2014-15 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 Leah Smith and Lianping Ti have received the 2014-15 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, Leah and Lianping will be honoured at the Canadian Association for Health Services and Policy Research (CAHSPR) conference, held in Montreal in May 2015.

Leah Smith

Postdoctoral Fellow, Queen’s University

Leah Smith (BSc, MSc, PhD) recently received her PhD in epidemiology from McGill University where her thesis was on the impact of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination on adolescent health outcomes. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University where she continues her research on the short-, intermediate-, and long-term effects of the HPV vaccine and Ontario’s Grade 8 HPV vaccination program and is also involved in a number of pharmacoepidemiologic studies.

Leah has been a member of the CAHSPR Student Working Group since 2011 and is currently serving her second term as both Co-Chair of SWG and Student Representative of the CAHSPR Board of Directors.

Leah holds a BSc (Honours) in psychology from Memorial University of Newfoundland and an MSc in epidemiology from Queen’s University. She is looking forward to starting her new position as Epidemiologist with the Canadian Cancer Society in May 2015. To learn more about Dr. Smith’s research, please contact her at leahmariesmith@gmail.com.

View the award-winning research:

Smith L, Kaufman JS, Strumpf EC, Levesque LE. Effect of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination on clinical indicators of sexual behavior among adolescent girls: the Ontario Grade 8 HPV Vaccine Cohort Study. CMAJ. 2015 Feb 3; 187(2): E74–E81. doi: 10.1503/cmaj.140900.

Lianping Ti

PhD candidate, School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia

Lianping Ti (MPH) is a PhD candidate in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and is currently working as a Research Associate with the Urban Health Research Initiative of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS on projects based in Vancouver and Bangkok. She completed a master’s degree in Public Health from Simon Fraser University.

Lianping’s research focuses on the delivery and efficacy of healthcare systems for people who use illicit drugs, as well as examining the natural history of injection drug use and infectious diseases among this population, having authored over 30 articles on these topics. Her PhD research is supported by a CIHR Doctoral Research Award and focuses on examining factors associated with leaving hospital against medical advice and identifying novel methods for improving hospital care for patients who use illicit drugs in Vancouver.

To learn more about Lianping’s research, please contact her at mintti@cfenet.ubc.ca.

View the award-winning research:

Ti L, Voon P, Dobrer S, Montaner J, Wood E, Kerr T. Denial of pain medication by health care providers predicts in-hospital illicit drug use among individuals who use illicit drugs. Pain Res Manag. 2015 Mar-Apr; 20(2): 84–88.

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