Leadership

Hertzel Gerstein

Interim Executive Director; Senior Scientist

Hertzel Gerstein is PHRI’s Interim Executive Director and Senior Lead of the Diabetes Scientific Program. He is also a Professor of Medicine at McMaster University where he holds the Population Health Research Institute Chair in Diabetes; an Endocrinologist; Director of the Boris Clinic Diabetes Care and Research Program; Chair of Diabetes Clinical Trials Network Canada; and a Fellow of both the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.

Gerstein pioneered and firmly established international long-term diabetes-focused outcomes trials as the norm to support Evidence-Based Diabetes Care. Randomized trials that he designed and led have collectively included more than 90,000 people with either diabetes or prediabetes to date, and have studied and identified clinically important, life-saving diabetes therapies. These trials were supported by the US National Institute of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, other Canadian peer-review agencies, and by industry. Together, they have substantially expanded the evidence-base pertaining to the prevention, remission, and treatment of diabetes and its consequences, and some of their findings have provided the evidence base for international diabetes guidelines and novel drug indications that have improved the lives of people living with diabetes or prediabetes.

His research has been published in over 600 papers and his h index is 100. His work has been recognized by many awards, including the 2012 Canadian Diabetes Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2022 American Diabetes Association’s Outstanding Achievement in Clinical Diabetes Research Award.

PJ Devereaux

Deputy Director, Senior Scientist

Devereaux is a cardiologist, perioperative care physician, and clinical epidemiologist. He is the Director of the Division of Perioperative Care at McMaster University and a Deputy Director, Senior Scientist, and Scientific Leader of the Anesthesiology, Perioperative Medicine, and Surgical Research Group at PHRI. He is the Nominated Principal Applicant of the Accelerating Clinical Trials (ACT) Consortium, which is the Pan-Canadian Clinical Trials Consortium funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Additionally, he holds a Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair in Perioperative Medicine.

Devereaux is a full Professor at McMaster University and the President of the Society of Perioperative Research and Care. He has published over 450 peer-reviewed papers and more than 85 book chapters, editorials, and commentaries, including 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine, 13 in the Lancet, and 11 in JAMA. He has an h-index of 115 and has given over 1000 lectures and research presentations in 41 countries. His research program focuses on major vascular complications during and after surgery, and he has led many large international randomized trials and prospective cohort studies on this topic.

Emilie Belley-Côté

Associate Deputy Director, Scientist

Emilie Belley-Côté is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University; she practices critical care cardiology in the cardiovascular intensive care unit and coronary care unit at the Hamilton General Hospital. Her research interests include perioperative cardiac surgery care, knowledge synthesis and guideline development. At this stage in her career, she has more than 120 publications, including articles in NEJM, Lancet, JAMA, as well as first-tier critical care journals.

She obtained her MD from Université de Sherbrooke in 2006. After internal medicine and cardiology training, as well as an MSc in Clinical Sciences, she completed a critical care fellowship at McMaster. In 2019, she completed a PhD in Health Research Methodology at McMaster University.

John Eikelboom

Senior Scientist

John Eikelboom is Professor, Department of Medicine, McMaster University, Senior Scientist, Population Health Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation, and Hematologist, Thrombosis Service, Hamilton General Hospital. He completed training in Internal Medicine and Hematology in Perth, Australia, in 1998 and in Health Research Methodology at McMaster University, Canada, in 2000.

He has authored or co-authored more than 800 articles in peer-reviewed journals and for the past decade has been listed annually by the Web of Science among the top 1% of cited researchers. He holds the Jack Hirsh/Population Health Research Institute Chair in Thrombosis and Atherosclerosis. His current research, supported by peer reviewed funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the Gates Foundation focuses on the efficacy and safety of antithrombotic therapies in arterial, venous, cardiac, and procedure-associated thromboembolism as well as strategies to reduce the burden of the “big three” infectious diseases (HIV, TB, malaria) on the African continent.