Professional Interests
I am a medical physicist and assistant
proferssor in the Gerald
Bronfman Dept. of Oncology at McGill
University, based at the Cedars
Cancer Centre of the McGill University
Health Centre in Montreal, Quebec.
In addition to some clinical duties, I lead two
active medical physics research
programs with collaborators in McGill's School of
Computer Science, Canadian
Nuclear Laboratories, the Canadian
Nuclear Safety Commission and in industry
(Detec Inc).
I also teach the Health
Physics for Medical Physicists and
Instrumentation and Computation classes in
McGill's CAMPEP-accredited Medical Physics M.Sc
program and I created and coordinate the
Practicum class of the Graduate
Diploma in Oncology program of the Gerald
Bronfman Dept. of Oncology.
I co-lead development of the award-winning Opal patient
portal and I am co-founder of the Quebec
startup Opal
Med Apps Inc. Opal was named Quebec
eHealth solution of 2019 and was awarded
the 2019 Prix
d'excellence– ministers' choice award -
the highest accolade in the Quebec healthcare
system. Our project to build data donation into
Opal was awarded the inaugural Trottier-Webster
award for Innovation at the Research
Institute of the McGill University Health
Centre.
O-HIG and Opal
I am particularly proud of the Opal
Health Informatics Group (O-HIG) that I
co-founded in 2014 with computer science
professor Laurie
Hendren and radiation oncologist Tarek
Hijal, MD. Our collaborative health
informatics research has involved about
70 student researchers thus far and has
given fruit to Opal,
an award-winning patient portal for mobile
phones. Opal provides patients with access to
their medical data, personalized education
material and questionnaires to collect patient
reported outcomes. The Opal development team
currently counts eight full-time software
developers.
My vision for Opal is that it will
become a widely-used tool to bring about
SmartCare - defined as the use of
patient-centered data and mHealth (mobile
health) technologies for remote care and
artificial intelligence (AI) research.
For more details, please see my Research Page.
Teaching and Supervision
In 2010 I became course instructor for the Health Physics
for Medical Physics class in the McGill
Medical Physics program. I restructured the
course, previously taught by four instructors,
and wrote a comprehensive
set of notes. In addition to Health
Physics, I currently also teach the
Instrumentation and Computation class in the
Medical Physics program and I coordinate the
ONCO 630 Practicum course in the Oncology
Graduate Diploma program of the Gerald
Bronfman Dept. of Oncology.
Since 2011 I have officially supervised
(primary supervisor) one postdoc, 4
Ph.D. candidates, 14 M.Sc students, 6 research
assistants, 5 interns, and 33 undergraduate
students in Medical Physics. Within the Opal
Health Informatics Group, I lead a team of
eight full-time software developers.
Each semester I offer fun and
interesting research projects to good
undergraduate students in Physics and Computer
Science at McGill as part of the MDPH
396 course.
Academic Background
Before moving into medical physics in 2008, I
studied physics at Queen's
University Belfast, astrophysics at University
College Dublin and I did two postdocs in
gamma-ray astronomy, one at McGill
University and the other at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics. I was part of the
design and development team that built the VERITAS
telescopes in Arizona and I was on shift during
first light of the VERITAS prototype telescope
in 2003. Click here for a poster
explaining VERITAS that I prepared for the First
Light fiesta in 2007.
VERITAS telescope array in Southern
Arizona, USA
Personal
Interests
Outside of work, I enjoy running and swimming. I
am the founder and race director of the Montreal
Pride Run and with some friends I founded a
running club, the Tucson Frontrunners, while I
lived in Tucson, Arizona. |
