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.

Faculty

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.

Group Lead

Dr. Nicole Alberts is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Behavioural Health Intervention in the Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal. Dr. Alberts has established herself as an expert in chronic pain and childhood cancer survivorship as well as in the development and testing of digital health interventions targeting pain and psychological outcomes among medical populations. She has been recognized through a variety of awards and honours including the Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology (CAPO) Early Career Award, the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study Career Development Award, and the Editor’s Choice award in the journal PAIN for her topical review on chronic pain in survivors of childhood cancer, in which she proposed a developmental model of pain across the cancer trajectory. Dr. Alberts’ program of research aims to improve behavioural health and psychological outcomes among individuals across the lifespan – with an emphasis on those diagnosed with catastrophic and chronic illnesses, including childhood cancer. In doing so, she also seeks to better characterize pain among those completing childhood cancer treatment and surviving childhood cancer as well as to identify biopsychosocial risk factors for the development of pain in childhood cancer. She also leverages digital health approaches to answer key research questions and to develop and test innovative interventions targeting pain and psychological outcomes. Clinically, Dr. Alberts has broad clinical experience spanning both clinical health psychology and rehabilitation psychology in pediatric and adult populations.

Group Lead

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.

Group Lead

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.

Faculty and Group Lead

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.

Faculty and Group Lead

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).

Group Lead

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.

Group Lead

Manuela is a Ph.D. student at Concordia University in the department of Health and Exercise Sciences and she is a part of the MBMC. She has a background in psychology, and she has experience in qualitative research, working with at-risk communities, data annotation and in emotion recognition and regulation. Her main focus is to understand the role of ambivalence and hesitancy in the behaviour change process and to create AI driven strategies to overcome them. At the moment she is working closely with L’École de technologie supérieure (ETS) to develop a diverse data set and to produce annotated data to train and develop deep learning models for affecting computing in digital health. During her Master’s in Humanistic Studies, she worked on understanding how emotions influence argumentation and collective decision making.

Faculty

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.

Faculty

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.

Faculty

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Group Lead

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.

Faculty and Group Lead

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).

Faculty and Group Lead

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.

Faculty and Group Lead

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.

Group Lead

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