Presenter Biographies | BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute

Keynote Speakers

Mohammed Abdulaziz

Dr. Mohammed Abdulaziz is the Head of Division, Disease control and Prevention, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is a medical doctor and has a master’s in public health. He is a fellow of the West African College of Physician and rose to the rank of Chief Consultant Physician before Joining Africa CDC. He is one of the foundation senior epidemiologists who started the operationalization of Africa CDC in 2016 and had previously served as the Principal Medical Epidemiologist where he was the program coordinator for Africa CDC’s first regional initiative to strengthen public Health in Africa. He is a fellow of the Chatham House Africa Leadership Program in public Health. He has led the development and validation of the Africa CDC strategy on NCD, Injuries and Mental Health and that of the Reproductive health which are currently been implemented to support African Union member states. During the COVID-19 pandemic response he co-chaired the Infection Prevention and Control Technical Working Group for Africa CDC continental response to COVID-19. He is the coordinator of the Country engagement workstream of the Africa CDC SLL program. Dr Mohammed has over 40 publications in peer review journals.

Mohamed Ibrahim

Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia School of Social Work and a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar. He is an affiliated research investigator with Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and a past Clinical Addiction Fellow at the British Columbia Center on Substance Use. Dr. Mohamed’s areas of research focus on global mental health, addiction, mental health and psychosocial support and peacebuilding, task-shifting/sharing in lower- and middle-income (LMIC) settings. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in health and addiction. His health leadership and clinical work covers over 20 years in East Africa including working in the Kenya public health care system, refugee and internally displaced settings in Somalia, Kenya and Uganda. Dr. Mohamed also has extensive clinical experience in the mental health and addiction sector in Canada and United States of America.

Panelists

André Janse van Rensburg

André Janse van Rensburg is a senior researcher in the Centre for Rural Health at the University of Kwazulu-Natal. He has 10 years’ experience in health systems research, in multiple settings, with extensive involvement in system strengthening initiatives in the public health sphere. He has a disciplinary background in monitoring and evaluation, sociology and political science, and holds a joint doctorate from Ghent University and Stellenbosch University.

Prior to joining the CRH, he was part of a health systems research team at the University of the Free State and held an EU Saturn scholarship at the Health and Demography Research unit (HeDeRa) at the Department of Sociology, Ghent University. Presently he is involved in the ASSET programme (Promoting Person-Centered Tuberculosis Care: A Mixed Method study); the S-MhINT programme; research investigating comorbid tuberculosis and depression in the Free State province; and an initiative with the National Department of Health towards developing a blueprint for community-based care for people living with severe mental and neurological disorders. André is a member of Health Systems Global, the Emerging Voices for Global Health initiative, as well as the NIHR Global Health Research Training platform.

Brittney Dudar

Brittney Dudar is a Portfolio Manager, Global Mental Health on Grand Challenges Canada’s Transition to Scale program. Brittney holds a Master’s of Global Affairs from the University of Toronto’s Munk School, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Music from Wilfrid Laurier University. Prior to joining Grand Challenges Canada, she completed an Engineers Without Borders Canada fellowship in Kampala, Uganda as an Investment Officer, where she was responsible for sourcing a pipeline of seed-stage social enterprise investments. Brittney also spearheaded the design of Engineers Without Borders’ gender lens investing strategy. Brittney has supported early-stage technology businesses and women entrepreneurs in London, UK and investigated behavioral interventions for women’s financial inclusion in South Africa. Her professional interests lie at the intersection of innovation, development, and gender equity.

Jura Augustinavicius

Jura Augustinavicius is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Equity, Ethics, and Policy at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. At McGill University she is a member of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health and an Associate Director of the Centre on Climate Change and Health. She regularly provides technical support to governments, NGOs, and UN agencies on mental health and psychosocial support in humanitarian crises and in the context of climate change. Prof. Augustinavicius’ research has a strong program implementation and evaluation focus. She currently leads several research projects that bring together teams with interdisciplinary and intersectoral expertise to co-design interventions with communities most heavily impacted by climate change and other crises.

Kenneth Miller

Prior to joining the faculty of Education at UBC in 2022, Dr. Miller was a Senior Researcher at War Child Holland, a Netherlands-based, international non-profit organization that works to improve the resilience and wellbeing of children living with violence and armed conflict. He joined War Child in 2015 to help establish the organization’s Research and Development Department, where he developed and evaluates psychosocial interventions for conflict-affected communities. Previously, Dr. Miller was an Associate Professor of Psychology at Lesley University (2012–14), Pomona College (2005–08), and San Francisco State University (2004–05) where he was initially an Assistant Professor (1999–2004). He has published extensively on the mental health effects of armed conflict and displacement and co-edited the book The Mental Health of Refugees. His book War Torn explores resilience and its limits in six war-affected communities. Working with a Sri Lankan film crew, he directed the documentary Unholy Ground: What is the Face of War?. The film, which was first screened at the Boston International Film Festival in 2011, examines the process of coming to terms with war-related trauma and loss in a village on the frontline of Sri Lanka’s civil war. He also writes a popular blog on PsychologyToday.com called The Refugee Experience.

Mark van Ommeren

Dr. Mark van Ommeren is Head of the Mental Health Unit at WHO headquarters. Much of his early work focused on initiating and developing inter-agency humanitarian policy (i.e. Sphere standards, IASC guidelines), humanitarian tools (e.g. assessment tools, mhGAP Humanitarian Intervention Guide); developing evidence-based guidelines for depression and PTSD; developing and testing various scalable psychological interventions; and supporting numerous countries to build back better mental health systems after emergencies. To improve intersectoral collaboration he introduced the now popular term “mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS)” into humanitarian policy. He coordinated the writing of WHO's (2022) World Mental Health Report. He leads a WHO team that covers many aspects of mental health, including suicide prevention; mental health at work; services reorganization; integrated care; workforce development; psychosocial, pharmaceutical and digital interventions; MHPSS emergency preparedness, response and recovery; child and adolescent mental health; and epidemiology. Born and raised in the Netherlands, he worked for five years for a WHO Collaborating Centre, based in Nepal and Fiji, before joining WHO. He studied at the University of British Columbia (BSc in statistics, 1992; MA in counselling psychology, 1995) and received a doctorate - on impact of torture on refugees in Nepal - from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2000).

Conference Co-Chairs

Jana Davidson

Dr. Jana Davidson is the chief medical officer for BC Children's Hospital and BC Women's Hospital + Health Centre. In this role, Jana has oversight over all medical staff, including physicians, midwives and dentists, working at BC Children's and BC Women's as well as, quality and safety, overall academic mandate, and both research institutes.

Jana was previously BC Children's Hospital's psychiatrist-in-chief and was the Head of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia (UBC) from 2008-2019.

She is a proud BC native and completed all her medical training at the University of British Columbia. Over the course of her career, Jana has provided consulting psychiatric services to virtually all BC Children's mental health clinics, as well as to community-based teams around the province via telehealth.

Jana is driven by her passion to ensure that all those who require care, receive education, undertake research and work at Children's and Women's are welcomed, valued and respected. She is focused on ensuring the highest quality of care and in fostering integrated clinical research.

Among her many accomplishments, Jana received the Premier's Award in 2016 for implementing a Telemental Health service in northwestern BC to create equitable access to child and adolescent psychiatry in that region and the Joint Collaborative Committee's "Champion of Change" award in 2018 for her work in child and youth mental health system transformation in BC.