IBTN Co-Lead, Conference Co-Host

Dr. Simon Bacon, co-Director of the Montreal Behavioural Medicine Centre, CIHR SPOR Chair in Innovative, Patient-Oriented, Behavioural Clinical Trials, and FRQS Co-Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Health for Health Behaviour Change, has had extensive training in the delivery of behavioural randomised controlled trials and has been a PI and co-I on 14 different studies involving behavioural interventions, including exercise, weight management, stress management, and motivational interviewing. In addition, he has several years in generating national recommendations through his work with the Canadian Hypertension Education Program (CHEP: he has been a member of the last 5 recommendation panels), where he is currently the chair of the lifestyles sub-committee. Finally, Dr. Bacon has organised several knowledge translation events, including Café Scientifiques, where he has brought a number of different stakeholders together to discuss key topics and issues, for example, trying to create a common dialogue between researchers and the media to improve health innovation reporting.

Session Speaker – IBTN Summer School Alumni Session

Karen Bouchard, PhD, is an Associate Scientist in the Division of Cardiac Prevention and Rehabilitation at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (Ottawa, Canada), and an Assistant Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. She directs the Cardiovascular Health Promotion, Education, and Social Determinants Laboratory. Dr. Bouchard has expertise in Education (BEd, MEd, PhD in Education), experience as an elementary and secondary school teacher, and postdoctoral training in Health Psychology. Her work involves advancing research on family-centric cardiovascular outcomes and care, with a special focus on caregivers and children of parents with cardiovascular disease. Alongside, she aims to enhance the rigor and impact of qualitative methodologies in the cardiovascular sciences, particularly as it relates to the development of relevant, feasible, and impactful behavioural clinical trials.

Session Speaker – IBTN Summer School Alumni session

Jen is an applied health researcher in the Mental Health & Addiction Research Group, Department of Health Sciences, University of York (UK). Jen has a background in health psychology and a particular interest in behaviour change. She has expertise in a range of research methods, including evidence synthesis, intervention development and evaluation, qualitative studies, and co-design. Jen currently manages a large randomised controlled trial testing a novel diabetes self-management intervention for individuals with serious mental illness. Jen is passionate about making research accessible for all and is driving innovation towards more meaningful knowledge translation.

Session Speaker – Issues of Equity and Access in Digitial Behavioural Interventions

David Buckeridge is a Professor in the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University in Montreal where he directs the Surveillance Lab, an interdisciplinary group that develops, implements, and evaluates novel computational methods and software for public health surveillance. He is also the Chief Digital Health Officer and the Director of Digital Health Research at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC). His research and practice focus on the informatics of health and health system monitoring and he holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Health Informatics and Data Science and is an Associate Member with the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). He is also currently seconded part-time to the Public Health Agency of Canada as the Executive Scientific Director of the Data, Foresight and Surveillance Branch. Dr Buckeridge has a MD from Queen’s University, a MSc in Epidemiology from the University of Toronto, a PhD in Biomedical informatics from Stanford University, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada.

Session Chair – Use Of Ontologies In Behavioural Intervention Development And Testing

Molly is a Professor of Health Psychology at the School of Psychology in the University of Galway, Ireland, where she directs the Health Behaviour Change Research Group (HBCRG). This Group is a national hub and internationally-recognised centre of excellence in the application of behavioural science to health behavioural intervention development, evaluation and implementation. Molly’s research aims to improve population health by working with key stakeholders to develop and promote an evidence-based behavioural science approach to health behaviour change interventions. She has published widely in the areas of chronic disease prevention and management, and directs a Collaborative Doctoral Programme in Chronic Disease Prevention (CDP-CDP), as well as a Masters Programme in Health Psychology. Molly is an Honorary Fellow of the European Health Psychology Society and the (Irish) National Institute for Prevention and Cardiovascular Health (NIPC). She is Associate Editor of Annals of Behavioral Medicine and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Behavioural Trials Network, the Executive Committee of the Health Research Board (HRB) Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland and the Executive Committee of the HRB Diabetes Collaborative Clinical Trials Network.

Workshop Co-Lead – Co-creation and intervention adaptation for implementation in LMICs

Laura is a nurse specialist in critical care. She is currently studying for a master’s degree in behavioral studies at the Eafit University in Medellin, Colombia. She has experience in hospital environments and has worked as a case manager and population manager. Now and for the last two years she has been working as a nursing leader in the scientific direction for Sura insurance company in the area of health services.

