Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences

Dr. Jamie Hutchison – Recipient of the 2023 CIHR-ICRH/CCCS Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences

Dr. Jamie Hutchison has led and collaborated on multiple high-impact studies of molecular mechanisms, clinical translational biology studies and clinical trials focused on critical illness. These include studies of cardiac arrest, traumatic brain injury, transfusion medicine and septic shock. The current goal of Dr. Hutchison’s research program is to improve survival and quality of life among survivors of acquired brain injuries. He has been awarded 69 peer-reviewed research grants over his career, 24 as principal investigator (PI) and 45 as a co-investigator (Co-I), with more than $16 million as PI or Co-PI and more than $120 million as a Co-I. He has published 113 Peer-Reviewed articles and has had multiple visiting professorships and presentations at national and international academic hospitals and meetings. He is the Past-Chair of the Canadian Critical Care Translational Biology Group (CCCTBG), the current Co-chair, with Dr. Alexis Turgeon, of the Canadian Traumatic Brain Injury Research Consortium (CTRC), funded by CIHR, and a member of the International Initiative for Traumatic Brain Injury Research. He has trained more than 20 graduate students and post-doctoral research fellows in his laboratory and mentored multiple pediatric critical care trainees in research. He also helped start and lead highly successful research trainee programs for the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group, the CCCTBG and the CTRC. He is advocating to designate moderate to severe TBI as a chronic condition in Canada on behalf of patients and their families, the CTRC and Brain Injury Canada.

Dr. Margaret Herridge – Recipient of the 2022 CIHR-ICRH/CCCS Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences

Dr. Herridge completed her MSc and MD at Queen’s University and her respiratory and critical care training at the University of Toronto. She completed her research training at the Channing Laboratory/ Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and her MPH at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, a Senior Scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, Director of Critical Care Research for the Interdepartmental Division of Critical Care Medicine, Director of the RECOVER Program/Grace RECOVER Program for Chronic Critical Illness and co-lead of CANCOV (Canadian Multi-centre 2-year follow-up of patients/caregivers after COVID-19). She has published extensively on patient and caregiver outcomes after critical illness.

She has received several national and international research distinctions including the Dr. F. Marguerite Hill Lecturer (2015), Honorary Member of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (2016), Lifetime Achievement Award in Critical Care from the American Thoracic Society (2018), the University of Toronto Eaton Scholar Researcher of the Year Award (2019), the Deborah Cook Mentorship Award from the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group (2020) and has been inducted as a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2021).

Dr. H. Thomas Stelfox – Recipient of the 2021 CIHR-ICRH/CCCS Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences

Dr. Tom Stelfox is Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Scientific Director of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary. He received his M.D. from the University of Alberta, Internal Medicine Residency at the University of Toronto, Ph.D. in Health Care Policy at Harvard University and Critical Care Fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital. His research program focuses on the application of health services research methods to evaluate and improve the quality of health care delivery to critically ill patients. His research activities include developing quality indicators; developing strategies to improve continuity of patient care across the care continuum; and improving the translation of scientific evidence into clinical practice. He has more than 300 peer-reviewed publications with more than 15,000 citations and has received more than $18 million in funding as principal or co-principal applicant and more than $55 million in network and training grants as co-applicant. The findings from his work have impacted health policy and patient care.

Dr. Maureen Meade – Recipient of the 2020 CIHR-ICRH/CCCS Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences

Dr. Meade is a critical care physician at Hamilton Health Sciences and Professor of Medicine at McMaster University. She is a distinguished critical care scholar who has undertaken a large body of rigorous clinical research and mentored a number of outstanding early career investigators.

Dr. Meade led a 20-year research program dedicated to lung protective ventilation in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. She earned international acclaim spearheading 4 randomized trials and contributing to the Executive Committees and Data Safety Monitoring Boards of many more. Her research addressing PEEP strategies and high frequency oscillation have influenced recommendations in UptoDate and international ARDS guidelines. Dr. Meade’s 250 publications feature the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA, and the British Medical Journal.

Dr. Meade was the inaugural recipient of the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group Deborah J. Cook Mentorship Award. She has mentored more than 40 critical care researchers: masters students, PhDs, and junior faculty. Thirteen are presenting their work internationally, 10 hold peer-reviewed career awards and 9 lead multicentre trials.

In 2015, Dr. Meade launched Canada-DONATE, a new program of research focused on deceased organ donation. The aim of this program is to address the many difficult challenges unique to research in this emerging field, and to create a sustainable, national research platform to support clinical trials.

Dr. Meade attributes her academic successes to strong mentorship, inspired collaborators, and generous support from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group, and the Canadian Donation and Transplant Research Program.

Dr. Jacques Lacroix – Recipient of the 2019 CIHR-ICRH/CCCS Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences

Jacques Lacroix is professor, Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, Université de Montréal. He is working at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine and its Research Centre. He is teaching pediatric critical care medicine, general pediatrics and epidemiology. He co-founded the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators (PALISI) Network in 2002. He received the PALISI Leadership Award in 2014 and the “Deborah J. Cook Mentorship Award” (Canadian Critical Care Trials Group) in 2016. His main topics of research are transfusion medicine, trauma, and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome in critically ill children. He wrote 267 papers, 95 chapters, 294 abstracts, posters and free papers, and a textbook (Lacroix J, Gauthier M, Hubert P, Leclerc F, Gaudreault P, éds. Urgences et soins intensifs pédiatriques. 2e édition, Paris & Montreal: Massonn & Les Éditions de l’Hôpital Sainte-Justine, 2007:1368p). He gave 307 invited lectures, including 158 outside Canada. He completed three large randomized controlled trials, the TRIPICU study (N Engl J Med 2007;356:1609-19), the ABLE study (N Engl J Med 2015;372:110-8), and, with Marisa Tucci and Phil Spinella, the ABC-PICU trial (NCT01977547). Many international organizations have sought his expertise (Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; Société de réanimation de langue française; Society of Critical Care Medicine). He was an Associate Editor of the journals Trials and Jornal de Pediatria, and is a Senior Editor of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.

Dr. John Marshall – Recipient of the 2018 CIHR-ICRH/CCCS Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences

John Marshall is a Professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto, a trauma surgeon and critical care physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, and a Senior Investigator in the Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science. His academic interests lie in the area of sepsis and life-threatening infection, trauma, and the host innate immune response to these. His CIHR-funded laboratory studies the cellular mechanisms that prolong neutrophil survival in critical illness by preventing neutrophil programmed cell death, or apoptosis. He has an active clinical research interest in sepsis and ICU-acquired infection, and in the design of clinical trials and outcome measures. He leads research programs in antimicrobial resistance and the treatment of post-resuscitation fluid overload in critically ill patients, and has been an active investigator in more than two dozen clinical trials. He has developed a widely used tool to measure organ dysfunction in the ICU, the Multiple Organ Dysfunction Score, and proposed the PIRO model as a method of stratifying critically ill patients using an approach similar to that used in staging cancer.

He has published more than 450 manuscripts and book chapters, and has been cited more than 90,000 times. He is the founding chair of the International Forum of Acute Care Trialists (InFACT) – a global network of 33 investigator-led critical care clinical research groups, vice-chair of the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infections Consortium, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Sepsis Alliance. He is past-chair of the International Sepsis Forum, past-President of the Surgical Infection Society, past Sectreary-General of the World Federation of Societies of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine, and past-chair of the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group. He has given more than 1000 invited lectures at more than 500 meetings around the world, and is an Associate Editor of the journals Critical Care Medicine and Critical Care.