Pouya Azar, MD, FRCPC, DABAM is the Head of the Complex Pain and Addiction Service (CPAS), a consult service under the Department of Psychiatry at Vancouver Coastal Health, British Columbia, Canada. CPAS provides management of pain, mental health disorders, and substance use disorders across all clinical services at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH), University of British Columbia (UBC) Hospital, and GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre. Dr. Azar is also the Addiction Lead at Foundry Vancouver Granville, a provincial clinic for youth and adolescents suffering from addiction and mental illness. 

In addition, Dr. Azar is a consulting physician for adolescent addiction medicine at BC Children’s Hospital, the co-lead of the Addiction Medicine Research and Innovation Program at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, a pain physician for the VGH Transitional Pain Clinic, a faculty member at the UBC Faculty of Medicine, and the director of the VGH & UBC Concurrent Disorders Fellowship.

Dr. Azar’s clinical and translational research focuses on the development and evaluation of novel opioid agonist treatment protocols and medical devices to improve the health outcomes for patients with mental health and substance use disorders.

Dr. Shyh-Dar Li

Dr. Shyh-Dar Li is the Angiotech Professor in Drug Delivery at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of British Columbia. His research focuses on developing innovative drug delivery technologies to enable novel therapies for cancer, metabolic disorders, and opioid withdrawal, with interests in lipid and polymer based nanoparticles and prodrug technologies. His research program has been supported by federal funding including CIHR and NSERC. He is currently the Chair of the Faculty’s Nanomedicine and Chemical Biology Research and Training Program, the Theme 1 co-Lead of the Nanomedicine Innovation Network, and a members of the Accelerated Translational Opioid Research Cluster.

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Dr. Dan Bizzotto

Prof. Dan Bizzotto received a PhD from the University of Guelph (1996) and started an independent research career in 1998 at the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC Canada. Research is focussed on developing in situ electrochemical fluorescence microscopy and applying it to study molecular and biomolecular adsorption. This work has been recognized with the Lash Miller Award from the Electrochemical Society, Canadian Section (2001) and the Prix Jacques Tacussel by the International Society of Electrochemistry (2011).

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Dr. Glenn Sammis

Prof. Glenn Sammis received a B.Sc. in Chemistry with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University in 1999.  He then went to work with Prof. Eric Jacobsen at Harvard University as an NSF Predoctoral fellow, obtaining a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2004.  After a two-year NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Erik Sorensen at Princeton University, he joined theChemistry Department at the University of British Columbia where he is now a full Professor. Prof. Sammis has built an internationally recognized research group working on the developmentof novel radical, photochemical, electrochemical, and fluorination processes. For his accomplishments, Prof. Sammis has been awarded a Merck-Frosst Young Investigator Grant, a Thieme Chemistry Journal Award, Ichikizaki travel awards, and a Killam Teaching award. 

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Dr. Anil Maharaj

Anil Maharaj is a Canadian pharmacist and researcher focused on clinical pharmacology and pharmacometrics. He obtained his B.Sc. (Pharmacy) at the University of Manitoba in 2008. After graduation and licensure, he enrolled in the University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy graduate program where he completed his Ph.D. in 2017. Following his doctorate, he pursued two postdoctoral fellowships at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Duke Clinical Research Institute. In 2020, he joined the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor. His overarching career goal is to promote the safe and effective use of medications in children and underserved populations through advanced modeling and simulation techniques.

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