Session Co-Chair – IBTN Summer School Alumni Presentations
Workshop Co-Lead – Using the ORBIT Model for Research on Complex Behavioral Interventions

Dr. Susan Czajkowski is Chief of the Health Behaviors Research Branch (HBRB), Behavioral Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute (NCI). She is an expert on psychosocial and behavioral risk factors for disease, including the development and testing of interventions for behavioral risk factors such as obesity, physical inactivity, adverse diets, and non-adherence to medical regimens. Other interests include research on the roles of social support and depression in disease risk and recovery and the assessment of health-related quality of life and psychosocial functioning in patients with chronic diseases. Prior to joining the NCI, Dr. Czajkowski was a Program Director at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, where she managed research initiatives testing interventions to improve adherence to lifestyle and medical therapies in patient populations, including in minority patients and the medically underserved, and was Project Officer for the Enhancing Recovery in Coronary Heart Disease (ENRICHD) Patients Study, a large, multicenter randomized clinical trial to evaluate the effects of treating depression and low social support on survival and recurrent events in myocardial infarction patients. Dr. Czajkowski was also the lead Project Officer for the Obesity Related Behavioral Intervention Trials (ORBIT) Consortium, a cooperative agreement program supporting seven research sites across the U.S. with the goal of translating findings from basic research on human behavior into more effective interventions to alter obesity-related health behaviors (e.g., diet, physical activity). As part of the ORBIT consortium, Dr. Czajkowski led the development of the ORBIT model for designing and testing behavioral treatments for chronic diseases. Dr. Czajkowski is a Fellow in the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and served as President of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research (2014 – 2015).

Workshop Co-Lead – Co-creation and intervention adaptation for implementation in LMICs

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Session Speaker – How Behavioural Science Can Address Global Challenges: A network approach to climate and pandemic preparedness

Dr. Dietz is the Chair of the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University (GWU) and the Director of the STOP Obesity Alliance. From 1997-2012 he was the Director of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity in the at the CDC. Prior to his appointment to the CDC, he was a Professor of Pediatrics at the Tuft’s University School of Medicine, and Director of Clinical Nutrition at the Floating Hospital of New England Medical Center Hospitals. He has been a councilor and past president of the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, and past president of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. He has recently become the Director of Research and Policy at the GWU’s Global Food Institute. Dr. Dietz was a co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Obesity and senior author on the Commission’s 2019 publication entitled the Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition and Climate Change. He has extended his work on the Lancet Commission to focus on the adverse effects of food systems on climate change and climate change on food systems. He is the author of over 300 publications in the scientific literature, and the editor of five books, including the 4^th edition of Clinical Obesity in Adults and Children, and Nutrition: What Every Parent Needs to Know.

Session co-chair – Use of Ontologies in Behavioural Intervention Development and Testing

Dr. Anda Dragomir is a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, working with Drs Kim Lavoie and Simon Bacon at the Montreal Behavioural Medicine Centre. Her research focuses on developing a behavioural change counselling training to improve physicians’ efficacy in addressing lifestyle changes in the context of chronic disease management. The training, entitled MOTIVATOR, has received Section 3 accreditation from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. She is a representative of the Canadian Network for Health behaviour Change and promotion (CAN-Change), composed of health behaviour experts from across Canada. https://can-change.ca/. She has received extensive training in psychophysiology and behavioural trial design and development. In her clinical work, Dr. Dragomir favours a collaborative approach to psychotherapy, employing cognitive-behavioural theory to explore emotional, behavioural and relational patterns. Her clientele is composed of adults and individuals suffering from chronic pain and other chronic medical conditions. During her Master’s she worked at the Montreal Heart Institute on projects examining the effects of psychological stress on physiological reactivity and cardiovascular diseases.

Session Speaker – How To Navigate the Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Implementation Continum
Workshop Lead – Using the ORBIT Model for Research on Complex Behavioral Interventions

Dr. Kenneth Freedland, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is an expert in the behavioural treatment of depression and related problems in patients with heart disease and other chronic illnesses. He has been the principal investigator, a co-investigator, or a DSMB member on multiple trials and has served on both the single-site and multicentre clinical trial review committees for the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. He has also served on the faculty of the annual NIH Summer Institute on Randomized Behavioural Clinical Trials since 2007 and was the Program Director of the Summer Institute from 2020 through 2023. He is the author of multiple articles and book chapters on behavioural trial methodology. His methodological interests include the selection and design of comparators for behavioural trials, the role and design of pilot studies in behavioural intervention research, and methods for making and tracking progress towards better health outcomes.

