Mar 25, 2019

Dr. Andrew Pinto Now Helping to Lead UTOPIAN

UTOPIAN

Image of Dr. Andrew Pinto
Dr. Andrew Pinto is the new Associate Director for Clinical Research for the University of Toronto Practice-Based Research Network (UTOPIAN) as of March 1st, 2019.

UTOPIAN is a “practice-based research network” (PBRN), a living laboratory that connects the real-world of patients and health professionals and clinical research. UTOPIAN includes over 1,700 family physicians and related teams, a de-identified database of over 550,000 electronic medical records, and is a platform to pragmatically test new interventions to improve health.

Dr. Andrew Pinto is the founder and director of The Upstream Lab. He is a Public Health and Preventive Medicine specialist and family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Department of Family and Community Medicine. He also holds appointments to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. Dr. Pinto completed his graduate training at the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a Commonwealth Scholar. Currently, he is a Scientist in MAP/Centre for Urban Health Solutions at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital. He was recently awarded the 2019 PSI Graham Farquharson Knowledge Translation Fellowship.

Dr. Pinto's research is focused on evaluating interventions that address the social determinants of health and bringing a population health perspective to clinical care.

Dr. Pinto joins Dr. Michelle Greiver, Director of UTOPIAN, and Dr. Karen Tu, Associate Director for the UTOPIAN Data Safe Haven.

"Our goal with appointing Dr. Pinto to this role is to build our capacity to carry out clinical research across UTOPIAN," says Dr. Greiver. "He brings substantial experience in carrying out experimental and observational studies in the real world of primary care clinics. This includes the SPARK Study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) that is happening across five provinces."

"I've already started to speak with colleagues at several sites about how we can make UTOPIAN a world-class platform for clinical research,” says Dr. Pinto. “We have amazing resources, but we need to build our internal capacity, raise the profile of UTOPIAN to external stakeholders, and create an efficient process to turn ideas into successful grants and projects that have impact."