NACI Membership/Representation

Dr. Caroline Quach is a Professor in the Departments of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases Immunology and Pediatrics at Université de Montréal and the physician in charge of the Infection Prevention & Control Unit at the CHU Sainte-Justine. She works as a pediatric infectious diseases consultant and a medical microbiologist. She holds a cross-appointment at the Quebec Institute of Public Health (INSPQ) where she works in the Healthcare-Associated Infections and Immunization branches.

Dr. Quach graduated from the Université de Montréal Medical School, completed her pediatric residency training at the CHU Sainte-Justine, and her post-graduate training at McGill University. She is a clinician-investigator and holds a salary award from the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé (FRQS, mérite). Her research interests are focused on the prevention of infections - both healthcare-associated infections and vaccine-preventable diseases.

Dr. Quach is the past president of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease - Canada's (AMMI). She currently chairs the Quebec Immunization Committee (CIQ) as well as the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI). She is a member of the Quebec Healthcare-Associated Infections Surveillance Program (SPIN) steering committee.

Wendy Vaudry is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Alberta and Director of Infectious Diseases at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton. Her research interests include the epidemiology of vaccine preventable diseases and vaccine adverse events; she is the current national co-PI of IMPACT (the Canadian Pediatric Society and Health Canada's Immunization monitoring program, active). Other research interests include congenital CMV infection and transplant infectious diseases. She is a graduate of Medical School at McGill University and trained in Pediatrics at the Montreal Children's Hospital, Infectious Diseases at the University of Alberta and Transplant Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington.

Natalie Dayneka is a clinical specialist with the Pharmacy Department of the tertiary care pediatric teaching hospital, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO). As a pediatric pharmacist, Natalie has played an active role developing pediatric guidelines for Infectious Diseases, including Immunizations. She was a co-author of the online 2015 CHEO Antimicrobial Guidelines for Children which has been offered externally as a mobile application (APP) for pediatric practitioners across Canada.

Natalie has consulted on other federal committees and was a member of the Pharmacology and Therapeutics Committee for the First Nations and Inuit Health Programs Directorate. She also served on the Canadian Paediatric Society's Drug Therapy and Hazardous Substances Committee. More recently, Natalie served on the Ontario Quality Based Procedure Tonsillectomy Clinical Expert Advisory Group.

Natalie has been very active with the Canadian Society of Hospital Pharmacists (CSHP) and was awarded the title of Fellow. She is a past Chair of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Pharmacists Network (CHAP). Natalie has presented lectures and posters at regional, national and international meetings.

Dr. Shelley Deeks is the Chief of Communicable Diseases, Emergency Preparedness and Response at Public Health Ontario and an Associate Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She has a long-standing interest and passion for communicable disease control and immunization in general, and vaccine safety in particular, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications. She is a member of Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunization and past Chair of the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Immunization Practices Advisory Committee. Dr. Deeks holds Fellowships in Public Health in both Canada and Australia and completed the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program. She has over 20 years' experience as a public health physician and has worked at all levels of the public health system in Canada, and at the national level in Australia.

Philippe De Wals is Professor at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Laval University, in Quebec City, Canada. Professor De Wals gained his Medical Degree and a Doctorate in Public Health in his home country of Belgium, at the Louvain Catholic University. His early academic and professional career combined epidemiology research studies at the School of Public Health at the Louvain Catholic University with the practice of general medicine. Between 1980 and 2000 he worked as an epidemiologist for EUROCAT, a European network of population-based registries for the epidemiologic surveillance of congenital anomalies. In 1990, he moved to Canada and became the Head of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Sherbrooke. In 1997, he was appointed visiting Professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, USA.

Professor De Wals' research is centered on the epidemiology of infectious diseases, reproductive abnormalities, and the assessment of health services and public health programs and policies. He is the author of over 150 published articles in scientific journals and has contributed several chapters to textbooks. Currently, Professor De Wals is a member of the research centers at Quebec University Hospital and the Sherbrooke University Hospital and is a medical advisor to the Quebec National Institute of Public Health. In 2011, he was appointed as Scientific Director of the Evaluation Platform on Obesity Prevention at the Quebec Cardiology and Pneumology Institute.

In 1990, Professor De Wals was awarded the Jean Van Beneden Prize in recognition of his excellent work in the public health field, and in 2005, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium.

Dr. Vinita Dubey graduated from the University of Toronto's Public Health and Preventive Medicine Residency Program. She holds an Adjunct Professor appointment with the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Since 2006, she has been an Associate Medical Officer of Health for Toronto Public Health in Communicable Disease Control. Specializing with the Vaccine Preventable Disease program includes involvement in the school based vaccine program, immunization school assessment program which suspends students who are not up-to-date with required vaccines, adverse event following immunization investigations, and outbreak management including the 2017 mumps outbreak in Toronto which was the largest mumps outbreak the city has had in over 20 years. She also works as an emergency medicine physician in a small community hospital.

Dr. Robyn Harrison is an Infectious Disease Specialist who works in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a Communicable Disease Consultant for the province wide Alberta Health Services Workplace Health and Safety Program (a position she has held since 2008). She has also served as consultant for the Covenant Health Alberta Occupational Health and Safety Program (2008-2014). Dr. Harrison is keenly interested in policy development and support for clinicians to prevent infection transmission in healthcare settings. She is a member of the Alberta Advisory Committee on Immunization, and she participates in infection prevention working groups in the province of Alberta, including past work on pandemic influenza H1N1 in 2009, and avian influenza is 2014. At a national level, she is working with the Public Health Agency of Canada as a member of the Prevention and Control of Occupational Infections in Health Care Settings Guideline Working Group to update and disseminate national evidence-based infection prevention and control (IPC) guidance.