Speaker – IBTN Summer School Alumni Session

Vincent Gosselin Boucher is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Université du Québec à Montréal. His research interests include behavior change, population health promotion, and the use of digital health technologies. His work focuses on developing technological tools designed for knowledge sharing and health assessment, applying qualitative methods to describe factors that hinder and facilitate behavior change, and exploring the well-being of healthcare professionals. Vincent has received several awards for academic excellence and research potential, including the Michael Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship, doctoral scholarships from CIHR and FRQS, an RBC award as a student-athlete, and a research award from the Canadian Psychological Association.

Keynote Speaker – Implemention: Translating efficacy to effectivess to improve global health

Dr. Jeremy Grimshaw received a MBChB from the University of Edinburgh and trained as a general practitioner prior to undertaking a PhD in health services research at the University of Aberdeen. He moved to Canada in 2002. His research focuses on the evaluation of interventions to disseminate and implement evidence-based practice. Dr. Grimshaw is a Senior Scientist, Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, a Full Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Ottawa and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health Knowledge Transfer and Uptake. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal College of Edinburgh. He has been awarded the CIHR Knowledge Translation award twice and is the 2018 CIHR Barer-Flood career achievement award for Health Services and Policy Research.

Workshop Co-Lead – Enhancing Impact of Behavioral Medicine Through Systems Thinking- Guided Coordination of Evidence Production and Information Flow

Eric is a transdisciplinary practitioner, designer, educator, and researcher who works at the intersection of health psychology (original training), public health (primary affiliation), and systems science. His mission is to advance methods and processes that equitably serve people and practice towards a more life-, love-, and liberation-affirming society and planet. He has three interconnected foci of his work: 1) cultivating people’s capacity to experience reality as it is, in all of its complexity and to the best of their ability in each moment and every moment; 2) cultivating public health systems that foster the vital conditions needed to enable every human to have their basic needs of safety, belonging, and dignity met; and 3) revamping and re-imagining approaches to quantification, mathematics/logic, and “expert” consensus practices that honor and are guided by ways of knowing consciousness and interdependence. He is recognized internationally as an expert in applied health science methods and digital health.

Session Speaker (Virtual) – Issues of Equity and Access in Digitial Behavioural Interventions

Dr. Beth Jaworski is a Social and Behavioral Scientist at The National Institutes of Health (NIH), within the All of Us research program. She earned her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to joining the NIH, Beth served as a Principal Investigator (PI), the mobile user experience (UX) lead, and co-investigator of the Center for Mobile Apps Research Resources and Services (CMARRS) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’s National Center for PTSD-Dissemination and Implementation Division. She split her time between creating and researching public mental health apps for PTSD and related conditions. Dr. Jaworski’s research interests are at the intersection of technology and behavioral and social sciences, with a particular focus on how behavioral and social sciences research can be leveraged to design and implement impactful, engaging, and equitable digital health research initiatives and interventions.

Session Discussant – How to Navigate the Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Implementation Continuum

Ian Kellar is a professor of Health Psychology with expertise in co-producing and evaluating interventions that use behaviour change techniques and implementation strategies both in the UK and in LMICs. He is currently a co-investigator on 10 funded studies, of which 3 include trials in ODA-recipient countries. He has led or co-led 10 workpackages where he has employed behaviour change and/or implementation science theory to structure knowledge mobilisation across evidence synthesis, qualitative interviews, co-production of intervention and/or implementation and process evaluation, including the intervention adaptation work package for a behavioural activation intervention for the treatment of depression in people with diabetes in Bangladesh and Pakistan; the evidence synthesis work package and the implementation modelling work package for an intervention programme for depression and TB in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the intervention development work package for an intervention to support diabetes self-management for people with severe mental illness; the co-design work package and the intervention optimisation work package for a digital intervention to support painful distal upper limb musculoskeletal disorders; and the theory of change work package and mixed-methods process evaluation work package for anti-psychotic switching intervention targeting guidelines implementation among mental health professionals.

