DFCM Funded Investigators
The DFCM Investigator Awards Program provides funding to protect research time for DFCM faculty members. The DFCM provides this funding for the following five types of DFCM faculty members:
- Clinician Scientists (faculty with >50% protected research time)
- Clinician Investigators (faculty with ≤50% protected research time)
- Research Scientists (non-clinician PhD researchers with >80% protected research time)
- New Investigators (faculty within five years of receiving their highest academic degree)
- Graduate Studies (faculty enrolled in graduate research degree programs)
In 2025, the DFCM Investigator Awards Program launched opportunities to provide funding to protect research time for community-site DFCM faculty members. These awards are made possible by a generous donation from the Waddington Family Fund. The DFCM currently funds two types of these community-site awards:
- Waddington Early-Career Researcher Awards (to assist faculty to develop their own research capacity and independent research programs)
- Waddington Fellowships (to assist faculty with demonstrated strong interest in and commitment to research, with the goals to develop their core research skills and capacity through engagement in mentored research activities)
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Aaron Orkin | Abhimanyu Sud | Aisha Lofters | Andrew Pinto | Ann Burchell | Archna Gupta | Benard Le Foll | Catherine Ji | Catherine Varner | Daniel Myran | Deanna Telner | Debra A. Butt | Jeff Kwong | Jennifer Hulme | Jennifer Shuldiner | June Carroll | Karen Tu | Liisa Jaakkimainen | Matt Orava | Megan Landes | Nav Persaud | Nikhil Shah | Nikki Bozinoff | Nisanthini Ravichandiran | Noah Ivers | Onil Bhattacharyya | Osnat Melamed | Peter Selby | Sakina Walji | Sheryl Spithoff | Tara Kiran
Dr. Aaron Orkin is a clinician scientist and emergency physician whose research focuses on clinical public health, community-based emergency care, task shifting, and health equity. For more than 15 years, he has developed and evaluated community-based emergency care programs that prepare local responders and community members to provide essential care in rural, remote, and underserved settings.
Dr. Sud is a health services and policy researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of clinical care and population health. Methodologically, he uses clinical trials, implementation evaluations, evidence synthesis, bibliometric analyses, comparative policy analyses and a variety of other approaches to evaluating complex interventions. Common areas of interest include chronic pain, mental illness, and substance use.
Dr. Aisha Lofters is a Scientist at the Women’s College Research Institute (WCRI), an Adjunct Senior Scientist at ICES, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. She is the Medical Director at the Peter Gilgan Centre for Women’s Cancers at Women’s College Hospital in partnership with the Canadian Cancer Society. She also holds a CIHR Applied Public Health Chair.
Dr. Andrew Pinto is the founder and director of the Upstream Lab, a research team focused on tackling social determinants of health, population health management, and using data science to enable Learning Health Systems. He holds the CIHR Applied Public Health Chair in Upstream Prevention. He is a Public Health and Preventive Medicine specialist and family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital.
Dr. Burchell is a Canada Research Chair in Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention. She uses epidemiological data to improve prevention and health care services for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and minimize the complications of STI-associated diseases. Dr. Burchell’s vision is to end these complications and promote sexual health for all, with aims to inform effective and practical strategies within primary care settings.
Dr. Archna Gupta is a Scientist at Upstream Lab whose research is grounded in health equity, women’s health, and global health. A pragmatic researcher, she brings experience in multi-method studies and participatory action research. Her work focuses on the intersection of public health and primary care, with an emphasis on improving care for vulnerable patients and communities facing structural marginalization.
Dr. Bernard Le Foll is a clinician-scientist specialized in drug addiction. He is Senior Scientist at CAMH. He is Chair of Addiction Psychiatry and Professor at University of Toronto. He is also the Vice-President Research and Academics and Chief Scientific Officer at the Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care. His multi-disciplinary research approach seeks to develop better treatment for addiction.
Dr. Catherine Ji is a family physician and clinician-researcher at Toronto Western Family Health Team, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on leveraging primary care electronic medical record data and linked population health databases to improve primary health care delivery.
Dr. Catherine Varner is an emergency physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. She is the Deputy Director and a Clinician Scientist of the Schwartz/Reisman Emergency Medicine Institute (SREMI) and Deputy Editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Dr. Daniel Myran is a Family Physician, Public Health and Preventative Medicine Physician, and health researcher. In the community, he practices general family medicine with an interest in addiction medicine. Dr. Myran’s research focuses on using health administrative data to understand drivers and downstream harms arising from mental health and substance use.
Dr. Telner is a community-based family physician at the South East Toronto Family Health Team, Research Director of the Toronto East Health Network and a Clinician Investigator in the DFCM Research Program. Her projects include studies on primary care genetics, exploring the primary care experiences of patients with eating disorders, and development of guidelines for family physicians caring for patients who have donated a kidney.
Dr. Debra A. Butt is an Associate Professor and Clinician Investigator in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto and the Scarborough Health Network, a Research Scientist at North York General Hospital, and a family physician in community practice in Scarborough, Ontario. Her research focuses on advancing mental health care in primary care.
Dr. Jeff Kwong is an epidemiologist, specialist in public health and preventive medicine, and practicing academic family physician at Toronto Western Family Health Team. Working at the intersection of primary care and public health, he generates real‑world evidence that informs infectious disease prevention strategies. His research leverages population-based health databases for public health.
