University Health Network (UHN)/Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH)
Biosketches
Dr. Kenneth Croitoru
Dr. Kenneth Croitoru joined the Division of Gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Hospital in January 2008 as a Clinician Scientist and is a full Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto.. He completed medical school at McGill University in 1981 and then trained in internal medicine and gastroenterology from 1982-1986. He went on to do post-doctoral training as an MRC Research Fellow in Mucosal Immunology with Dr. John Bienenstock at McMaster University. On completion of this research training he joined the Division of Gastroenterology at McMaster in 1992 where he went on to serve as Training Program Director and Associate Director of the Division. During this time he developed his research program with funding from the Canadian Institute of Health Research, Canadian Association of Gastroenterology and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada. He held an Ontario Ministry of Health Career Scientist award for 10 years and more recently was one of the first recipients of a 5 year CCFC IBD Research Scientist Award. He served as the Chair of the CCFC Medical Advsiory Board and helped develop the CCFC IBD Research Institute where he served as Chair of the Executive Committee until 2008.
His research is focused on investigating the fundamental mechanisms of intestinal inflammation, in particular the role of T cell effector and regulatory function in the intestinal mucosal in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. These studies will be carried out at the Clinical Sciences Division in the Medical Sciences Building at the University of Toronto, where he is a member of the Institute of Medical Sciences. He is collaborating with other members of the CSD as well as with members of the departments of Immunology and Lab Medicine and Pathobiology. The goal of his work is to understand how T cells function serves to maintain intestinal homeostasis in health and what defects in regulatory T cells allow for the breakdown of these mechanisms. Dr. Croitoru is also Project Leader of, the GEM Project (www.GEMPROJECT.ca) a major clinical study that will be coordinated out of the IBD Research Group at Mount Sinai Hospital. The study is a prospective cohort study of healthy subjects at risk of developing Crohn’s disease. These subjects will be identified by virtue of the fact that they are a sibling of a patient with Crohn’s disease and will examine the Genetic, Environmental and Microbial factors that lead to Cohn’s disease. This is a 5 years study linking every major IBD center from across Canada and has received over $5 million in funding from the CCFC. As a result of these research activities, Dr. Croitoru has achieved both national and international recognition for his IBD research.
Dr. S. Victor Feinman
Dr. Feinman received his MD from the University of Vienna (1948) and then trained in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at the Vienna General Hospital (1948-51) and Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto (1951-53). Since 1953, Dr. Feinman has been a staff physician at the Mount Sinai Hospital where he also serves as Director, Liver Study Unit. Dr. Feinman's clinical and research interest is in viral hepatitis. In 2003, Dr. Feinman was the recipient of the Commemorative Medal of the Queen's Golden Jubilee, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Canadian Liver Foundation and the Ontario Association of Gastroenterology Award for his contributions to Gastroenterology.
Dr. Alvin Newman
I went to medical school at the University of Pittsburgh and I trained in Gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1969-71 and this was followed by 2 years at the MRC Gastroenterology Unit at Central Middlesex Hospital in London, England. In 1973 I joined the faculty and started my position as gastroenterologist at Mt.Sinai Hospital and I have remained there ever since. My principal interest in practice has been in functional gastrointestinal diseases but I see many different GI problems. For many years I was deeply involved in undergraduate medical education at the University of Toronto and I was Director of Curriculum Development for nearly a decade and I oversaw the introduction of a new curriculum in the early 1990s. Prior to my 65th birthday I was a Professor of Medicine. I am now an Adjunct Professor of Medicine.
Dr. Geoffrey Nguyen
Dr. Nguyen is Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Health Policy Management and Evaluation. He is also an adjunct scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. After graduating from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2000, he completed residency in Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2003. He then pursued a combined clinical and research fellowship in gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins. He concurrently completed a PhD degree in Clinical Investigation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2007 under the auspices of an NIH-sponsored National Research Services Award.
Dr. Nguyen is currently appointed as a Clinician Scientist at the Mount Sinai Hospital. He is the recipient of an AGA Research Scholar Award and two consecutive New Investigator Awards from CIHR and the CIHR Embedded Clinician Researcher Award. These career awards have supported his research endeavors in health services and outcomes and clinical epidemiological studies that complement his clinical interests in inflammatory bowel diseases. The main focus of his research is the impact of IBD specialty care on health outcomes at the population level. Dr. Nguyen's research focuses on using administrative health data to monitor patterns of IBD-related healthcare utilization, its determinants, effect on health quality of life and morbidity, and economic impact. He is the national lead for the Promoting Access and Care through Centres of Excellence (PACE) a national network dedicated to improving access and quality of care for patients with IBD. He is also Chair of the CINERGI group, a Canadian-wide collaborative network of IBD centres focused on quality improvement initiatives. He has spearheaded the Choosing Wisely campaign in IBD and was the lead author on several North American clinical practice guidelines in IBD. His is a recipient of the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology’s Young Investigator Award and the University of Toronto Department of Medicine Award for Quality and Innovation. As part of the PACE program, he and his research team have pioneered the use of telemedicine to improve access to IBD care to underserviced regions of Ontario. As Chair of the University of Toronto’s GI Committee for Quality Improvement and Safety, he is also a champion for optimizing the delivery of quality care for GI conditions throughout the university’s many affiliated hospitals.
