2023 Rising Star Early Career Award in Health Services and Policy Research

Recognizing emerging Health Services and Policy Researchers

The CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (CIHR-IHSPR) is pleased to announce that Dr. Emily Belita is the recipient of the 2023 Rising Star Early Career Award in Health Services and Policy Research.

This award recognizes the excellence of emerging health services and policy researchers at the early career stage and awarded to the highest ranking Early-Career Investigator in CIHR’s Project Grant competition working within the mandate of IHSPR. The prize entails a $25,000 supplemental grant to support research and/or knowledge mobilization for the duration of 1 year.

In recognizing and supporting research excellence, IHSPR Career Awards are a key strategy to help advance IHSPR’s 2021-26 Strategic Plan: Accelerate Health Care System Transformation through Research to Achieve the Quadruple Aim and Health Equity for All and CIHR’s 2021-31 Strategic Plan: A Vision for a Healthier Future.

About the Recipient

Dr. Emily Belita

Dr. Emily Belita is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Nursing, at McMaster University, holds an adjunct position in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo, and is a Knowledge Translation Advisor with the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools. Dr. Belita is a registered nurse with over a decade of experience working in the field of public health, specifically in chronic disease prevention and school health.

As a public health services and systems researcher, Dr. Belita leverages her experience as a public health nurse and community collaborator to lead a program of research that is centrally focused on investigating and strengthening the infrastructure and delivery of public health services, with impacts at the regional, provincial, and national levels. As the lead investigator of projects funded by CIHR and SSHRC, her research spans two key areas: 1) public health workforce and system monitoring and planning; and 2) strengthening public health evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) through research-practice partnerships.

Dr. Belita’s CIHR-awarded research will establish public health workforce indicators and develop a data collection system to support ongoing assessment of the public health workforce in Canada to inform decisions on human resource planning, recruitment, and retention. This project is the first step in standardizing the collection, analysis, and use of public health workforce data in Canada which will provide the necessary contextual information to describe the state of local public health systems across the country and serve as a vehicle to demonstrate the impact of ongoing public health reforms in the future.

Date modified: