About Me
I began my career with a business degree from Queen's, a public health degree from Johns Hopkins, a medical degree from McMaster, and an emergency medicine residency from the University of Toronto — an impressive stack of credentials on paper. But classes, training and the paper that comes from them only get you so far. What actually shapes me as a physician and a leader is over two decades on the frontline of the emergency department — shifts filled with critically sick patients, being put to the test in the middle of the night in the downtown core, leadership challenges you can never anticipate, and lessons from patients, teachers, and colleagues that no degree or certification can teach.
I built my career in the highest-pressure area in the hospital — the emergency department. I led my team's response to a mass-casualty shooting that broke out in the middle of the Raptors championship parade — a reminder that it's the preparation done long before the crisis that lets a team respond with excellence when it matters most. When COVID-19 hit, I led our department through it as Chief, alongside incredible colleagues across the hospital — every shift, every policy, and every impossible tradeoff it took to keep an emergency department running safely for patients and staff, while continuing to provide excellent care throughout the pandemic. A colleague told me afterward that I'd shone during that time — that it was like I was in my element as a leader. Looking back, I think she was right: it was never the day-to-day administration of running a department that lit me up. It was leading through the moments where everything was on the line. But even with incredible colleagues around me, crisis leadership carries its own kind of loneliness — the weight of being the one every call ultimately rests with. Knowing other leaders across the country were carrying that same weight, I spearheaded a weekly check-in for emergency department leaders across Canada, so that none of us had to navigate the unknown alone.
Alongside my clinical and leadership work, I've spent years helping build programs for people the healthcare system usually misses — always in true partnership with the people those programs serve. In Winnipeg, that was EDVIP, an emergency department violence intervention program for youth. In Toronto, it grew into THRIVE, and alongside THRIVE, an ED outreach worker program for people experiencing homelessness. I led these programs, but they exist because of the ideas, voice, expertise, and dedication of people with lived experience who helped build them with me — this was never work done for people, it was work done together. Aside from helping design and implement these important programs, my role is to lead he research: to evaluate whether what we've built actually works as designed, and help move programs like these from being treated as "nice to have" to being recognized as essential care.
Along the way, I served as Chief of Emergency Medicine at Unity Health Toronto – St. Michael's Hospital, secured more than $2 million in research funding as principal investigator, published over 30 peer-reviewed studies, and became one of the voices Canadian media calls on — from CBC and the Globe and Mail to the Toronto Star and TVO's The Agenda — to explain what's really happening inside our hospitals, and to advocate for what's happening outside them, too: the homelessness, the violence, and the preventable injuries that bring so many people through our doors in the first place.
None of that is why I do this work, though. The emergency department taught me something most leadership books miss: real leadership shows up in the moments no one had time to prepare for — the ones with the highest stakes, the least information, and the most human cost.
It also taught me how to deliver hard truths. I don't beat around the bush — I'm diplomatic, but frank, and my advice isn't always what you want to hear. It's what you need to hear, grounded in a detailed assessment and the best evidence available. But I've learned that people can hear almost anything if you bring empathy and a little humour into the room — so that's how I deliver it, in a way that helps people lean into the discomfort instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
That's the leadership I'm now bringing beyond the hospital's walls — and beyond healthcare altogether. I've provided consultation to healthcare instutions across Canada and been consulted by policymakers and elected officials shaping health policy. But that business degree I started with hasn't gone anywhere either: crisis, pressure, and high-stakes decision-making look the same whether you're in a hospital or a boardroom. I'm opening up two decades of that experience — through keynotes, workshops, and consulting — to any organization navigating its own high-pressure moments, in healthcare or well beyond it.
Outside the hospital and off the stage, I'm a scuba diver, a choir member with Voices Rock Medicine, an urban flower gardener, and an enthusiastic traveler — and, most importantly, a mom to an incredible teenager, married to a brilliant and loving sport historian, surrounded by a wonderfully loyal group of friends, and part of a big, loud, supportive and funny family who's quick to remind me I can trip on a completely flat floor.