Meet the OPTIMISE Research Team

Dr. Naveed Janjua provides leadership on surveillance, research and policy advice, and programming related to HBV and HCV in BC. He uses data to inform policy and programs to improve the health of populations. His research interests include HBV and HCV epidemiology, syndemics of substance use, mental illness, and sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections (STBBI), intervention effectiveness, disparities in treatment access, disease outcomes, and strategies to enhance access to care. Dr. Janjua led the development of the BC Hepatitis Testers Cohort. The BC-HTC is a large cohort that integrates testing and surveillance data on blood borne and sexually transmitted infections with healthcare administrative data and serves as surveillance and monitoring platform for hepatitis in BC. Dr. Janjua and his team have produced influential pieces of evidence on HBV, HCV and HIV coinfections that have shaped guidelines and policy in Canada and beyond and are recognized nationally and internationally.

He has expertise in HBV and HCV epidemiology, health disparities, quantitative methods, longitudinal analysis and working with large administrative databases. He is involved in initiatives to design and scale up testing, linkage with care and treatment for HCV in various settings including Canada and Pakistan. He is also member of various national networks including Co-Director Canadian Network on HCV (CanHepC), the scientific review committee (chair) and  member steering committee the CIHR Pan-Canadian Network for HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted and Blood Borne Infections (STBBI) Clinical Trials Research (CTN).

He will provide overall leadership and direction to this project in collaboration with researchers, clinicians, public health, and community members.

Dr. Sofia Bartlett’s research expertise in hepatitis C infection among specific populations (gbMSM, people who inject drugs [PWID], people who are incarcerated), with particular focus on health inequity among these groups. Her research uses a multidisciplinary approach, combining laboratory science, phylogenetic and epidemiological techniques, applied to both clinical and public health questions with an emphasis on community engagement. Her compassion and diligence for promoting and supporting EDI in both research and community contexts has led to positive and innovate collaborations with people who have been historically marginalized and/or less likely to be engaged into health and social care services.

Dr. Mel Krajden is a medical virologist with broad expertise in infectious diseases and medical microbiology. He is an expert in viral hepatitis diagnosis, monitoring, treatment and outcome assessment, with particular strengths in quantitative nucleic acid testing of HBV and HCV, inter-assay evaluation and molecular fingerprinting. He spearheaded the BC-HTC cohort and oversees research on the impact of HCV and syndemics in British Columbia. Dr. Krajden’s work also includes the detection and sero-epidemiology of human papillomaviruses.

As a co-principal investigator in the Canadian Network on Hepatitis C (CanHepC), he will facilitate links to this network. Dr. Krajden’s expertise in hepatitis prevention, care and treatment, his strong knowledge of the health care system and government policy landscape, and his leading role in the provincial Public Health Laboratory will be invaluable for the analysis, interpretation, and reporting of project findings.

Dr. Jason Wong is the chief medical officer at the BC Centre for Disease Control. In this role, Dr. Wong provides public health medical leadership for the BC Centre for Disease Control. He was previously the medical director for Clinical Prevention Services and the physician lead for the epidemiology and surveillance team and is responsible for the provincial surveillance of sexually transmitted infections, including HBV, HCV, HIV, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia and tuberculosis.

Dr. Wong also works with public health and community partners to apply research and epidemiology data to develop and evaluate public health programs, services, and policies.

Dr. Agatha Jassem oversees diagnostic services and has extensive expertise in developing and implementing molecular- and serological-based tests for several organisms, notably for those causing sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections and for respiratory pathogens. Dr. Jassem has previously led provincial implementation of HCV reflex NAT testing and validation of dried blood spot samples for diagnosis of HCV and HIV in hard-to-reach populations.

She is also involved in the laboratory design and oversight of provincial point-of-care and self-collection testing programs. She is the BC Lab Lead for the Canadian Sentinel Practitioner Surveillance Network, which is monitoring SARS-CoV-2 and influenza vaccine effectiveness. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Jassem secured funding to characterize the immune response after infection and vaccination. This involved validation and operationalization of novel multiplex serology, neutralization, and infectivity methods to support cohort-based studies across BC.

Her current focus couples viral genomics and immune correlates of protection to understand the impacts of SARS-CoV-2 evolution under vaccine pressure and the protection conferred by current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Other research led by Dr. Jassem includes utilization of novel phage

Dr. Alnoor Ramji is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, practicing at the St. Paul’s Hospital site. He completed his training in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of British Columbia.  He thereafter also completed medical school, Internal medicine and Gastroenterology fellowship training at the University of British Columbia. He undertook a Hepatology fellowship at the University of Toronto with a focus in viral hepatitis. 

