Founding Evidence Informed Fellows

Georgia Richards is a researcher and teacher at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford. During her DPhil Georgia sought out open data, including coroner’s reports, global narcotics data, sales of over-the-counter medicines and private prescription data developing tools such as the Oxford Catalogue of Opioids and the Preventable Deaths Tracker. The Preventable Deaths Tracker has gained national interest from the UK’s Chief Coroner’s Office, the Ministry of Justice, the media, bereaved families, and the public, receiving over 9,000 monthly visitors.  These skills in data collation, open science and her work on preventable deaths will be highly valuable to the collaboration.

Jessica Bartoszko is an Infectious disease epidemiologist with the Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program. Jessica has 30+ peer-reviewed publications and 5+ years of experience in evidence synthesis and evaluation. She led the design, coordination, execution and publication of studies that have informed practice guidelines and policy on influenza vaccination, personal protective equipment, and drugs for COVID-19. A highlight is a systematic review and meta-analysis she led comparing medical masks to N95 respirators for preventing COVID-19 in healthcare workers, which has been cited 608 times and is in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.

Jenine Leal is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary whose research focuses on developing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of novel approaches to infection prevention and control to improve patient safety, outcomes, and lower healthcare costs. She conducts population-based, epidemiological, economic, and validation studies using large surveillance and administrative datasets related to existing and emerging infectious diseases, including antimicrobial resistance. Jenine was an active writer for the AHS COVID-19 Scientific Advisory Group and completed 6 reports that informed practice and policy in AHS. She also developed the Alberta COVID-19. Analytics Research Database is a population-based database using secondary data sources to understand local epidemiology and resource use implications of COVID-19.

Oyungerel Byambasuren is an academic general practitioner and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare, Bond University. Oyungerel completed her PhD degree on the effectiveness of mHealth apps and their usability in primary care and since completing has been working on projects to increase uptake of non-drug interventions, reduce overdiagnosis, and to close evidence-practice gaps in general practice. Other projects include COVID-19 research, answering high-priority questions such as the prevalence of asymptomatic cases, seroprevalence, role of eye protection in prevention, and impact of COVID-19 vaccinations on long COVID.