Dr. Harrison obtained her medical degree at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia; and she completed her Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases subspecialty training at the University of Alberta. Most recently she completed an MSc in the combined areas of Public Health and Epidemiology through the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, England.

Dr. Martin Lavoie is the Executive Medical Director & Medical Health Officer, Population and Public Health at Fraser Health in British Columbia. He has a long-standing interest and involvement in communicable diseases and immunization at the regional and provincial levels in Alberta, and has contributed to the work of various Federal/Provincial/Territorial committees in the last 15 years.

As Medical Officer of Health for the David Thompson Health Region (Alberta), then as Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health / Acting Chief Medical Officer of Health at Alberta Health (Government of Alberta), Dr. Lavoie’s work has focused very significantly on immunization. He was responsible to provide leadership, was directly involved in immunization decisions and policy making, provided expertise and professional support to immunization programs, and has been the main media spokesperson on immunization issues. As an active member of Alberta’s Advisory Committee on Immunization, he helped shape the implementation of new immunization programs, and guide changes to existing programs. He was a liaison member for the Council of Chief Medical Officers of Health, and is now a Public Health and Preventive Medicine Specialist voting member on NACI.

In the area of vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization, Dr. Lavoie has made a large number of presentations to health-field students, health professionals and the public. He presented a number of times at immunization conferences, including at a few editions of the Canadian Immunization Conference.

In 2011, he took the role of Provincial/Territorial Co-Chair of the National Immunization Strategy Task Group (NIS TG), alongside a Federal Co-Chair from the Public Health Agency of Canada, to lead the review and refresh of the NIS. Subsequently, and secondary to NIS TG’s final recommendations, he chaired a committee of experts to further develop materials and recommendations on security of vaccine supply.

Dr. Lavoie specialized in Community Medicine at Université de Montréal, and is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada in Community Medicine.

Dr. Rotstein is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Toronto and Attending Physician at the University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario. He received a Bachelor of Science at the University of Toronto and earned his medical degree from the University of Calgary in 1976. Dr. Rotstein completed his specialty training in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto and pursued further subspecialty training in Infectious Diseases & Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, South Carolina from 1980 to 1983 [ABIM (1980), FRCPC (Internal Medicine 1981), Infectious Diseases ABIM (1982)].

Dr. Rotstein is currently the Director of Oncologic Infectious Diseases at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre of the Immunocompromised Host Infectious Diseases Service at the University Health Network.  He is also former Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at McMaster University, past Chair and Secretary of the Infectious Diseases Section of the Ontario Medical Association, former Co-chair of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Network, former Past-President of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada, former President of the Canadian Infectious Disease Society, and former Chair of the Clinical Trials Committee of the Canadian Infectious Disease Society. In addition, he has been elected a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He is a reviewer for several international journals and was formerly Associate Editor, Review Section, for the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology.

Dr. Rotstein has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers. His research interests have focused mainly on infections in cancer patients and other immunocompromised hosts as well as fungal infections caused by Candida organisms. He maintains active research interests in clinical trials involving antifungal agents in immunocompromised hosts.

Marina Salvadori graduated from medicine at Queen's University in 1991.

She did her residency training in pediatrics at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, then trained in Infectious Diseases at The Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto. She was working there in May 2000, and joined a team of pediatricians who responded to the call for help from Walkerton. She spent the summer of 2000 working in Walkerton, then moved to London in October 2000. She is currently a pediatric infectious diseases consultant at London Health Sciences Center-Children's Hospital, and an Associate Professor at the Schulich school of medicine and dentistry at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. She is part of the team that conducted the Walkerton Health Study to provide care and monitor health problems of the people of Walkerton. She is also very interested in immunizations and immunization advocacy and regularly does teaching and workshops about immunizations. She has represented the Canadian Pediatric Society as a liaison member to NACI.

Beate Sander, PhD, is a Scientist at Public Health Ontario (PHO), Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Adjunct Faculty at York University, and Adjunct Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES).

Beate's research interests lie in the area of economic evaluation with a focus on infectious diseases. She is leading multidisciplinary teams evaluating Zika and West Nile virus mitigation strategies using data-driven simulation models, and is linking laboratory with population-based administrative data, enabling novel approaches to study the burden of infectious diseases.

Beate served on the board of the Society of Medical Decision Making (SMDM) and is an editorial board member of the "Medical Decision Making" journal. Beate provides scientific advice to decision-makers and advisory bodies and serves on scientific working groups and networks.

Nadine Sicard studied medicine and Public Health at Sherbrooke and Montréal universities. Since 2011, she has been a medical advisor in the Public Health protection team of Quebec's Ministry of Health and Social Services and contributes, particularly, to immunization, tuberculosis and antibiotic resistance programs and policies. She held the position of Associate Medical Officer of Health at Ottawa Public Health from 2008 to 2011, mostly in the areas of communicable disease prevention and control, emergency preparedness and response and management of the vaccine preventable diseases programs. Prior to working in Ottawa, Dr. Sicard worked in the areas of policy development, quality assurance and communicable disease control in Montreal and Abitibi-Témiscamingue. She's been involved in the management of public health outbreaks including pandemic influenza. She has contributed to several provincial and national advisory committees, including NACI. Dr. Sicard has held adjunct Faculty appointments at l'Université de Montréal and Queen's University.