Dr. Binay Adhikari is a geospatial scientist at Data and Analytics Services, BC Center for Disease Control, with expertise in quantitatively assessing the role of neighbourhood physical and social environments on health and health disparities. With training in urban planning, architecture, and geographic information systems, Dr. Adhikari’s work includes applying different geospatial techniques for mapping, measuring, and modelling geo-social determinants of health.

He completed his doctoral degree in urban planning from the School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia. A key component of his doctoral training included examining the role of neighborhood-built and natural environments on travel behavior and downstream health outcomes.

Dr. Brian Conway has been involved in the design of clinical trials since 1990. At the present time, he is involved in the design and evaluation of systems of care for vulnerable individuals infected with HIV and/or HCV. He was the co-PI on an international NIH-funded study of acute/early HIV infection, showing that this intervention was not superior to intervention in the setting of chronic HIV infection. In 1998-2000, his group was among the first to demonstrate that co-administration of HIV medications with methadone to infected active drug users was both safe and effective.

Currently, he is funded to perform the BRAAVO study to identify HIV-infected inner-city residents who have disengaged from care and integrate them in a structure to successfully treat HIV. He is an expert clinician and clinical trialist. He has set up a robust clinical collaboration with the inner-city housing societies to expand the reach and effectiveness of the programs he and his team have designed, with community-based interventions and the new Vancouver Urban Health Centre, located in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

Dr. Chris Greenaway is an infectious disease physician, clinician researcher and internationally recognized expert in migrant health. Her research program has focused on identifying and addressing the infectious disease health disparities among migrants. The overall objective of her research program is to promote the health of the migrant population and decrease their health disparities. To achieve this, she has conducted observational studies, retrospective cohort studies with large linked administrative datasets, systematic reviews, economic analyses and has developed screening and clinical guidelines for migrants in Canada and Europe using the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) methodology.

Chris has a long-standing interest in TB and been involved in clinical care of patients with TB for almost 20 years. She established the TB clinic at the Jewish General Hospital in 2001. She has conducted research related to the diagnosis and treatment of TB and the TB burden and screening strategies for the migrant population. She has written screening guidelines for active and latent TB for the Canadian Collaboration for Immigrant and Refugee Health (CMAJ 2011) and for the European Centers for Disease Control (2018 https://ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/ecdc-issues-migrant-screening-and-vaccination-guidance).

She is a co-PI on a multi-province CIHR funded study (2017-2020) that is using linked administrative databases to develop a risk prediction tool for the development of active TB among migrants. This data will be used to determine the most cost-effective screening and treatment strategy to achieve TB elimination in Canada.

Dr. Hin Hin Ko completed her Bachelor of Science in Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of British Columbia and subsequently received her medical doctor degree from the University of Toronto. She then completed her Internal Medicine residency Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology fellowship at UBC.

With her strong interest in liver diseases, she completed an additional year of fellowship in Hepatology and Nutrition at the University of Toronto. Her special interests are viral hepatitis, autoimmune liver disease, and metabolic dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease.

Besides clinical work, she has a strong passion in clinical research and education.

Dr. Dahn Jeong recently completed her PhD at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and was a doctoral trainee with the Canadian Network on Hepatitis C. She was also supported by the Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Doctoral Award from CIHR. Her current work is based on chronic diseases related to HCV infection, while utilizing robust methodological approach including propensity score analyses. Dahn has been contributing to HCV care cascades in BC as well as supporting the construction of a national collaborative cascade. 

Dr. M. Ehsan Karim is an Assistant Professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health, a Scientist at the Centre for Advancing Health Outcomes, a member of Data Science and Health (DSH) Cluster, and a Michael Smith Health Research BC (MSFHR) Scholar. He obtained his PhD in Statistics from the University of British Columbia. He completed his postgraduate training in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University and was also a trainee at the Canadian Network for Observational Drug Effect Studies (CNODES).

Dr. Christina Wiesmann has a strong research background in the field of host-microbe interactions in which she recently completed her PhD, but is relatively new to the field of infectious diseases. She is currently receiving mentorship mentoring in project design, implementation of community-based interventions and data analysis, as well as the supervision of more junior staff to help her become a leading and independent scientist in the field of infectious diseases research, including HIV treatment of vulnerable populations in Vancouver’s inner-city. She additionally currently helping to lead the BRAAVO study which will identify HIV-infected inner-city residents who have disengaged from care and integrate them in a structure to successfully treat HIV. In just three short months, Dr. Wiesmann has contributed to five conference posters and two manuscripts, one recently published and one currently in review. This highlights her strong research potential and ability to become a leading scholar in infectious diseases research.

