Celebrating our 2020 Senior Promotions: Full and Associate Professors

Dr. Rick Penciner is an emergency physician and academic leader who is passionate about teaching and education. His academic roles have been multiple and overlapping including teacher, educator, researcher, and leader. He teaches, mentors, and supports medical students, residents, colleagues, and faculty from all health professions. Over the past 10 years, he has developed an international reputation as an educator and faculty developer in the health professions. His academic goal is to add value to individuals, groups, and organizations to help them be better clinicians and faculty ultimately in the care of their patients. He has spent his entire career at North York General Hospital where he is currently the Director of Medical Education and the Centre for Education.

Dr. Joshua Tepper’s career goal has been to improve access to care for marginalized and disadvantaged populations. Throughout his career, he has worked towards this goal through a broad scholarly focus on equity. He has played many leadership roles in educating students, colleagues, and leaders on the importance of quality care with a strong emphasis on equity and marginalized communities. He maintained this focus as President and CEO of Health Quality Ontario and now as President and CEO of North York General Hospital. Through his clinical work, scholarly activities and leadership roles wants to to continue to support those who face barriers to accessing healthcare.

Dr. Joyce Nyhof-Young is passionate about teaching, mentoring, and advising trainees and faculty in education research and scholarship. As an education scientist, she has focused her career on building capacity in education scholarship within the Faculty of Medicine and beyond.  She does so using diverse strategies such as formal classroom teaching in MD Program lectures and small group tutorials, educational consultations, research mentorship, and project supervision. Her diverse, interdisciplinary teams of learners, practitioners and community members have built many novel and improved educational programs, curriculums, and resources in the MD Program, and in her home departments, hospital clinics, and local communities.

Dr. Andrew Pinto is the founder and director of the Upstream Lab, a space to co-design and rigorously evaluate interventions that tackle the complex social factors that impact our health. Dr. Pinto is a scientist with MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute. He has adjunct appointments at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. He serves as the Associate Director for Clinical Research of the University of Toronto Practice-Based Research Network (UTOPIAN), where he is leading the creation of a Primary Care Trials Group. He was a Commonwealth Scholar, received an Early Research Award from the Ontario Government, and in 2019, he was awarded the PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship.

Dr. Evelyn Williams has dedicated her academic career to improving physician knowledge and skills so that the quality of patient care is safe, efficient, and effective. She is most interested in developing curriculum to prepare post-graduate trainees for community practice and providing continuing professional development for physicians in long-term care (LTC) as part of their mandated life-long learning. Her involvement as the primary co-author of the LTC Medical Director Curriculum, which provides evidence-based continuing education post-licensure, helps to increase the impact of family physicians in long-term care administration and in provision of exemplary clinical care.

Dr. George Porfiris first started teaching in the Emergency Department of Toronto East General Hospital in 1996. Since then, his love for teaching has grown and he has taught many trainees of all levels – first as an attending physician, then as a preceptor to our family medicine residents, and eventually as the inaugural Director of Emergency Medical Education at Toronto East General Hospital in 2007, where he was in charge of both undergraduate and postgraduate education. His passion for teaching has been acknowledged on a national level, as he is the recipient of numerous teaching awards including the College of Family Physicians of Canada Award of Excellence for his contributions to education in the field of family medicine in 2013 and the Joseph Mikhael Medical Education Award in 2015.

Dr. Kulamakan (Mahan) Kulasegaram’s ambition is to advance the scholarship of health professions and medical education in an evidence-based manner. To achieve this, much of his scholarly work as a scientist and academic has been in advancing the science of how we train and prepare health professionals for future practice. His research sits at the intersection of assessment research, psychology of learning and clinical reasoning, and instructional design, and focuses on the transfer of learning in health professions education (HPE). His research has been used to inform curricular reform in undergraduate and postgraduate settings, and has been consistently cited by other researchers to inform their curriculum reform efforts as well.