2012-13 CIHR-IHSPR Rising Star Award Recipients

Recognizing emerging health services and policy researchers

The CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (CIHR-IHSPR) is pleased to announce that Noah Ivers, Tara Kiran and Alexandra Martiniuk have received the 2012-13 CIHR-IHSPR Rising Star of the Year Award.

The Rising Star Award Review committee selected this year’s winners for their excellence in research and/or knowledge translation (KT), the innovation of their work and the potential impact of their work within the field of health services and policy research. In addition to receiving an award of $1,000 and a certificate of excellence, Drs. Ivers, Kiran and Martiniuk will be honoured at the Canadian Association for Health Services and Policy Research (CAHSPR) conference, to be held in Vancouver in May 2013.

Noah Ivers

Post-doctoral fellow with Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto

Noah Ivers (MD) is a family physician practicing at the Women's College Hospital Family Practice and a doctoral candidate in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Toronto. He is supported by fellowship awards from CIHR and from the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.

His research focuses on optimizing the design and delivery of knowledge translation interventions to improve quality and patient outcomes in primary care, with a methodological focus on cluster-randomized trials and systematic reviews.

Dr. Ivers' Cochrane systematic review considers evidence from 140 randomized trials examining the effect of audit and feedback on professional practice and healthcare outcomes. Its findings will inform best practices in the use of audit and feedback to improve quality of care, which is important for policy-makers, administrators, health-care providers and patients.

Dr. Ivers intends to build upon this work by continuing to develop, tailor, and test interventions aiming to improve outcomes for patients seen in primary care.

To learn more about Dr. Ivers’ research, please contact him at noahivers@utoronto.ca.

View the award-winning article:

Tara Kiran

Post-doctoral fellow with St. Michael’s Hospital

Tara Kiran (MD, MSc) graduated from medical school in 2002 and completed post-graduate training in family medicine in 2004. In 2008, she obtained an MSc in Public Health, with a specialization in Health Services Research, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, England.

She was a post-doctoral fellow at St. Michael’s Hospital from June 2009 to April 2012 where she studied under the supervision of Dr. Rick Glazier. Dr. Kiran is interested in understanding the impact of primary care reforms on quality of primary care and health inequalities. She is particularly interested in evaluating the impact of physician financial incentives and changes in primary care funding and structure including the introduction of Family Health Teams in Ontario.

She is now an Associate Scientist at St. Michael's Hospital where she is also a Staff Physician and Director of the Quality Improvement Program in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. She hopes to use her role as a clinician and researcher to test interventions to improve quality of care and assess whether high quality primary care can reduce health inequalities. She also plans to continue to do research to understand the different primary care models in Ontario and their differential impact on quality of care and health outcomes.

To learn more about Dr. Kiran’s research, please contact her at Tara.kiran@utoronto.ca.

View the award-winning article:

Alexandra Martiniuk

Post-doctoral fellow with The George Institute for Global Health at the University of Sydney

Alexandra Martiniuk (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Toronto, an Associate Professor at The University of Sydney, Senior Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health, Associate Staff at the Menzies Center for Health Policy and Consultant to the AusAID Health Systems Knowledge Hub Sydney.

She holds total grant funding as a chief/principal investigator >$5.1 million from: NHMRC, ARC, CIHR, IDRC, CIDA, WHO, Government and Philanthropy and is the recipient of 27 awards, scholarships and fellowships.

She has supervised 18 graduate students (seven PhDs, 11 MScs) and has a total of 77 publications (52 peer-reviewed and 25 reports to government and industry).

She has been an invited speaker at seven conferences and given over 95 other conference presentations.

Martiniuk has been interviewed or quoted over 70 times in international and national media including Sydney Morning Herald, MSN, ABC, CBC, SBS, United Press International, Times India and Diplomat Magazine.

To learn more about Dr. Martiniuk’s research, please contact her at Alex.martiniuk@utoronto.ca.

View the award-winning article:

Date modified:

2013-05-28