Maxine Alford is the Regional Professional Practice and Academic Leader for Nursing at the Centre of the Southern Interior & Vancouver Island. She is also the Manager of the Clinical Trials Unit at Vancouver Island Centre.

Her research interests include social construction, critical and interpretative studies focusing on organizational analysis, ethnography and issues related to professional practice.

She is currently involved in studies entitled "Capacity and Continuity: A patient's experience of cancer care" funded by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and "Canada's Experience Translating Workplace Knowledge in Cancer Settings" funded by Health Canada.

Marilyn Borugian has been the senior scientist for the Screening Mammography Program of British Columbia (SMPBC) since 2004, and also serves as senior scientist for the Cancer Control Research Program at the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre.

Trained in epidemiology, computer systems development, and psychology, she has published on the associations of diet, body shape, insulin resistance and socioeconomic status with cancer risk and prognosis, including breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and childhood cancers.

She is currently working with radiologists at the SMPBC on studies relating to assessment of mammographic density, review of interval cancers, implications of increase in mean glandular dose per mammogram, and the association of different classes of calcifications with breast cancer outcomes. Her research focuses on breast density: how it relates to breast cancer, and how it might be reduced to reduce risk and improve cancer detection.

Lynda Balneaves is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing, Faculty of Applied Science at the University of British Columbia. Lynda is an SRC Research Associate and a Co-Principal Investigator with NEXUS- a centre for research on the social context of health behaviour, funded by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research.

Her research focuses on health behaviour and treatment decision-making processes of people living with cancer. She is particularly interested in understanding socio-behavioural and cognitive factors associated with the use of complementary therapies.

Lori Brotto, PhD
SRC Research Scientist
Lori.Brotto@vch.ca

Lori Brotto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the University of British Columbia, a Career Scholar of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, and a New Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In addition to her role as a researcher, she is a licensed psychologist.

Her research focuses on the development of psychoeducational interventions for gynaecologic cancer survivors with sexual dysfunction. In addition she is interested in adapting these interventions for use in group settings, rural communities, and with select ethno-cultural groups.

Susan Cadell, PhD
SRC Research Scientist
scadell@wlu.ca

Susan Cadell is an associate professor and the Director of the Manulife Centre for Healthy Living at Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty of Social Work in Waterloo, Ontario. Her research focuses on making meaning, spirituality, and palliative care, on caregivers of people who are dying, and on positive outcomes of stress.

Susan has a particular interest in posttraumatic growth, or the positive outcomes that occur after particularly stressful circumstances. She has studied palliative care in HIV/AIDS and cancer, and is now focusing on pediatric palliative care as well as professional caregivers in palliative care.

Susan is currently funded to investigate the positive aspects of such stressful situations as caring for a child with a life-limiting illness, spinal cord injury, lone motherhood, parental bereavement and aging with HIV/AIDS.

She is a member of a Canadian Institutes of Health Research-funded New Emerging Team in pediatric palliative care: Transitions in Pediatric Palliative and End-of-Life Care. Current research in development concerns couples coping with caregiving as well as undertaking an exploration of physical manifestations of stress.

Linda Carlson is a Clinical Psychologist and Associate Professor in Psychosocial Oncology in the Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary, and the holder of the Enbridge Endowed Research Chair in Psychosocial Oncology. She also holds an Adjunct Associate Professor appointment in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Carlson trained as a Clinical Health Psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, researching the area of psychoneuroendocrinology. She then worked a post-doctoral fellow at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary, sponsored by a Terry Fox Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the National Cancer Institute of Canada/Canadian Cancer Society, before being appointed Assistant Professor. She received a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator award from 2002-2007, before being appointed the Endowed Chairholder.

Dr. Carlson’s current research interests are focused in the areas of computerized distress screening, psychoneuroimmunology, integrative oncology and complementary and alternative medicine, providing and evaluating interventions for cancer patients such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), yoga, Reiki, acupuncture, exercise, and smoking cessation. She has published over 80 book chapters and research papers in peer-reviewed journals, holds several millions of dollars in grant funding and regularly presents her work at international conferences.

Gwen Chapman, PhD
SRC Research Scientist
gec@interchange.ubc.ca

Gwen Chapman is an Associate Professor of Food, Nutrition and Health at the University of British Columbia.