Dr. Jennifer Hulme is an emergency and addictions physician at UHN, Research Director for the UHN Department of Emergency Medicine, Associate Professor with the DFCM, University of Toronto, and Board Chair of the Centre for Global Equity in Emergency Medicine. Her research focuses on program evaluation, health systems innovation, and advancing health equity and access to high-quality emergency care.
Jennifer Shuldiner's research strengthens team-based primary care by designing, implementing, and evaluating models that improve access, attachment, continuity, and equity. As an embedded scientist within the Women's College Hospital Family Health Team, she works alongside clinicians and patients to co-design, test, and refine innovative ways of working together, including task shifting, new team roles, and workflow redesign.
Dr. Carroll’s academic focus is the integration of genomic medicine into primary care through research and health policy work. Her research is generally in the areas of health services delivery and knowledge mobilization. She is the Co-Founding Director of GECKO, which develops, evaluates and disseminates practical, up-to-date, clinically relevant educational materials on genetics
Dr. Karen Tu established the Electronic Medical Record Administrative Data Linked Database (EMRALD), pioneering the development of electronic medical record data extraction tools, secure electronic data transfer, and anonymous linkage of primary care EMR data with Ontario's administrative health databases. She also founded the International Consortium of Primary Care Big Data Researchers (INTRePID) in 2020.
Dr. Jaakkimainen’s research focuses on primary care health services research, initially using health administrative data to examine primary care health care access, continuity of care, primary health care indicators and benchmarks. Currently she is using Natural Language Processing using FP EMRs to identify disease conditions and "codify" unstructured information for research.
Matt Orava is a Community Family Physician working at the Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre.  As the Barrie Family Health Organization Associate Lead Physician, Co-Chair of the Barrie and Area Ontario Health Team Primary Care Network Executive and the Tristan Lawson Distinguished Fellow in Child Nutrition and Community Engagement he has led several health-promoting and equity-focused community initiatives. 
Dr. Megan Landes is a Professor and Head of the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Toronto's Department of Family & Community Medicine and an attending staff physician in the Emergency Department of the University Health Network (UHN). Dr. Landes completed her medical training at McGill University, and Master’s degree at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (MSc).
Nav Persaud is the Canada Research Chair in Health Justice and professor at the DFCM. He is a staff physician and scientist at St. Michael's Hospital in Unity Health Toronto and director of MAP. His academic interests focus on justice in health outcomes as it relates to medicine access and access to proven primary care interventions. He trained at the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto.
Dr. Nikhil Shah is a family physician and palliative care provider at St. Joseph’s Health Centre. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on health econometrics and policy evaluation, with an emphasis on using economic theory and population-based administrative data to evaluate health system policy.
Dr. Nikki Bozinoff is an Associate Scientist in the Addictions Division and the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute and a physician in the Concurrent Outpatient Medical and Psychosocial Addiction Support Service and the Addiction Consult Service at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). She is also an Assistant Professor and Division Head of the Division of Mental Health and Addiction at the DFCM.
Dr. Ravichandiran's research focuses on improving equity, access, and integration in primary care, particularly for immigrants and linguistically diverse communities. Drawing on her experience as a family physician in Scarborough, she examines how language barriers, immigration experiences, and health-system structures shape patients’ access to and experiences of care.
Dr. Noah Ivers is a Family Physician at Women's College Hospital, Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, and Canada Research Chair in Implementation of Evidence-Based Practice. His research focuses on improving the quality, effectiveness, and implementation of primary care through learning health systems, implementation science, audit and feedback, and pragmatic clinical trials.
Onil Bhattacharyya is a clinician scientist and works closely with the provincial and federal partners to assess the impact of digital tools in clinical practice to inform local implementation as well as scale and spread. He adapts research methods to enable learning health systems in close partnership with policymakers, balancing rigour and responsiveness to support evidence informed policies around tools like AI scribes and decision supports.
Dr. Osnat Melamed is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, a Scientist with the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research (IMHPR), and a staff physician in the Addictions Division at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), where she works in the Nicotine Dependence and general Addictions clinics.
Dr. Peter Selby is a Senior Scientist and Senior Medical Consultant at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and Principal Investigator of the INTREPID Lab, based at CAMH. He is Vice-Chair, Research for the Department of Family and Community Medicine and holds the Dr. Barnett & Beverley Giblon Professorship in Family Medicine, a University Named Professorship at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Walji is a family physician and PhD candidate in Family Medicine Research at the University of Western Ontario. Her doctoral research focuses on reproductive carrier screening, with an emphasis on supporting the implementation of genomic medicine in primary care through patient-centred, evidence-informed research. Her broader research interests include reproductive genetics, qualitative methods, implementation science, and health services research.
Dr. Sheryl Spithoff is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, a Clinician Scientist at Women’s College Hospital, and the founder and director of the Health Tech and Society Lab. She also has appointments at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. Her work examines issues at the intersection of new technologies, commercial interests and health care systems.
Dr. Tara Kiran is a family physician and a health systems researcher with nationally and internationally recognized expertise in primary care policy, quality improvement, and health system evaluation. Dr. Kiran’s research focuses on understanding and addressing gaps in access, equity, and quality in primary care, with recent work examining shifts in the physician workforce, the impact of team-based care, and public priorities for reform.