Team Members

We are a global consortium of researchers, innovators, & advocates who work in diverse areas ranging from clinical medicine, data & social science, epidemiology, biobanking, medical anthropology, & health policy with the aim of improving maternal health.

Marianne Vidler, Assistant Professor

Marianne Vidler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at UBC. Her research focus is on pregnancy complications and maternal mortality in resources constrained settings. Marianne received a Masters in Public Health at Simon Fraser University in 2011, where her research focused on the obstetric referral system in rural Mexico. Marianne completed her doctoral degree in Reproductive and Developmental Science and UBC. Her doctoral research focused on community knowledge, attitudes and practices related to pre-eclampsia and obstetric care in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Marianne is dedicated to positioning Vancouver as a leader in global maternal and child health.

Marianne can be contacted at marianne.vidler@cw.bc.ca.

Maggie Woo Kinshella, Global Health Research Coordinator

Maggie Woo Kinshella is the Global health Research Coordinator with the PRE-EMPT project. Born and raised in Vancouver, Maggie obtained a MA in Cultural Medical Anthropology and a BA in Psychology and Anthropology from the University of British Colombia. Maggie is passionate about global health, gender and reducing inequalities in health. As such, she has worked as a consultant in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver,  youth health across BC, maternal and child health in Ethiopia, sex-and-gender-based violence prevention in Western Kenya and with the intersection of food security and maternal and child health in rural Tanzania.  She speaks some Spanish, Cantonese Chinese, Amharic and KiSwahili.
 
Outside of work, Maggie enjoys cycling, reading SF/fantasy books and is an avid traveler and writer.

Maggie can be reached at maggie.kinshella@cw.bc.ca

Kelly Pickerill, PRECISE Research Coordinator

Kelly Pickerill is a Research Coordinator with the PRE-EMPT-PRECISE projects. She is passionate about maternal and reproductive health, gender (in)equality, and the environment.

Prior to joining PRE-EMPT, Kelly’s research concerned women’s work and health in Uganda’s small-scale fisheries. She has previously worked with a number of education and advocacy-focused initiatives based out of East Africa, and with community-led climate change research in the North. Kelly has a Master of Arts in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University. She loves animals and smashing the patriarchy.

Sarina Prasad, Research Assistant

Sarina Prasad is a research assistant with the PRE-EMPT team. She graduated from UBC with a BSC in Biology and is currently pursuing her Master in Public Health at SFU. After working with the Contraception and Abortion Research Team (CART) at BC Women’s Hospital, she discovered her love for global health research during a brief internship with a rural health clinic in India where she learned about their local initiatives to tackle menstrual hygiene stigma. She hopes to use her MPH degree to further apply her skills in women’s health education and promotion.

Outside of research, she is an avid dancer, reader and loves to talk about football and hockey with anybody who will listen!

Jeffrey Bone, Research Analyst

Jeff Bone is a biostatistician for the PRE-EMPT team and at B.C. Women’s and Children’s Hospital who provides his expertise to both global health and local research projects. Jeff is also a PhD student at UBC and is working in perinatal epidemiology and biostatistics. He has worked on a variety of projects ranging from multi center clinical trials to large population based cohort studies in a variety of areas of medicine and public health.

He has an MSc in Statistics from the University of British Columbia and a Bachelors with Honours in Mathematics and Statsistics from the University of Victoria. His primary statistical interests are in causal inference and predictive modeling and is currently pursuing a PhD with a focus on using these methods for applications in obstetrics. Outside of work, Jeff likes to watch and play sports, and loves to cook and travel.

Akshdeep Sandhu, Junior Developer and Statistician

Akshdeep (Ash) Sandhu is a Junior Developer and Statistician with the PRE-EMPT team. He graduated from UBC with a BSc in Statistics and CS. As a junior developer, he is working on creating applications for data collection and building robust pipelines to ensure database from various sources can communicate in synchrony. On the statistics side, he helps the senior statistician with a number of different projects ranging from predictive modelling to meta-analysis. Away from work, you can probably find him geeking out over some quality journalism on the fivethirtyeight website or running to (barely) catch the last ferry to Vancouver Island to get away from his computer.