Dr. Prince Adu has expertise in equity-centred research having co-led several international collaborative studies addressing HBV, TB, HIV/AIDS in HBV endemic countries such as Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Ghana. In this role, he worked with an interdisciplinary team of local and international stakeholders to build capacity and generate evidence for national policy development.

His experiences investigating and subsequently supporting the implementation of a health information system to collect, store and analyze data related to HCV, TB and HIV infections in the South African health workplace will be valuable for this project.  

Dr. Saina Beitari (she/her) is a researcher at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Disease Control. She earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from McGill University, where she specialized in the study of HIV/AIDS.

Her passion for infectious diseases has driven her to work on a wide range of viruses with public health relevance. After completing her Ph.D., she joined the National Research Council of Canada, contributing to COVID-19 and other viral infection R&D efforts.

Saina’s commitment to public health, virology research, and community engagement has also led her to serve on the boards of various AIDS organizations, where she focuses on reducing stigma and improving access to services.

Kirsty is a medical director of Clinical Prevention Services, a Public Health and Preventative Medicine specialist and epidemiologist with over 10 years of experience leading large scale public health programs and applied research. She also provides provincial leadership for public health management of STBBIs.  Her department provides clinical services for STIs, and she is also leading provincial syphilis response.

She is chair of the provincial STBBI task group and represent BC at national public health and policy tables related to STBBIs. Her expertise includes managing surveillance, outbreak response, and health interventions for sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, and chronic diseases.

Kirsty has extensive experience in digital health innovation in low-resource settings, including Sub-Saharan Africa, and her work focuses on pragmatic trials, health systems strengthening, and addressing health equity through interdisciplinary approaches

Dr. Terri Buller-Taylor has experience in community engagement and knowledge translation. Leading projects at Data Analytic Services, UBC/BC Centre for Disease Control.

A core passion in her work is engaging with health and social care providers and people with lived experiences in collaborative research to co-identify barriers and solutions to accessing care, and co-creating knowledge products that reduce identified barriers and facilitate solutions.

Terri obtained a PhD from the University of British Columbia. Before joining the BCCDC team, she worked as a research consultant on medical education research projects. She also consulted on health-related research projects including those related to hepatitis C prevention; school-based health promotion; and strategies to impact determinants of health.  

Ms. Ji Hyun Choi is a PhD student in experimental medicine at the University of British Columbia. Her research work is on looking at the impact of engagement in care through Direct Acting Antivirals as Hepatitis C treatment on injection-related infections.

She is also working extensively with community members with lived experiences, creating a partnership with community groups. including the Downtown Eastside Community Research Ethics Workshop (DTES CREW) team. 

Teddy Consolacion (they/she) is a senior scientist in Clinical Prevention Services at BC Centre for Disease Control. With a Ph.D. in social psychology, they have worked in different public health agencies in Canada and the US for over 15 years.

Their interests include research on the intersectionality of identities, cultural appropriate health services and downstream health outcomes. 

Dr. Mark Gilbert is a settler of European descent and a public health physician grateful to be living and working on the lands of the Coast Salish peoples. Mark received his medical degree from the University of Ottawa in 2000, and a fellowship in community medicine from UBC in 2005. Over his career Mark has worked as a field epidemiologist and medical health officer, and as a physician epidemiologist leading provincial sexually transmitted and blood-borne infection surveillance systems in BC and Ontario.

Mark works as a public health physician at the BC Centre for Disease Control where he leads and supports clinical prevention programs and research for marginalized populations facing health inequities and disproportionately affected by conditions including STBBI. 

Mark holds an Applied Public Health Chair related to improving STBBI testing systems and is an affiliated researcher with the Community Based Research Centre and the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity. He also leads the Digital Sexual Health Initiative, a team of researchers, program leaders and policymakers that have been working together since 2009 examining the individual, system, and population impact of digital sexual health interventions.  

Dr. Troy Grennan is the physician lead for the Provincial HIV/STI Program at BCCDC. He is also a clinical associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at UBC. Dr. Grennan’s research interests include HIV and STI prevention, HPV-associated disease and anal cancer, and the health of men who have sex with men (MSM). He currently holds several grants in these areas. He is the co-principal investigator on two CIHR-funded grants. The Doxycycline as an Intervention for STI Chemoprophylaxis (DISCO) study is a national, multi-centre randomized controlled trial examining the novel use of a common antibiotic for the prevention of bacterial STIs. The second, the Predicting and Evaluating Anal Cancer in HIV using novel biomarkers (PEACH) study, is a cohort study examining the predictive ability of various HPV biomarkers in predicting anal pre-cancers in MSM and trans women living with HIV, the group most disproportionately impacted by anal cancer. 

