PhD, MPH) is a Research Associate at the Centre for Global Child Health, the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. Following a Bachelors of Science at McGill University, she completed a PhD in Pathology, studying the role of vascular stem cells in mitigating the long-term complications of diabetes. She then undertook a Masters of Public Health, specializing in Epidemiology, at the University of Toronto. Her research interests fall broadly into the categories of adolescent health, nutrition, and gender equality in the context of developing countries. Emily has experience working and living in East Africa, and is an enthusiastic member of the Countdown to 2030 consortium, a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration working towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
Peter Kiiza
Sunnybrook Hospital
Carolina Kwok
Manager, TB Access, Clinton Foundation
Carolina is currently the Program Manager for the TB Drug Access program at the Clinton Health Access Initiative where she works on increasing access to optimal TB drugs for high burden TB countries in Africa and Asia. She was also previously engaged in research in barriers to diagnostic services in Lesotho, research on implementation of maternal and newborn health programs in Tanzania and scaling up HIV testing services in mining areas in Zambia. Prior to her career in public health, Carolina worked as a physiotherapist in Toronto. She is passionate about increasing access to health in vulnerable populations and interested in expediting innovations in technologies and service delivery approaches in different health contexts.
Wendy Lou
Professor, PhD Program Director and Division Head, Biostatistics, DLSPH
Wendy Lou is a tenured Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics, and Head of the Division of Biostatistics at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is the Canada Research Chair in Statistical Methods for Health Care. Prior to her current position at the University of Toronto, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomathematical Sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York University. She has been principal investigator and co-investigator on numerous statistical methodology grants and interdisciplinary research projects, funded by government agencies in Canada (e.g. NSERC, CIHR) and the US (e.g. NIH, AHRQ). Her research has focused on the development of statistical methodology for the study of chronic conditions and quality improvement, as well as on biomedical applications of the distribution theory of runs and patterns. She is currently an Associate Editor for Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability and The American Statistician. Among her professional services, she has served as Member of the Regional Advisory Board for ENAR of the International Biometric Society, as President of the Southern Ontario Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA), as Publications Officer on the Board of Directors of the Statistical Society of Canada, as Council of Chapters Representative on the Board of Directors of ASA, and Secretary/Treasurer of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) . Currently, she is the President-Elect of the Caucus for Women in Statistics (CWS).
Leslie Sorensen
Managing Director Quality, Risk and Outcomes, Spectrum Health
Leslie is a Senior Healthcare Leader with over 25 years’ experience in executive and consulting roles spanning public and private sectors. She has expertise in strategic planning and implementation; project management and team leadership; employee engagement and change management; community and stakeholder engagement; as well as business development and relationship management. Leslie continuously demonstrates effective completion of challenging projects and initiatives.
Currently as Managing Quality, Risk and Outcomes for Spectrum Health Care, Leslie leads Spectrum’s integrated approach to strategy and quality management through the development and execution of strategic and corporate-wide initiatives. She is responsible for establishing a system of performance measures and expectations, and measuring achievements against expected outcomes to drive the development and adoption of Spectrum’s integrated Quality, Risk and Safety Framework. Inclusive in this portfolio are the roles of Privacy Officer and Ethics Lead.
A Certified Healthcare Executive and Registered Occupational Therapist, Leslie has extensive expertise managing and consulting with a broad range of community and institutional health services spanning the public and private sectors including, National Research Corporation Canada (NRCC), the University of Toronto’s Department of Family and Community Medicine, Med-Emerg Inc., Ontario’s Family Health Teams, the Ontario Medical Association, the Etobicoke and York Community Care Access Centres, Providence Healthcare, COTA Health, and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
Yianni Soumalias
Director, Business Development, Closing the Gap Healthcare
Yianni Soumalias is a change leader who is focused on building a sustainable healthcare system in Ontario and across Canada. With an extensive background in sales, marketing, customer relationship and project management, he has demonstrated an ability to find unique solutions to problems within our health system. Yianni currently works for Closing the Gap Healthcare (CTG) as the Director of Business Development. His current portfolio oversees the organization’s sales, marketing, project management and corporate health departments. He has experience developing innovative service delivery models that create better value for the funder and better outcomes for the patient. Yianni has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Wilfrid Laurier University and is currently completing his MBA at Ivey Business School at Western.
Chris Tait
Consultant, Boston Consulting
Christopher Tait is a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group – a global management consulting firm that partners with clients to solve complex problems facing businesses and the world more broadly. Chris completed his PhD in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in 2018. His global health research has focused on cross-national comparisons of the distribution and determinants of chronic disease risk among adolescents in low- and middle-income countries. For his doctoral thesis, Chris applied cutting edge methods to a unique population-based data source that informs how dietary patterns in the population relate to the development of chronic disease and premature death. His work on the largest population-based databases of food exposures linked with health outcomes in Canada provides the opportunity to have significant impact and inform chronic disease prevention efforts in Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology, Health & Society from Cornell University and a Masters of Public Health in Epidemiology from Columbia University.
Xiaolin Wei
Associate Professor, DLSPH
Prof. Wei is the Dalla Lana Chair for Global Health Policy and Associate Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in the University of Toronto. He is qualified as a medical doctor and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2005. He is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of UK. He has been an assistant professor in the School of Public Health and Primary Care in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a senior research fellow in the Nuffield Centre of International Health and Development at the University of Leeds, UK. His major research interests include primary care reforms and policy evaluation, and health service delivery studies in tuberculosis and cardiovascular disease control, mostly in primary care settings. He has led the Communicable Disease and Health Service Delivery consortium in China, 2006-2016. Prof Wei has been a consultant to a number of international and national bodies, including the WHO, World Bank, the China’s Committee for Health and Family Planning and the National Development and Planning Commission, on topics of primary care, tuberculosis and influenza. He serves as board member and the Secretary General for The International Union of Lung Disease.