Workshop Co-Lead – Enhancing Impact of Behavioral Medicine Through Systems Thinking- Guided Coordination of Evidence Production and Information Flow

Predrag “Pedja” Klasnja is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He focuses on the design and optimization of novel mHealth technologies for health behavior change. He is particularly interested in the design and evaluation of just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs), interventions that continuously adapt their functioning to provide optimal support to individuals as their needs and circumstances change. In addition to his intervention development work, Dr. Klasnja develops optimization methods for implementation science, with an emphasis on causal modeling of processes hypothesized to underlie the functioning of implementation strategies.

Workshop Co-Lead – Designing for Scale: Strategies for interventions that can help more people in more ways

Zeenat Ladak is a graduate fellow of the Implementation Science team at Women’s College Hospital and currently works in their Office of Spread & Scale. Within the Office of Spread & Scale, Zeenat is involved in applying implementation science for the spread, scale, and sustainability of a diverse range of healthcare innovations from initial design through to established networks. She is also a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto in the department of Applied Psychology and Human Development where her research focuses on health equity in the access and use of health services during pregnancy.

Session Discussant – Issues of Equity and Access in Digital Behavioural Interventions

Sylvie Lambert, RN, PhD is Associate Professor and Associate Director of Research at the Ingram School of Nursing, McGill University as well as Scientist at the St. Mary’s Research Centre, Montreal. Sylvie is also the recipient of a CIHR Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in self-care and illness self-management support interventions. In this position, the objectives of her research programs includes: 1) developing and evaluating low-cost self-care and illness self-management interventions that are sustainable to enhance translation in practice, 2) implementing real-world patient-reported outcome (PRO) and caregiver-reported outcome (CRO) screening programs, 3) adapting evidence-based self-management interventions to the needs of patients from a culturally and linguistically diverse background and their caregivers, and 4) using advanced psychometric approaches for improving the precision and efficiency of outcome evaluations. She has received national and international recognition of her work in the form of several awards and prizes.

IBTN Co-Lead and Conference Co-Host

Dr. Kim Lavoie is co-Director of the MBMC, holds the Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Medicine, and is a researcher in the Chronic Disease Research Division at Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal. She is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at UQAM and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at University of Montreal. She is internationally recognized for her research on the impact of psychological and behavioural factors on the development and progression of cardiovascular and lung diseases, and the impact of behavioral interventions, e.g., motivational communication, exercise, and behavioural weight loss, on key health behaviours and outcomes in chronic lung disease. She is also the Chair of the Canadian Network for Health Behaviour Change and Promotion (CAN-Change) and an active member of the CHEP recommendation panel (Adherence Subcommittee). Finally, she is an internationally recognized expert in motivational communication; over 15,000 health professionals across Canada, the US, Europe (France, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, Estonia, the UK), India and Australia/New Zealand have attended her professional training workshops. She currently holds multiple grants in the area of motivational communication training and efficacy for behaviour change in chronic disease. Dr. Lavoie is a founding member of the IBTN.

Session Speaker – How to Navigate the Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Implementation Continuum
Workshop Lead – Designing for Scale: Strategies for interventions that can help more people in more ways

Celia Laur is an implementation scientist and health services researcher with a focus on how to sustain, spread and scale effective interventions. She is a Scientist in the Office of Spread and Scale at the Women’s College Hospital Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care, and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. Dr Laur supports the Office of Spread and Scale in achieving their aim of amplifying and sustaining successful models of care and innovative programs. Throughout her work, she applies a breadth of methodological skills across health disciplines and care settings, while working in partnership with clinicians, lived experience advisors, and health system decision makers.

Session Chair – Issues of Equity and Access in Digitial Behavioural Interventions
Workshop Lead – Co-creation and intervention adaptation for implementation in LMICs

Dr. Lemos is a professor in the department of psychology and in the Behavioral Studies Masters program at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia. She is a psychologist and psychotherapist whose work has been focused on the impact of emotions in the prognosis of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. Currently she is working on promoting health behaviors such as physical activity and healthy diet in Colombian population.

Session Speaker – Use of Ontologies in Behavioural Intervention Development and Testing

Dr. Marta Marques is an Assistant Professor in Behavioral Science and Health Promotion at the National School of Public Health, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal, and an associate of the Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London. Her research focuses on advancing the methods for enhancing behaviour change research through the creation, validation, and integration of classification systems like ontologies, and on the development, implementation, and evaluation of theory – and evidence-based behaviour change interventions across a spectrum of health behaviours, populations, and contexts.

