Meet the Speakers
Hosts
Marie Pigeyre
MD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine;
McMaster University
Marie Pigeyre is an Investigator at the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), and Assistant Professor in the Division of Endocrinology, McMaster University. She has received peer-reviewed New Investigating Funding from Hamilton Health Sciences, and is supported by the Medicine Internal Career Award from McMaster University.
She completed her clinical and research post-doctoral fellowship in epidemiology, genetics and biomarkers at McMaster University in 2019, preceded by a PhD in Epidemiology and Genetics, medical degree, and endocrinology training at the University of Lille in France (2007).
Matthew Lanktree
MD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine;
Associate Member, Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact (HEI);
McMaster University
Dr. Matthew Lanktree is a clinician scientist in nephrology genetics at McMaster University. Dr. Lanktree obtained an undergraduate degree in bioinformatics at University of Waterloo, followed by a combined MD/PhD at Western University with special training in human genetics. Moving to McMaster, he completed clinical training in internal medicine and nephrology, before moving to University of Toronto for a post-doctoral research fellowship in heritable kidney disease under Drs. York Pei and Andrew Paterson. Dr. Lanktree has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, is the recipient of the Jared G. Grantham Fellowship of the American Society of Nephrology, and a post-doctoral fellowship followed by a new investigator award from the Canadian Kidney Research Scientist Core Education National Training (KRESCENT) program. Over the last 15 years, Dr. Lanktree has published over 60 articles in high impact journals in genetics and medicine, including recent articles in Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and Nature Reviews Nephrology. Dr. Lanktree has set his goal to translate genetic studies into improved care of patients with kidney disease. The genetics field has been quick to recognize the importance of large collaborations to generate samples sizes required to confidently identify genetic variants with small but important effects. He has been fortunate to lead and participate in such collaborations and want to work to include more multi-disciplinary professionals, as well as patient partners, into his research program in his new position as a clinician scientist at McMaster University.
Presenters
See Program for Presentation Abstracts
Ingrid Waldron
PhD
Professor of Humanities;
HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program;
McMaster University
Dr. Ingrid Waldron was born in Montreal, Quebec to Trinidadian parents. She is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program in the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. From 2008 to 2021, she was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University.
Dr. Waldron’s research, teaching and community advocacy work focus on the structural and environmental determinants of health and mental health disparities in Black, Indigenous, immigrant and refugee communities in Canada, including environmental racism, climate inequities, mental illness, and COVID-19. She is also involved in a study on dementia in Ontario.
She is the author of There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities (Fernwood Publishing), which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page, Ian Daniel, and Julia Sanderson and directed by Page and Daniel. Her book received the 2020 Society for Socialist Studies Errol Sharpe Book Prize and the 2019 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing. She is the recipient of several other awards, including Research Canada’s Leadership in Advocacy Award (Individual Category), Dalhousie University’s President’s Research Excellence Award – Research Impact, the Dalhousie Faculty of Health Early Career Research Excellence Award, and Springtide Collective’s Advocate of the Year Award.
Dr. Waldron is the founder and Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project), the co-founder and Co-Director of the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice (CCECJ), and the co-founder and past Vice-President of Rural Water Watch, which conducts water testing projects in marginalized rural Nova Scotian communities. Her research and community advocacy work inspired the federal private members bill a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice (Bill C-226).
She is currently writing her next book titled From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: The Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities, which will trace experiences of racial trauma in Black communities in North America and the UK from the colonial era to the present day.
Sonia Anand
MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine;
Canada Research Chair in Ethnic Diversity and Cardiovascular Disease;
Director, Population Genomics Program, Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact (HEI);
McMaster University
McMaster University’s Dr. Sonia Anand was only 33 years old when she landed the Eli Lilly Canada-May Cohen Chair in Women’s Health. Although her present research involves the environmental and genetic determinants of vascular and peripheral vascular disease in populations of varying ancestral origin, she is most recognized for her research on women’s health issues, particularly in the area of cardiovascular disease. The care and treatment of women’s cardiovascular disease, unique in its latent and non-specific symptoms, must differ from the standard employed for men to be successful, and Dr. Anand’s research is innovative in making this a priority.
As a Professor with the Department of Medicine and a member of the Leadership Council of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada’s Heart Truth campaign, Dr. Anand has helped give women the tools they need to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease. Studying the differences associated with each gender’s symptomatic experience of heart disease, Dr. Anand aims to clarify the way in which social factors interact with biological factors to impact cardiovascular health.
Dr. Anand is also the Principal Investigator of two large genetic association studies, including the CIHR/HSFO funded EPiDREAM study of 22,000 people from 21 countries. Complementing this research, Dr. Anand teaches clinical epidemiology courses in methodology and cardiovascular disease at McMaster University with the hope of influencing future generations of doctors to be mindful of women’s health matters.
Ron Do
PhD
Associate Professor, Genomics;
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai,
New York, New York
Dr. Ron Do, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and co-Director of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Prior to joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Do was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2010 to 2013) and Instructor in Medicine (2013 to 2015) at the Center for Human Genetic Research (now Center for Genomic Medicine) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and a research affiliate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He completed his Ph.D. in Human Genetics at McGill University in 2010. Dr. Do is the recipient of the Dr. Harold and Golden Lamport Clinical Research Award of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Banting postdoctoral fellowship of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Dr. Do is a human computational geneticist interested in understanding the genomic, biological, and clinical basis of disease. He has pursued this interest by applying methods from human genetics, genetic epidemiology, statistical genetics, population genetics and computing to large-scale human genotyping, sequencing datasets. Some of Dr. Do’s current research activities include: 1) development of risk prediction models for complex disease; 2) evaluating clinical utility of genetic risk for complex disease; 3) using Mendelian randomization to infer causality of risk factors and complex disease; 4) evaluating the genetic architecture of complex disease; and 5) using human genetics to guide drug discovery and validation.