Dr Carole Légaré completed her medical training at the University of Ottawa, and her postgraduate pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance training at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK. After gaining experience in clinical practice and public health, she joined Health Canada in 2002 where she initially worked in pharmacovigilance. She also worked as a senior medical advisor for the Centre for Biologics Evaluation during the H1N1 influenza pandemic. In 2013, she joined the Therapeutic Products Directorate as the Director of the Office of Clinical Trials, where she oversees all activities related to the approval and pharmacovigilance of clinical trials involving pharmaceuticals. She is currently a member of the ICH E8 working group on General Considerations for Clinical Studies.
Monica Taljaard is a Senior Scientist in the Clinical Epidemiology Program at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and Associate Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa. She received her PhD degree in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Western University in 2006. Her main research interests are in the design, analysis and ethics of cluster randomized trials. As a methodologist with the Ottawa Methods Centre, she works with clinicians and researchers from a variety of disciplines and medical specialties in the design and analysis of cluster randomized trials, standard clinical trials, and observational studies. She supervises MSc and PhD students in Epidemiology and teaches Biostatistics courses at the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Jason Field is the President and CEO of Life Sciences Ontario (LSO), the industry voice for the life sciences sector in Ontario. Jason obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts and his undergraduate degree from the University of Waterloo. Following graduate school, Jason returned to Ontario and worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a research scientist developing scalable manufacturing processes of active pharmaceutical ingredients.
Charles Weijer is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioethics at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University in London, Canada. He is the leading expert on the ethics of randomized controlled trials. In 2008, Charles founded the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, which is dedicated to fostering collaboration between the humanities and the sciences, and served as the Institute’s first director. In 2014, he received Western’s Hellmuth Prize for Achievement in Research, and, in 2016, he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada
Drew Memmott is currently the Senior Vice President for Research Administration at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Associate Director for Administration for the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute (NCI) designated Comprehensive Cancer Center comprised of 5 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and 2 Harvard biomedical schools. He is the senior administrative leader for all aspects of research at DFCI and the DF/HCC consortium. In his role as SVP he is responsible for oversight of the research administrative infrastructure (including grant and contract management, core facilities, laboratory operations, and the animal resource facility) and clinical research operations (including clinical trials administration and operations, Institutional Review Board, protocol review approval and activation, and clinical trials financial management). In his role as Associate Director for Administration for DF/HCC he oversees the administration of the DF/HCC Cancer Center Support Grant and its associated operational requirements including administration, shared resources, and clinical research support.
Prior to DFCI Drew held a number of senior leadership roles at Mayo Clinic. He was the Associate Director for Administration for the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center, an NCI designated national cancer center with operations in three geographic regions. Additionally, Drew also served as a Director of Research Administration at Columbia University Medical Center.
Drew is an active member of the Cancer Center Administrator’s Forum (CCAF), an organization of NCI designated Cancer Center Administrators; the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI); an External Advisory Board Member for several NCI designated cancer centers; and the National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) where he has served in multiple committee leadership roles.