Session Speaker – Use Of Ontologies In Behavioural Intervention Development And Testing
Workshop Co-Lead – Embedding the routine use of ontologies to promote best use of evidence in behavioural science

Susan Michie is Professor of Health Psychology and Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London, UK. Her research focuses on human behaviour change in relation to health and the environment: how to understand it theoretically and apply theory and evidence to intervention and policy development, evaluation and implementation. Her research, collaborating with disciplines such as information science, environmental science, computer science and medicine, covers population, organisational and individual level interventions. Examples include the Human Behaviour-Change Project and Complex Systems for Sustainability and Health. She is an investigator on 15 research projects and has published >550 journal articles and several books, including the Behaviour Change Wheel: A Guide to Designing Interventions. She is Chair of WHO’s Behavioural Insights and Sciences Technical Advisory Group, participated in the Lancet’s Covid-19 Commission and served as an expert advisor on the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group in Emergencies and its Behavioural Science group. She is part of the UK’s Policy Research Unit in Behavioural Sciences, advising the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care. Professor Michie has served as Chair of the UK Food Standard Agency’s Social Sciences Advisory Committee and chaired the Academy of Social Science’s ‘Health of People’ project. For other projects, see Health Psychology Research Group

Session Chair – How Behavioural Science Can Address Global Challenges: A network approach to climate and pandemic preparedness

Dr. David Musoke is a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at Makerere University School of Public Health, Uganda. He is Co-Chair of the Community Health Workers Thematic Working Group of Health Systems Global, a Senior Visiting Fellow at Nottingham Trent University (UK), and an Affiliate Member of the African Academy of Sciences. His research interests include communicable diseases (particularly malaria), environmental health (including water, sanitation and hygiene), health systems (such as health-seeking behavior, and human resources for health particularly Community Health Workers), non-communicable diseases, One Health, and antimicrobial resistance. He has also used photovoice, a community based participatory research methodology, in his research. Currently, he is conducting research on integrated malaria prevention in Uganda which involves behavioral interventions at household and community levels to improve practices among the population. He has also been involved in vast stakeholder engagement as part of his research in Uganda including at community, sub-national, and national levels. Dr. Musoke is an alumni of the IBTN Summer School (2022).

Workshop Lead – Publish and Flourish (presented in French)

Linda S. Pagani was a nurse at the Montreal Queen Elizabeth Hospital in medicine, surgery, cardiovascular rehabilitation, and psychiatry (1984-1994). During that same decade, she also earned academic degrees at Concordia University (B.A. in Psychology 1986-1989) and McGill University (M.A. and Ph.D. in Educational and Counseling Psychology 1989-1993) in Montreal, Canada. In 1993-1994, Dr. Pagani completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Montreal, using some of the most esteemed and informative longitudinal databases on North American children. After officially leaving hospital nursing in 1994, she began her academic career at the University of Montreal. In 2005, she was promoted to the rank of full professor at the School of Psychoeducation. Since 1999, she has also been the principal researcher at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center within the Brain Health Division. Her research expertise focuses on modifiable factors in early childhood that affect human development. She devotes her energy to improving social and health policies for youth. Throughout her career, she has regarded research and practice in psychology and education as branches of public health. Her prolific research program currently revolves around three main areas: (1) risks associated with screen time during early childhood; (2) benefits associated with physical activity and risks of sedentary behaviour during childhood; and (3) modifiable factors related to the family environment.

Discussant – IBTN Summer School Alumni Session

Dr. Angela Fidler Pfammatter, MS, PhD, FSBM is the Senior Methodologist for the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences and Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She also maintains an appointment at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine. She is a licensed clinical health psychologist and behavioral medicine scientist. Her primary research uses mobile health (mHealth) tools and optimization research methodology to develop innovative behavioral interventions aimed at preventing cardiovascular disease. In addition to the research she leads, Dr. Pfammatter’s extensive expertise in the application of the Multiphase Optimization Strategy, mobile health technology development, and the science and praxis of team science has led to a broad portfolio of national and international collaborations. Her new role at Tennessee now allows her to balance a productive research program while supporting other investigators in strengthening their use of rigorous research methods, acquiring external funding, and achieving their program goals.