Dr. Peter G. Rossos
As a CMIO and staff gastroenterologist, Dr. Rossos’ priorities include alignment of clinical systems with clinicians' workflow and productivity, as well as the impact of systems on patient safety, quality improvement, education, and clinical research. In addition to working closely with local academic leadership and researchers, he contributes to provincial and national efforts to advance the use of information and communication technologies.
Peter received his M.D. from the University of Toronto in 1986, where he subsequently completed his Internal Medicine, Gastroenterology training, and therapeutic endoscopy fellowship. He studied Leadership Development for Physicians in Academic Health Centers at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004, and graduated from the Executive MBA Program at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management as a Bregman Scholar in June, 2008. He has achieved international recognition for his innovation and leadership in informatics and telehealth, chairs and serves on a number of local and national committees while holding executive positions within the Centers for Global eHealth and Innovation in Complex Care (CICC) at UHN. His educational contributions have been formally recognized with the W.H. Anderson Teaching Award from The Toronto Hospital in 1995-6, the University of Toronto Louis J. Cole Faculty Teaching Award for excellence in the field of gastroenterology in June, 2007, and the University Health Network/Mount Sinai Teacher of the Year Award for 2007-2008.
Team awards include the Cancer Quality Council of Ontario Annual Quality and Innovation Award for “Quality Initiatives Enabled by Whole-Slide Imaging Telepathology”, and the Canadian Society for Telehealth Technology Innovation Award for “Achieving Sustainable Growth by Combining Smartphone and Web Technologies” in 2009, and the Ontario Hospital Association, Best of International Best Practices Award for "Creating High Quality Discharge Summaries That are Integrated with the Electronic Patient Record” in 2006.
Dr. Mark Silverberg
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Dr. Mark Silverberg graduated from the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine in 1992 and completed his internal medicine and gastroenterology training there in 1997. He then completed a PhD studying the genetics of inflammatory bowel disease in 2002 at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute (Lunenfeld) of Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH). He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, a clinician-scientist in the SLRI and a practicing gastroenterologist in the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Group at MSH.
Dr. Silverberg’s medical practice is devoted to the care of patients with IBD and IBD makes up the majority of his clinical work. He participates in clinical trials and clinical observational research studies in IBD. He is also heavily engaged in training physicians and other allied health staff about the management of IBD.
He is the co-chair of the Canadian GI Fellows Program in IBD and the Program Director of the Advanced IBD Fellowship at MSH. Fellows and students come from around the world to train in this program with the MSH IBD Group. Dr. Silverberg also has an interest in colon cancer screening, particularly for those with an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer, such as those with FAP and HNPCC/Lynch Syndrome. He holds an appointment with the Familial GI Cancer Registry at MSH and provides clinical and endoscopic care for patients requiring cancer screening.
Dr. Silverberg is currently an Investigator at the Lunenfeld investigating genetic aspects of inflammatory bowel disease. His laboratory is focused on identifying novel susceptibility genes for IBD and to explain the contribution of genes and other biomarkers to its etiology and clinical course. More recently he has expanded his program to study the relationship between serum immune responses, gene regulation and the host microbiome and genetic susceptibility. He has made significant contributions to the discovery of genes related to Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and paediatric IBD.
Dr. Hillary Steinhart
Dr. Hillary Steinhart is a Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto and holds a faculty appointment at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto.. He is also Head of the Combined Division of Gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Hospital and University Health Network in Toronto.
Dr. Steinhart received his MD from the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and his MSc in Clinical Epidemiology from the University of Toronto.
Dr. Steinhart’s research interests include the evaluation of new therapeutic strategies for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, meta-analysis and clinical trials methodology, disease severity evaluation, complications of inflammatory bowel disease and phenotype-genotype interactions in inflammatory bowel disease. He has published over 100 research papers as well as two books on Inflammatory Bowel Disease for patients and families.
Dr. Steinhart is the immediate past chair of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada’s Scientific and Medical Advisory Committee and is Clinical Section editor for the journal Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.
Dr. Adam Weizman
Dr. Weizman is a gastroenterologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ontario and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba where he received his medical degree from the University of Manitoba in 2006. He subsequently did a Residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship in Gastroenterology at the University of Toronto. He completed the Advanced Fellowship in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California and a Master's degree (MSc) in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety from the Institute of Health Policy, Evaluation, and Management at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Weizman’s academic appointment is as Clinician in Quality and Innovation. His research interests include healthcare quality and health outcomes, with a focus on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Dr. Weizman is involved in teaching at the graduate, undergraduate, and post-graduate levels.
Dr. Norman Marcon
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Dr. Marcon is a graduate of Queens University in Kingston. Dr. Marcon previously served as Chief of Gastroenterology at The Wellesley Hospital. In 2001 he and the Therapeutic Endoscopy group moved to St. Michael's Hospital where they continue the Wellesley tradition of innovative endoscopy. He is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Toronto.
Dr. Marcon served as the Director of the Therapeutic Endoscopy Training Program at St. Michael's Hospital, which is one of the largest in North America.
Dr. Marcon and his colleagues established a highly successful annual International Course on Therapeutic Endoscopy, now in its 28th year. Faculty and attendees come from around the world to this major educational event.
Dr. Marcon's research interests include endoscopic oncology, the early detection of dysplasia using novel optical devices, photodynamic therapy, and treatment by endoscopic mucosal resection. Dr. Marcon is involved in the development and application of experimental devices for dysplasia detection treatment.
Dr. Marcon travels widely lecturing and demonstrating therapeutic endoscopy procedures.
In recognition of his contribution to the field of endoscopic education and therapy, he has been appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada.