Dr. Mike Irvine is a senior scientist in Data & Analytics Services at BCCDC. He is also an adjunct professor in the UBC Faculty of Science, and in the SFU Faculty of Health Sciences. Dr. Irvine’s work lies at the interface between mathematical modelling, biostatistics and machine learning. He incorporates a broad range of techniques into his work, including Bayesian evidence synthesis methods that can utilize disparate data sources to provide insight for disease epidemiology and broader public health applications. 

His work has supported the evaluation of a number of interventions, including within vector-borne disease, sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections, respiratory infections and opioid-related overdose. 

Dr. Jean Damascene Makuza holds a masters’ degree in Epidemiology. He is currently a PhD candidate in Population and Public Health at the UBC School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and a doctoral trainee with the Canadian Network on Hepatitis C.

His work concerns the HBV care cascade in Rwanda and the impact of decentralization and integration of HBV services into existing services on HBV continuum of care. He has expertise in infectious diseases prevention and control especially in HIV, STIs, and BBI, health projects management, and capacity building. He has extensive experience in clinical practice as well as the design, development, and implementation of health programming. In his 13 years of public health experience, he has led programs in HIV, STIs, Viral hepatitis, and cervical cancer prevention and control. As well as consultancy on development, review different policies related to HIV, STIs and Viral hepatitis. He also has publications and presentations on Viral Hepatitis.

His career goal is to prevent and control infectious diseases such as HIV, viral hepatitis, STIs, HPV, etc. in low limited resource setting through early screening, vaccinating and treating. His work in Canada explore the impact of HBV and its treatment on various outcomes such as HCC, all causes and liver-related mortality in BC, Canada using population based-datasets

Dr. Richard Morrow is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. His current work involves studying the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on HBV testing and HCV care; and investigating how the COVID-19 pandemic may have modified the effect of rapid opioid tapering on risk of overdose.

Richard has 15 years of experience in conducting epidemiologic research with large administrative datasets. His first-authored research has been published in journals including BMJ Quality & Safety, Drug Safety, and CMAJ.  

Dr. Morshed’s primary research area is medical microbiology, infectious diseases and immunopathology; his secondary research area is molecular pathology and cell biology, and zoonotic and spirochaetal diseases. His work includes a focus on modern diagnosis, the discovery of novel pathogens and the molecular epidemiology of zoonotic and emerging pathogens, particularly Borrelia burgdorferi, Treponema pallidum and Helicobacter pylori.  

His laboratory at BCCDC is responsible for specialized serology testing, molecular testing and microbial fingerprinting, program evaluation and research. Currently, his team is working on developing in-house nucleic acid testing as well as finding novel pathogens for vector-borne diseases. 

Dr Prital Patel has over 5 years of experience in the STBBI space working with community organisations, policy makers, academic researchers, and clinicians. Dr Patel led the evaluation of a pilot and demonstration project looking to expand a digital health intervention (MyCheck) for comprehensive STBBI testing among priority populations across New South Wales (NSW), Australia. She was also a researcher on the NSW Health Partnership program which brought together key government, community, and academic stakeholders to monitor progress against the current state-wide HIV strategy and also inform the new state-wide HIV strategy.

She has participated as a member of the NSW HIV data advisory committee and has worked extensively with novel diagnostic technologies such as point of care PCR testing for remote and regional Indigenous communities nationally.

Dr Patel will contribute her extensive experiences in evaluation, surveillance using big data, and co-design approaches to foster engagement of people with lived experiences and enhance implementation of new interventions to improve health outcomes. 

Harlan Pruden is nehiyô/First Nations Cree, Two-Spirit, and a dedicated disruptor of settler colonialism, homophobia, and transphobia with the goal of creating better tomorrows with and for Two-Spirit communities.  

Among the many hats he wears, Harlan is the co-founder of the Two-Spirit Dry Lab, Turtle Island’s first research group that exclusively focuses on Two-Spirit people, communities and/or experiences; and an Indigenous Knowledge Translation & Research Lead at Chee Mamuk, an Indigenous Health Program at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. Harlan is also the Managing Editor of the TwoSpiritJournal.com and an Advisory Member for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Gender and Health. 

Dr. Sbihi’s research focuses on the human health effects of the built environment (air pollution, natural/green spaces, and microbiome) across vulnerable and/or stigmatized subgroups of the population. 