Her recent work looks at how people's everyday food habits are shaped by socially constructed understandings of food, health, and the body, including the experience of having cancer and people's understandings of how diet affects cancer risk.

She draws upon theoretical and methodological approaches from the social sciences, particularly in the use of qualitative research methods, rooted in sociological and anthropological traditions.

Michael Chung is registered Doctor of TCM (Dr. TCM) in British Columbia. He received his B.Sc. in Pharmacy from Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), and MSc and PhD in TCM from the Tianjin TCM University (P.R. China).

Michael has taught in four TCM schools in the US and Canada since 1995, and he has his own TCM practice in Canada since 1998. His formal training, professional knowledge of both TCM and western medicine, and his personal abilities have made him a well-known TCM practitioner in the Chinese as well as mainstream communities.

Michael’s expertise and professional standing are recognized by the authorities in Canada and he has considerable passion for advancing the professional education and practice of TCM in Canada. In 2001, he was appointed as Chief Examiner and Academic Consultant of the College of TCM Practitioners and Acupuncturists of BC (CTCMA), the licensing body of TCM in British Columbia. Since then, he has helped establish the standards of TCM practice, design the TCM Licensing Examinations and the Mandatory Safety Courses, and development of the Core Competencies for Doctor of TCM (Dr. TCM). In January 2007, he became an elected member and vice-chair of the Board of Directors of CTCMA. He is also an appointed member of the Expert Advisory Committee of Health Canada’s Natural Health Products Directorate.

Apart from clinical practice, Michael is involved in TCM clinical trial and methodology research. He is currently a member of the Cancer and Complementary Alternative Medicine (CCAM) research team. His research activities and clinical practice have helped him stay abreast of latest scientific developments and strengthen his professional network with the wider professional community.

Konrad Fassbender is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Palliative Care Medicine, an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health, and a Fellow of the Institute of Public Economics at the University of Alberta. In July 2006, he was cross-appointed as the first Scientist for the Integrated Centre for Care Advancement through Research (iCARE), a joint venture of the University of Alberta and Capital Health.

Dr.Fassbender studies the effects of health reform, technological changes on health, and economic outcomes of dying patients and their families. He has developed tools to measure the cost and performance associated with the financing and delivery of health and social services.

Lise Fillion is a nurse and a psychologist. She is a regular research member of the Cancer Research Center at the Hotel Dieu de Quebec. She is also a member of the multidisciplinary research team at the Maison Michel-Sarrazin, a supraregional palliative care hospice, and a member of a New Emerging Team (NET) funded by the CIHR, with the mandate to examine and develop novel interventional strategies having application in end-of-life care.

Her research area is stress, coping, and psychosocial adjustment to cancer. A part of her research program is related to supportive care, such as stress management and existential interventions aiming at facilitating psychosocial adjustment. Likewise, she is interested in methodological issues and health organizational services aspects related to supportive care and psychosocial adjustment.

Gillian Fyles, MD
SRC Research Scientist
gfyles@bccancer.bc.ca

Gillian Fyles is the Research Leader for Palliative Care at BCCA and Medical Leader of the Pain & Symptom Management/Palliative Care Program (PSMPC) at BCCA Centre for the Southern Interior (CSI) in Kelowna.

She is also the Co-Medical Director of the Kelowna Palliative Response Team. She is the Chair of the UBC/BCCA Pain & Symptom Management/Palliative Care Research Subcommittee and an active member of the Sociobehavioural Cancer Research Network (SCRN) Palliative Team, led by Dr. Robin Cohen.

She is a member of the Executive of the NCIC Clinical Trials Group Symptom Control Committee.

Dr. Girgis' research areas of interest include the measurement of health related behaviours, especially in relation to cancer prevention, early detection and supportive care of cancer patients; modification of health risk behaviours at the community level; modification of the psychosocial outcomes of people affected by cancer, including survivors and their caregivers; modification of the behaviour of health care providers, including communication skills training; evaluation of the quality of medical care, including efficient systems to support adoption of evidence based practice; and translation of research into policy and practice.

She is experienced in the development of needs assessment and screening tools, in developing clinical practice guidelines, as well as training health professionals in communication skills to encourage adherence to such guidelines. She has a strong commitment to translating research into policy and practice, and in training postgraduate students and junior researchers in behavioural and psychosocial research.