Keynote Speaker – Early-Phase Research on Complex Interventions
Workshop Co-Lead – Using the ORBIT Model for Research on Complex Behavioral Interventions

Dr. Powell is the Charles J. and Margaret Roberts Professor of Preventive Medicine, Medicine, Behavioral Sciences, and Pharmacology in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and past Chair of the Department (2007-2022). She is internationally recognized as an expert in the design and conduct of behavioral randomized clinical trials. She has been a past Principal Investigator of 5 major randomized behavioral trials, the Principal Investigator of an NHLBI-sponsored P50 center aimed at developing and testing multi-level behavioral treatments to reduce cardiopulmonary disparities, and the Principal Investigator of the Chicago site of the NHLBI-sponsored Obesity-Related Behavioral Intervention Trials (ORBIT) network. The Chicago ORBIT site was aimed at developing a multi-component, multi-level lifestyle treatment to prevent the menopause-related progression of visceral fat in mid-life women. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a $10.7 million multi-site behavioral clinical trial aimed at determining whether a lifestyle intervention can promote a sustained 2-year remission of the metabolic syndrome. She was the Director of the OBSSR-sponsored Workshop “Translating Ideas into Interventions: The Process of Developing Health-Related Behavioral Interventions,” Director of the OBSSR-sponsored Workshop on “Controversies in Behavioral Randomized Clinical Trials,” and participant in the NIH-NCAAM “Workshop on Control Groups.” She is a founding faculty member of the NIH/OBSSR-sponsored Summer Institute for Randomized Clinical Trials Involving Behavioral Interventions (since 1/01), and served as a Co-Director of the Institute (1/08-7/13). In that capacity, she has trained approximately 800 Fellows. She is Co-Director of the ORBIT Institute aimed at training in the early development of behavioral interventions to improve chronic diseases, funded by NCI/OBSSR and currently in its first year. She has or currently mentors approximately 65 junior faculty in or outside of her Department in behavioral intervention development and behavioral clinical trial methodology. She has been invited to present on behavioral trial methodology at the annual meetings of the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, American Psychosomatic Society, the Society for Behavioral Medicine, the Society for Clinical Trials, and the International Society for Behavioral Medicine. She was an invited member of the NIH National Advisory Council for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) (2011-2015). She was a Fellow, at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences (2015-2016). She is co-developer of the ORBIT model for behavioral intervention development. Along with her co-authors, Ken Freedland and Peter Kaufmann, she published a book on the unique methodological challenges posed by clinical trials involving behavioral interventions entitled “Behavioral Clinical Trials for Chronic Diseases. Scientific Foundations” (Springer, 2021).

Session co-chair – Use of Ontologies in Behavioural Intervention Development and Testing

Dr. Joshua Rash is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Director of the Memorial University of Newfoundland – Behavioural Medicine Centre (MUN-BMC). He is a registered clinical, health and rehabilitation psychologist with expertise in behavioural medicine, health behaviour change, and chronic disease management. Dr. Rash has significant experience conducting multi-site, pragmatic clinical trials that involve pharmacological and behavioural interventions. His expertise is highly sought out in chronic pain management, weight management, stress management, motivating health behaviour change, treatment of insomnia, and cardiovascular psychophysiology.

Session Speaker – IBTN Summer School Alumni Session

Demián Rodante is a psychiatrist and Head of Psychiatry Section of the Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Braulio A. Moyano”, in Buenos Aire, Argentina where he acquired clinical skills to manage patients with personality disorders and suicidal behaviors. Nowadays, he carries out training and direct postgraduate courses related to the evaluation and management of acute suicidal risk. Since 2015, he is a researcher at the Institute of Pharmacology of the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. Dr. Rodante is Practical Assignments Chief of the Department of Toxicology and Pharmacology & of the Department of Mental Health and Psychiatry of the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Demián completed a Master on Clinical Effectiveness at the Institute for Clinical Effectiveness at the University of Buenos Aires. He also holds a master’s degree in Neuropsychopharmacology from the Universidad Favaloro, Argentina. Currently, he is finishing his PhD at the UBA with the project: “Effectiveness, safety and acceptability of a mobile phone application to reduce self-harming thoughts and behaviors in adolescents: randomized and controlled study.” He’s also a clinician specialized in the care of people at risk of suicide from the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy model. Demián Rodante was part of the cohort of the 2021 IBTN Summer School.

