From the Unity Health Toronto article

Dr. Andrew Pinto, scientist at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and founder and director of the Upstream Lab, has been awarded a CIHR Applied Public Health Chair in Upstream Prevention in Primary Healthcare. We spoke with [him] to learn more about the impact of this award.

What does this CIHR Chair mean for you and your research team?

Being awarded this CIHR Chair means we can continue our work with individuals and communities to “go upstream” of the negative social and economic policies that impair their health, and co-design solutions and rigorously evaluate them. This Chair will help sustain our work over the next six years, and achieve our vision of being a resource nationally and internationally.

Which research projects and work will it contribute to?

This will support four new research areas at the Upstream Lab, including bringing together the latest evidence on the most effective upstream interventions and supporting scale-up and studying how health organizations implement upstream action to improve population health.

We will identify gaps in the evidence, and obtain funding to develop and evaluate new upstream interventions. We will also link upstream efforts in health care to rapid responses to future health threats in collaboration with public health.

Is there anything else you’d like to add about this achievement?

We will also host an annual international Upstream Summer Institute to engage more early-career researchers and graduate students in this work. This is one of only seven Chairs funded across the country, and the only one at the University of Toronto. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the crucial need for these Applied Public Health Chairs.