Job Title: Scientist, Postdoctoral Fellow
Department/Location: CHÉOS
Describe your job in one sentence:
I collaborate with patients, health care professionals, and policy makers to co-create and implement research evidence that promotes patient-centred care. Examples of current work in which I am involved are choice of next birth after a previous caesarean section and maternal health.
What’s your favourite thing about your work?
I love working with such brilliant collaborators. Implementation and knowledge translation science is a team sport. We have to work together to produce high-quality evidence that is rigorous, but also timely and useful for policy makers. Most of my postdoctoral fellowship training has been outside of academic settings, embedded with health care professionals and health system decision makers. It has given me a great appreciation for how research evidence has to be tailored to meet end users’ needs.
When you look back on your body of work, what do hope to have accomplished?
I hope that my body of work supports families to have the evidence they need to make autonomous, informed decisions through clear, supportive discussions with their health care teams. The work we are doing to implement shared decision-making with patient decision aids would be a step in that direction.
If you weren’t a researcher, what would you be?
I would probably be a high school English teacher. My early graduate work was in literature with a focus on Shakespeare.
If you could bring one famous person back from the dead who would it be?
Émilie du Châtelet, a wild 18th century scientist and mathematician.
If you had a year off with pay, what would you do?
I would slow down, set up with my family in a cabin on the Gulf Islands, and read lots of fiction.
What is one thing we might be surprised to learn about you?
I spend a lot of time fishing. My out of office reply should be, “I’m currently in the backcountry and will respond to your message when I’m back in cell range.”
This post originally appeared in PHC News.
