Stress Management & Mental Wellness for Entrepreneurs

Dr. Lauren Brown | Lead Facilitator & Program Coordinator, Mindfulness, Meditation and Yoga, Division of Student Life, University of Toronto 

Dr. Lauren Brown is the lead facilitator and Program Coordinator of Mindfulness, Meditation and Yoga for the Division of Student Life at the University of Toronto. She has been a guest lecturer across campus and a keynote speaker in healthcare, non-profit, and entrepreneurial settings. Her recently completed Ph.D. research is a call to leverage formal education, such as credit-bearing university courses, as a preventative measure in the fight for student mental health and wellbeing. Through her research, she identified that undergraduates learn about wellbeing through experiential learning, contemplation, and critical thinking. “It is more than simply teaching students about wellbeing and mental health literacy, it’s about teaching these topics with the hope of deep transformative learning,” she says. Lauren was an inaugural Fellow through the Inlight Student Mental Health Research Initiative at the University of Toronto and holds a B.Ed. and M.Ed. in Adult Education and a Ph.D. in Curriculum, Teaching & Learning from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. 

Patrick Clifford | Former Director of Research and Innovation, Research Institute of Southlake Regional Health Centre 

Patrick Clifford has recently retired as the Director of Research and Innovation, at the Research Institute of Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket Ontario and CreateIT Now the Southlake-owned and operated on-campus health innovation center. During his tenure in that role, Patrick’s responsibilities included 1/oversight of research operations and infrastructure (including the REB) and 2/ advancing innovation and commercialization activities along with culture building, through strategic collaborations with industry, academia, funders, and other key partners. Patrick was also charged with leading the development and implementation of Southlake’s research agenda and advancing the innovation and commercialization strategy which included growing partnerships and collaborations with private sector ventures wishing to evaluate and/or validate wide ranging health focused technologies with Southlake clinicians in an acute care, large community hospital environment. Patrick led the CreateIT Now hospital-based innovation center which saw and assessed for collaborations some 350 early to mid stage ventures in the medical, digital, AI, and health related technologies, including their impact on health care delivery models and health economics.  Patrick oversaw the attraction and disbursement of some 12 million dollars in innovation funding and led a team focused on horizon scanning, hospital based HTA’s, HTA’s as enablers of innovation and innovative procurement mechanisms.  Patrick’s role at CreateIT now also focused on gaining early access to promising technologies and helping to drive real world data and validation exercises through collaborative initiatives with multiple stakeholders and the use of implementation science to help drive adoption and scale.  

Patrick was also engaged in Southlake’s health sector leadership role in innovative, value/outcome based, procurement practices using a range of innovative procurement strategies including competitive dialogue and design contests. Patrick retired after 34 years of health care experience in acute care, including a concurrent 22 years as a practicing clinician in emergency mental health at Oak Valley Health (formerly Markham Stouffville Hospital) which he continues post-retirement from Southlake. Patrick continues to practice as a clinician, performs occasional work for Southlake post-retirement serves on several boards including a publicly funded long term care home, HELIX through Seneca Polytechnic and Clinical Trials Ontario, and maintains his role of Treasurer for N2. He holds a BA, BSW, BEd, MSW and his RSW designation. 

Kamran Khan | Founder & CEO, BlueDot; Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto

Dr. Kamran Khan, MD, MPH, is a practising infectious disease physician and a Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto, where he holds a Temerty Health Nexus Chair in Innovation and Technology. Motivated by his experiences as a frontline healthcare worker during the 2003 Toronto SARS outbreak, Kamran has been studying outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging pathogens for nearly two decades to lay the scientific foundation for a global early warning system for infectious diseases. His research has been published in leading scientific journals from the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, Science, Nature, and Cell. Kamran’s work during global health emergencies such as the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the 2016 Zika epidemic in Latin America has led him into numerous advisory roles from the World Health Organization to the White House. 

To translate and disseminate scientific knowledge into timely action, Dr. Khan spun off BlueDot in 2013, a biothreat intelligence company that combines human and artificial intelligence to help governments protect their citizens, and businesses protect their operations, employees and customers from disruptive infectious disease threats. BlueDot has been featured in global forums such as CNN, BBC World, and CBS’ 60 Minutes. Kamran’s work transcending clinical medicine, public health, big data, and artificial intelligence has been recognized with a University of Toronto’s President’s Impact Award and a Governor General’s Award. 

Kamran is passionate about drawing from his experiences spanning the bedside to bench to the boardroom to mentor aspiring health innovators and entrepreneurs. 

Robert Brooks, PhD | Founder & CEO, FORCEN 

Robert is a leading expert in precision, high-reliability robotic sensing and design with a PhD in mechanical engineering and over 9 years of industry experience. 

He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto where his thesis was focused on designing and developing next generation of surgical robotic mechanisms and sensors. In industry, Robert has worked across a broad range of high-reliability sectors including nuclear, steel, industrial robotics, pharmaceutical automation and medical devices. Practically, he has a deep background in micro-machining, high-density circuit board assembly, and welding with a focus on precision machine assemblies. 

Before that, he received his Bachelor’s Degree in Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Waterloo. 

Wendy Naimark | Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, Ripple Therapeutics 

Wendy is one of the founders of Ripple Therapeutics following its spin-out from Interface Biologics in 2020. Ripple’s core technology, Epidel™, is founded on a discovery that drugs can be designed to deliver themselves without the need for polymers or excipients. The Company has successfully transitioned from an early preclinical to a clinical-stage company raising over $25M in Seed and Series A funding.

Wendy has been leading teams in the development of local drug delivery products for over 20 years. Before returning to Canada in 2016 to join Interface Biologics, Wendy led the Clinical Program for the development of a drug-eluting, self-expanding, biodegradable scaffold at 480 Biomedical in Boston (Founders, Bob Langer and George Whitesides).

Wendy began her industry career at Boston Scientific in the Corporate R&D group. At Boston Scientific, her work spanned developing combination products to deliver angiogenic biological agents to leading Regulatory Submission Strategies for approval of Class III combination products. Wendy is an inventor of over 35 patents in the local drug delivery field.

Wendy received her PhD in Biomaterials from the University of Toronto and began developing her career interest in local drug delivery at Caltech during her post-doctoral fellowship. During her post-doc, Wendy also discovered yoga which led her to become a certified yoga instructor. Wendy has shared her love of yoga through teaching her R&D communities along the way.