Keynote Speaker – Foundation: Mechanisms of Behaviour Change

Alex Rothman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.  His research program synthesizes basic research on how people process and respond to health information with the development and evaluation of theory-based interventions to promote healthy behavior.  Working across an array of health domains, Dr. Rothman and his colleagues have contributed to our understanding of a range of issues including why and when different health communication strategies are most effective, the decision processes that underlie the initiation and maintenance of behavior change, and the development of strategies for optimizing the integration of theory and practice.  He has served as the President of the Society for Health Psychology and was the founding President of the Social Personality and Heath Network.  Dr. Rothman has been a leading advocate for forging tighter linkages between theories of health behavior and intervention practices and policies.  To this end, he has contributed to a range of NIH-initiatives including having co-developed the NCI/NIH-sponsored Advanced Training Institute on Health Behavior Theory, co-led the NHLBI/NIH Accumulating Data to Optimally Predict Obesity Treatment (ADOPT) Core Measures Project, and currently co-chairs the OBSSR/NIH Health Behavior Theories Project.

Workshop Lead – Rapid prototyping for digital behavioural interventions

Since 2008, Alex has been helping organisations apply leading-edge methodologies for the design of innovative digital products. Alex works in complex domains such as healthcare, using human-centred design with a behavioural-science lense to explore the intersectional challenges between the practical constraints of service delivery, and the human sentiment and behaviours that determine effective use, uptake and outcome. Alex holds a Masters degree in Human-centred Computing from the University of Sussex, UK.

Speaker – IBTN Summer School Alumni Session

Dr Elaine Toomey is a Lecturer in Evidence-Based Healthcare in the University of Galway and Programme Co-Director for the new MSc in Evidence-Based Future Healthcare. She is also a Health Research Board ‘Applying Research into Policy and Practice’ Research Fellow and a Cochrane Ireland/Evidence Synthesis Ireland Research Associate. Until April 2020, Elaine was Associate Director of Cochrane Ireland within Evidence Synthesis Ireland and led the implementation of the Evidence Synthesis Ireland Fellowship Scheme. Previously, Elaine was a Health Research Board Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement Post-doctoral Research Fellow, where she co-led the development of a complex behaviour change childhood obesity prevention intervention, with a specific focus on process and implementation outcomes. Dr Toomey’s work seeks to improve population health and wellbeing by enhancing the implementation of research into policy and practice using insights from behavioural and implementation science. She has expertise in evidence synthesis, implementation science, knowledge translation and intervention fidelity within health behaviour change interventions. Her current HRB Fellowship focuses on enhancing the use of evidence in public health decision-making, drawing on insights from implementation science and behavioural science.

Plenary Session Discussant – Use of Ontologies in Behavioural Intervention Development and Testing

Robert West is Professor Emeritus of Health Psychology at University College London. He specialises in behaviour change. He co-founded the Behaviour Change Wheel, the Capability-Opportunity-Motivation-Behaviour (COM-B) model of behaviour, and the PRIME Theory of motivation. He has more than 900 academic publications including numerous books on behavioural science. He is former Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal, Addiction, and has acted as an advisor to the UK Government and currently advises the Welsh Government. His most recent book is ‘React: Harness your animal brain’ which provides a concise summary of our understanding of motivation as it applies to topics such as addiction. Google Scholar profile.

Session Speaker (Virtual) – How Behavioural Science Can Address Global Challenges: A network approach to climate and pandemic preparedness

Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, MBE, is an environmental psychologist, specialising in perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport, based in the Department of Psychology, University of Bath. She is Director of the ESRC-funded UK Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). She regularly advises governmental and other organisations on low-carbon behaviour change and climate change communication, was one of the expert leads for Climate Assembly UK, and Lead Author for IPCC’s Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report. Her research projects have included studies of meat consumption, energy efficiency behaviours, waste reduction and carrier bag reuse, perceptions of smart technologies and electric vehicles, low-carbon lifestyles, and responses to climate change.

Session chair – How to Navigate the Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Implementation Continuum

Rebecca Wyse, is an Associate Professor of behavioral science at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle (Australia). She specializes in the development of behavioral interventions for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease, with a particular focus on the development of digital health interventions. Her work addresses cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity and asthma, and she has developed interventions for schools, childcare centres, canteens, the home and hospital. She holds dual fellowships from the Cancer Institute NSW and the National Heart Foundation of Australia, and she is the current chair of the Health Behavior International Collaborative award