IBTN 2022 Summer School Academic Lead

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.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Committee Member and Faculty

Molly Byrne is a Professor of Health Psychology at the School of Psychology in NUI Galway 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 is particularly interested in chronic disease prevention and management, and directs the Collaborative Doctoral Programme in Chronic Disease Prevention (CDP-CDP). Molly is interested in exploring and developing novel methodologies for behavioural trials to advance science and increase the impact of research. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Behavioural Trials Network, and has been a member of the IBTN Summer School faculty since 2018. Molly is an Honorary Fellow of the European Health Psychology Society and Associate Editor of Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Faculty

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).

IBTN 2022 Summer School Satellite Co-Lead

Dr. Vincent Gosselin Boucher is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia. He completed his PhD in Psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His research interests include behaviour change interventions, population health promotion, and the use of digital health. His work includes the development of technology-based evaluation and scientific knowledge translation tools, the use of qualitative methods to describe barriers and facilitators to behaviour change, and the wellbeing of healthcare professionals. For his academic excellence and research potential, Dr. Gosselin Boucher has received several prestigious awards, including the Michael Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship, CIHR and FRSQ doctoral fellowships, an RBC Student-Athlete Award, and a Canadian Psychological Association Research Award.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Committee Member and Faculty

Dr. Kate Guastaferro is an assistant research professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Kate has a doctorate and masters of public health with a focus on prevention science. She completed a T32 postdoctoral fellowship in the Prevention and Methodology Training program at Penn State. Her advanced training centered substantively upon the prevention of child sexual abuse and methodologically on innovative methods for the optimization, evaluation, and dissemination of interventions (e.g., the multiphase optimization strategy [MOST]) with high public health impact. As a prevention scientist working at the cutting edge of prevention and intervention science, Dr. Guastaferro’s program of research is devoted to the development, optimization, and evaluation of effective, efficient, economical, and scalable interventions with a specific focus on the prevention of child maltreatment.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Committee Member and Faculty

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.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Satellite Co-Lead

Dr. Lemos is a professor in the department of psychology and coordinator of 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.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Satellite Co-Lead

Dr. Sean Locke is an Assistant Professor at Brock University in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences. He received his PhD from the University of Saskatchewan in the area of exercise psychology and a postdoctoral fellowship at UBC in the areas of diabetes prevention and community health. Dr. Locke runs the REFRAME (REFraming Rehabilitation Adherence, Motivation and Exercise) lab, which focuses on developing interventions to modify health-related cognitions and behaviours to help individuals prevent or manage complex chronic conditions. Dr. Locke has conducted behavioural research for individuals with multiple sclerosis, cardiac rehabilitation, chronic pain, and prediabetes.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Faculty

Dr. Marta Marques is a Senior Research Fellow in Health Psychology/Behavioral Science at the Comprehensive Health Research Centre and Co-PI at EpiDoc, NOVA Medical School, University of Lisbon, Portugal, a visiting research fellow and associate of the Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London, and a visiting researcher at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Health Psychology Society, and a member of the Portuguese Behavioral Science COVID-19 Task Force. Her research focuses on advancing the methods for enhancing behaviour change research (e.g. taxonomies and ontologies of behaviour change interventions), and in applying health behaviour change theories and frameworks to develop and evaluate behaviour change (digital) interventions targeting a range of health behaviours (e.g. physical activity).

IBTN 2022 Summer School Satellite Co-Lead

Dr. Oonagh Meade is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Health Behaviour Change Research Group and an Honorary Research Lecturer at the School of Psychology at NUI Galway, Ireland. Oonagh’s research interests lie in health psychology, particularly the prevention and management of long-term health conditions and the development and evaluation of behavioural interventions. Oonagh is a Patient and Public Involvement Catalyst at NUI Galway where she works to support staff and students to embed patient and public involvement in research. Oonagh is lead postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Making MECC Work’ project, which is a Health Research Board funded project focused on optimising the implementation of the ‘Making Every Contact Count’ brief behavioural intervention programme in the Irish healthcare system.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Satellite Co-Lead

Dr. Chris Noone is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at NUI Galway, Ireland. His research focuses on behaviour in relation to health, with a special interest in health within the LGBT+ community. Chris is a committee member for the European Health Psychology Society Open Science Special Interest Group and a research associate with Evidence Synthesis Ireland and Cochrane Ireland.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Faculty

Dr. Justin Presseau is an Associate Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health and the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa in Canada, and a Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute where he leads the Psychology and Health Research Group, and is core faculty in the Centre for Implementation Research. His research program operates at the intersection between health psychology and implementation science, spanning evidence synthesis to mixed-methods intervention development to trials and process evaluation. His work draws on behaviour change theories and methods to understand factors that promote and undermine behaviour change in healthcare and in patients and the general public. He chairs the Canadian Psychological Association’s Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine section, and is Associate Editor for the journal Implementation Science.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Faculty

Dr. Sheinfeld Gorin, Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, is a Fulbright Distinguished Senior Scholar. She is also Director of New York Physicians against Cancer (NYPAC), founded with the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, a grant-funded research and training group that works with primary care physicians to reduce health disparities in cancer prevention and screening. She has held positions of leadership in cancer prevention and control research with an emphasis on health disparities in the government, non-profit, and academic sectors. She has published or presented over 250 papers; she contributes as an editor or reviewer to over 40 publications. Her scholarly interests are both deep and broad, spanning the fields of behavioral medicine, cancer epidemiology, health services research, empirical research ethics, and implementation science. Her primary interests are in the implications of disparities, particularly among ethnic and racial subgroups, in cancer prevention, screening, and treatment outcomes for breast, colorectal, prostate, and cervical cancers. She has led the development and implementation of multi-level, theory-based, interventions to reduce cancer-related health disparities across diverse subgroups.

IBTN 2022 Summer School Satellite Lead

Michael is a nurse and the Quality Improvement Lead for the English and Welsh National Audit of Diabetes. His research interests are in implementation science and the development and testing of complex interventions, with a focus on implementing enhancements to existing quality improvement interventions. His work has involved co-design and multi-methods qualitative work to describe and enhance audit and feedback. Michael attended the 2018 IBTN Summer School.