Michael Hayes' research interests involve social geographies of health, and health and public policy. He is Principal Investigator (PI) of the Urban Structure, Population Health and Public Policy project, a three-year project aimed at estimating variations in health status throughout the Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area (funded by the Canadian Population Health Initiative). He is also PI of the project entitled Telling stories: news media, health literacy and public policy. Funded by SSHRC, this research investigates how health is presented in Canadian newspapers. He is co-PI (with Dr. Nadine Schuurman, Geography) on a CIHR funded project entitled Creation of an extended metadata format for public and population health research, policy and surveillance in Canada and co-investigator on the recently completed CIHR funded project Investigating socio-economic dimensions of housing and health with researchers from the University of Calgary, University of Toronto and Universite de Montreal. His third edited book with LT Foster is called Too small to see, too big to ignore: the health and well-being of children in BC (University of Victoria, 2002). He is former associate editor (North America) of the journal Health and Place (Pergamon) and has been Associate Director of IHRE since its inception in 2001. He is a non-governmental representative on the Population Health Promotion Expert Group of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Donna Jeffrey, PhD
SRC Research Scientist
donnaj@uvic.ca

Donna Jeffery is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Victoria. Her background is in the sociology of education and much of her work explores the ways in which discourses of culture and race are deployed in professional practice and education/training. Currently, she and a colleague from the Ontario Breast Cancer Community Research Initiative are investigating the everyday practices of social workers who work in oncology. Drawing on critical race theory and discourse analysis, they are exploring the ways in which cultural and racial narratives are taken up in professional-patient encounters and what this can tell us about the strategies and challenges faced by supportive care health professionals.

Arminée Kazanjian, DrSoc.
SRC Research Scientist
a.kazanjian@ubc.ca

Arminee Kazanjian is a Professor at the School of Population and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia.

A sociologist by training, Dr. Kazanjian’s most recent research interests are in cancer supportive care and psychosocial oncology. She is a pioneer of population-based data linkage for surveillance purposes and her recent work focuses on immigrant health and service utilization, linking health program databases with immigration databases. She is an internationally known health services researcher for her work delineating the social context of health seeking behaviour and the evaluation of health systems.

Anne Leis, PhD
SRC Research Scientist
anne.leis@usask.ca

Anne Leis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology, College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan.

She has training in health psychology, community health, and epidemiology. The psychosocial aspects of cancer constitute the main focus of her research. Areas of interest include complementary therapies, quality of life and spirituality.

She currently co-leads a national research team on complementary and alternative therapies and cancer.

Wolfgang Linden, PhD
SRC Research Scientist
wlinden@psych.ubc.ca

Wolfgang Linden is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of British Columbia.

His research interests include health psychology; psychometrics, stress and coping; cardiac rehabilitation; heart disease and cancer.

He is co-investigator on the Patient Navigation research project and Principal Investigator on the Psychological Screening for BCCA Patients Project.

Greg Miller, PhD
SRC Research Scientist
Psychosocial Research
gemiller@psych.ubc.ca

Greg Miller is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and a Career Scholar of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research.

His research focuses on how stressors "get inside the body" to influence the development and progression of illness. His current research at BCCA seeks (1) to document the psychological and biological consequences of caring for a family member who is being treated for cancer, and (2) to identify personal resources and coping strategies that enable caregivers to manage this demanding experience successfully.

Gary Poole is an Associate Professor at UBC's Department of Health Care and Epidemiology.

He is a co-investigator on the Patient Navigation research study at the SRC. His research interests include health psychology, coping with cancer, and social and cognitive determinants of health.

Carole Robinson has a PhD in Family Systems Nursing and is a Clinical Nurse Specialist in Pain and Sypmtom Management and Palliative Care. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at UBC Okanagan. Her program of Research has focused on families managing chronic, life-threatening illness and encompasses health care relationships, interventions that assist families to manage well with chronic illness, and end-of-life decision making.

Kathy Scalzo is an associate professor/clinical instructor with the UBC School of Rehabilitation Sciences and an independent organization development consultant.. She is the co-author of “Picking Up the Pieces; Moving Forward After Surviving Cancer.”

Her research areas of interest are: change and transition; the transition from cancer survivor to living well and other survivorship issues; posttraumatic growth; meaning making and sustaining positive change after a life-altering event.