Dustin Dunsmuir, Software Developer

Photo: Dustin Dunsmuir is pictured in the middle with the CLIP Pakistan team members and PRE-EMPT manager Marianne Vidler.

Dustin Dunsmuir was the software developer for the CLIP (Community Level Interventions for Pre-eclampsia) Trial who created the mobile applications used for data collection. Dustin also created infographics and visualizations of the CLIP data for use in monthly monitoring and reports. Dustin completed his Master’s of Science degree at Simon Fraser University in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology with a specialization in visual analytics. He is currently the Global Health Technical Lead at the Centre for International Child Health at the University of British Columbia and the BC Children’s Hospital.

As the software developer for the CLIP trial, Dustin’s main duty was to implement the study protocol as a mobile application allowing easy entry of surveillance and pregnancy assessment data into a smartphone or tablet and synchronization of this data to a database. Dustin was responsible for making changes to the software based on feedback from all the collaborators and community health care providers in the CLIP trial.

Link to the CICH: http://www.bcchildrens.ca/globalhealth

Peter von Dadelszen, PRE-EMPT Principal Investigator

Peter von Dadelszen is Professor of Global Women’s Health, King’s College London, UK.  A New Zealander (and now Canadian), Peter is married to Laura Magee, Professor of Women’s Health at KCL, with whom he leads a pregnancy hypertension research group.  With Laura, Peter was co-recipient of the 2014 International Society for the Study of Hypertension in Pregnancy Chesley Award.  Currently, they focus pregnancy hypertension, fetal growth and stillbirth, from basic science to clinical epidemiology and health services research to global health, primarily through the PRE-EMPT and PRECISE initiatives funded by the Gates Foundation and Research Councils of the UK, respectively.

Laura Magee, PRE-EMPT Vice-Chair

Laura Magee is a general obstetric internist (Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology, Royal College of Canada). She has recently joined King’s College London, UK as Professor of Women’s Health following consultant posts at St. George’s, University of London, UK (2015-2017), and the Universities of British Columbia (2000-2015) and Toronto (1996-2000), Canada. Laura’s research is focused on pregnancy hypertension, particularly antihypertensive therapy. She is President-of the International Society for the Study of Hypertension in Pregnancy (ISSHP) and President-Elect of the International Society of Obstetric Medicine (ISOM). 

Alumni

Shazmeen Omar

Shazmeen Omar was a Research Assistant at PRE-EMPT and recently completed a BSc in Food, Nutrition and Health from the University of British Columbia. Born and raised in Tanzania, she is passionate about global health and nutrition and is also a MasterCard Foundation Scholar. At PRE-EMPT her main focus is science communication and knowledge translation. She has also helped organize events like the Global Health Conference for both 2020 and 2021.

Outside of work, her interests include reading, watercolor painting, brush lette​ring and spoken word poetry.

Larry Li

Larry Li was the Senior Database Manager and Global Health Data Management Team Lead on clinical research databases and web applications at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada.  Over the past 19 years, Larry worked closely with research managers, co-ordinators, programmers, and analysts on databases system architecture, implementation, and data management processes on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the CLIP (Community Level Interventions for Pre-eclampsia) cluster randomised controlled trial in India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Mozambique .  

Domena Tu

Domena Tu was the Database Programmer/Developer for many current and past projects and trials that PRE-EMPT has been involved in.  These projects include the CLIP (Community Level Interventions in Pre-eclampsia) Trial, the STRIDER (Sildenafil Therapy In Dismal Prognosis Early-Onset Intrauterine Growth Restriction) Trials, the PRECISE (PREgnancy Care Integrating translational Science Everywhere) Network, and the ENGAGE (ENhancinG vAGinal dElivery) Trial.