Her work is interested in identifying intervention strategies to reduce exposures and improve health, and in integrating surveillance systems for (re-)emerging pathogens. Her current line of work integrates a program of applied research on causal inference methods and surveillance to quantify pathways and consequences of social inequalities in order to inform public health policies.  

Dr. Tang is a computer scientist by training. She is knowledgeable in machine learning and various types of neural networks, as well as practical experiences in development and validation of predictive models involving survival data analyses with applications to prognosis and diagnosis of brain, cardiac, and lung diseases using multi-modalities such as volumetric images and time-series.

Her latest works at BCCDC involved geospatial data analysis for development of inequity mapping, and rapid prototyping with Python Streamlit, enabling the deployment of interactive dashboard and statistical tools on multi-page web applications within days’ times. 

These experiences, along with her current involvement at BCCDC’s “Antiracism Working Group” and “AI Research Working Group”, can support creation of knowledge transfer materials for this grant.

Dr. García is a Biostatistician and Quantitative Epidemiologist at the BC Centre for Disease Control, with a rather heterogeneous background. Before his PhD training (School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia), he spent five years as a clinician (Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia) in a wide variety of settings, ranging from rural isolated areas to tertiary care hospitals, and accumulated over eight years of experience in medical informatics (University of California, Davis).

Throughout the course of his MPH (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), he specialized in epidemiological and biostatistical methods for public health and clinical research; he also received training in risk sciences and public policy. He worked on advanced biostatistical and epidemiological techniques in public health research, meta-analyses, and molecular epidemiology. He has sound knowledge of explanatory and predictive model building, model validation techniques, precision evaluation, survival analysis, as well as extensive experience with linkage and data-mining of large administrative health databases, relational databases, and causal inference techniques to deal with confounding in observational studies (such as propensity score matching and inverse-probability weighting estimators). He is highly experienced in the development and application of algorithms to identify chronic comorbidities and other health-related conditions using administrative data

Dr. Jessica Moe holds an MD, FRCPC (emergency medicine), American Board Certification (emergency medicine), MSc (clinical epidemiology), and MA (international law and human rights). She is the scientific director of the Emergency Opioid Innovation Program within the BC Emergency Medicine Network. She also practices as an emergency physician at Vancouver General Hospital and BC Children’s Hospital. 

Nashira Popovic has worked at the Public Health Agency of Canada for 17 years and is currently the manager of the Estimates and Field Surveillance Section within the Centre for Communicable Diseases and Infection Control at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Her team is responsible for estimating and reporting on incidence, prevalence and Canada’s progress towards the global elimination targets for HIV and HCV. Nashira holds an undergraduate degree in Kinesiology and a master’s in health administration and is a graduate of the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program where she completed her placement at the Montreal Public Health Department. 

Justin Presseau has expertise in application of behavioural and implementation science principles, methods, and frameworks to understand factors that support and undermine behaviour change in healthcare and in patients and the public. Methodological expertise spanning evidence synthesis to multi-methods intervention development (including qualitative and survey data-based modelling) to trials and process evaluation, with an emphasis on partnership-based research with patients, the public, and health system decision makers.  

Travis Salway is a social epidemiologist who works to understand and improve the health of Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (2S/LGBTQ) populations. Travis directs the REAFFIRM Collaborative, an interdisciplinary team studying effects of 2S/LGBTQ identity (in)validation. He founded MindMapBC.ca, a 2S/LGBTQ-affirming mental health service finder. 

Dr. Laura Sauvé is a Clinical Assistant Professor and a pediatric infectious disease specialist who has a special interest in Pediatric HIV/AIDS. 

She joined the Vaccine Evaluation Center in 2007 as the BC site investigator for the Immunization Monitoring Program, Active (IMPAct), a national surveillance system for vaccine preventable diseases and vaccine adverse events in 12 pediatric tertiary care centers across Canada. She is also the co-primary investigator of the Canadian Perinatal HIV Surveillance Program, which studies vertical transmission of HIV across Canada. As Pediatrics Residency Program Director, she is also involved in several medical education research initiatives. 

Her main research interests include public health surveillance especially with respect to vaccinology, vaccine preventable disease, global child health and pediatric HIV/AIDS.

Dr. Maulik Baxi is a public health physician, and the Medical Health Officer and Medical Director of Population Public Health at Fraser Health, the largest regional health authority in B.C. Dr. Baxi’s portfolio includes public health management of STBBIs within Fraser Health.  In this role he also leads response to syphilis epidemic in Fraser Health Authority.