Current Positions

Section head, Paediatric Rheumatology.
Associate Professor, Department of Paediatrics & Child health
Investigator, Children's Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba

Education

MBBS (medicine), National University of Singapore
MRCP Child Health, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, UK
FRCPC, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, Canada
Board certified pediatrics, Canada
Board certified pediatric rheumatology, Canada
PhD, Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, Canada

Research Focus

I believe that health care delivery should be personalized. Such an approach will optimize patients’ outcomes – resulting in best benefit to adverse effects ratios. Clinicians should be able to individualize patient management using robust prognostic factors identified from well-designed prognosis studies. As prognosis studies are not randomized, the conclusions could easily be biased if bias reduction methods have not been employed in study design and analysis. The quality of studies is further compromised by small sample sizes common in rare diseases. I have developed skills for dealing with the problems associated with the design, execution and analysis of prognosis studies, especially in the setting of small sample sizes.

As a clinician, I follow my patients longitudinally. There is a wealth of information in repeated measures of patients over time; this has been under-exploited. I am an expert in designing longitudinal study design and analysis. I have applied multiple longitudinal analytic methods including latent class methods, implemented in both Frequentist and Bayesian frameworks, to model longitudinal disease trajectories of rheumatic diseases. I have addressed previously unaddressed questions in prognosis and therapeutic questions in both paediatric and adult rheumatic diseases.

I have developed new skills in artificial intelligence (AI) analysis in the past 3 years. I have successfully applied pattern mining methods to Manitoba health administrative databases to study patterns preceding Juvenile Arthritis diagnosis. I have been recognized as an expert in applying AI in large databases in rheumatic diseases in Canada by my peers and invited to present in the Canadian Rheumatology Association meeting in 2023. I have been funded for further work on applying AI to earlier SLE discovery in health administrative data. In the next 5 years, I plan to pursue further national fundings to validate the AI methods pipeline I have developed, in other provinces. The long-term goal is to harness the AI methods to develop learning and efficient, population-based models to inform the health care outcomes in provinces. I aim to harness the potential of distributed databases to amalgamate the provincial models into a Canadian model for every research question.

In the next 5 years, I will be working also in designing and implementation of patient support programs for young adults with SLE, helping them to acquire and keep employment. This is a follow-up from my first CIHR project grant as an independent scientist. I expect to acquire a number of new skills as I work on this, including implementation science.

Research Interests

Machine learning
Longitudinal analytic methods
Innovative cohort design
Clinical epidemiology