Jean-François Gagné
Co-chair, COVID-19 Exposure Notification App Advisory Council
Chief Executive Officer and founder of Element AI, a ServiceNow company
Jean-François (JF) Gagné is a serial entrepreneur in the software industry and currently, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Montreal's Element AI, which was acquired in January 2021 by ServiceNow. He has previously built and sold two AI companies, Logiweb and Planora, and spent three years as a VP and then Chief Innovation and Products Officer of JDA. After three years at JDA, he went back to entrepreneurship and soon founded Element AI to transform traditional organizations that are not yet engaged in "big tech".
Carole Piovesan
Co-chair, COVID-19 Exposure Notification App Advisory Council
Partner and co-founder, INQ Data Law
Carole Piovesan brings a wealth of experience gained at the forefront of the intersection between technology and law, with expertise in privacy, cyber readiness, data governance and artificial intelligence. She is the co-chair of the data governance working group for the Data Governance Standardization Collaborative at the Standards Council of Canada and a member of the Taskforce on AI for Health at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She was previously appointed by the Government of Canada to serve as a digital leader for the 2018 national Data and Digital Transformation consultations.
Simone Atungo
Chief Executive Officer, Vibrant Healthcare Alliance
Simone Atungo is Chief Executive Officer of Vibrant Healthcare Alliance. Prior to that, she served as Vice-President, Resident and Community Services at Toronto Community Housing Corporation, the second largest housing provider in North America. She is also the former director of Community Development and Integration at Mount Sinai Hospital and the former executive director of the Parkdale Community Health Centre. She holds a masters degree in Environmental Studies and a Non-profit Management Certificate, both from York University, and an Executive Leadership Program Certificate from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Jonathan Dewar
Chief Executive Officer, First Nations Information Governance Centre
Dr. Jonathan Dewar is the Chief Executive Director at the First Nations Information Governance Centre. He has been recognized as a leader in healing and reconciliation, and Indigenous health and well-being education, policy, and research. He has published extensively on these subjects and has lectured nationally and internationally. He completed a doctorate in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University, and he holds an appointment as Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. From 2012-2016, Jonathan served as the first Director of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre and Special Advisor to the President at Algoma University. From 2007-2012, Jonathan served as Director of Research at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
Dr. Bunmi Fatoye
Medical Officer of Health, Winnipeg Region
Dr. Bunmi Fatoye is a medical officer of health with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and an expert in charge of COVID-19 contact tracing efforts in the region. She specializes in public health practice in the areas of communicable disease prevention and control and immunization.
Dr. Éloïse Gratton
Partner, Cybersecurity Privacy Data Protection, Borden Ladner Gervais
Dr. Éloïse Gratton is recognized internationally as a pioneer in the field of privacy and she co-leads the Borden Ladner Gervais's national privacy and data protection practice. She offers strategic advice relating to privacy compliance, risk management as well as best business practices relevant to the monetization of big data and the use of artificial intelligence. She also provides support nationally and internationally in crisis management situations, such as security breaches, privacy commissioners' investigations, class actions.
Andrew Harrison
Head of Business and Corporate Development, Verily Life Sciences
As the Head of Business and Corporate Development at Verily, Andrew Harrison focuses on partnerships, collaborations, go-to-market activities, acquisitions, and venture capital activities. He started his career at RBC Ventures. Prior to Verily, he was a founding institutional investor and the Chief Operating Officer of Lapis Advisers, a healthcare-oriented investment firm. Prior to that, he was a senior partner at Fintan Partners, a firm originally capitalized by Stanford University's endowment which was acquired by Cantor Fitzgerald. He has degrees in bio-chemical and bio-medical engineering from McGill and Cornell University. He is a named inventor on medical device patents and is a CFA Charterholder. He currently represents Verily on a number of domestic and international boards.
Dr. Brenda McPhail
Director, Canadian Civil Liberties Association's Privacy, Surveillance and Technology Project
Dr. Brenda McPhail is the Director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association's (CCLA) Privacy, Surveillance and Technology Project. Her work supports CCLA's litigation, advocacy and public education efforts. This includes guiding interventions in key court cases that raise privacy issues, such as the recent Supreme Court of Canada cases R. v. Marakah and R v. Jones, which confirmed privacy rights in electronic communications. Her research agenda focuses on the social implications of technology, including, most recently, government information sharing, digital surveillance, video surveillance and facial recognition, artificial intelligence and human rights, and data trusts. She's written articles on the risks of contact tracing for civil liberties in Canada.
Dr. Derek Ruths
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, McGill University
Dr. Derek Ruths is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, where he leads the Network Dynamics Lab and co-leads the Media Ecosystem Observatory and Tech Informed Policy initiative. In his research, he investigates and advances techniques for the responsible use of machine learning and data science, particularly as applied to social systems. He actively collaborates with colleagues in the social sciences and humanities and in industry.
Dr. Margo Seltzer
Professor, Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Science and Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science, University of British Columbia
Professor Margo Seltzer's research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in health care. Professor Seltzer received an A.B. (baccalaureate) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Seltzer is the author of several widely used software packages, including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. She was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sleepycat Software and is now an architect for Oracle Corporation. She serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the (U.S.) National Academies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Science and Technology Study Group. She is a past president of the USENIX Association. She is a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, an ACM Fellow and a Bunting Fellow, and was the recipient of the 1996 Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship.
Dr. Gaynor Watson-Creed (July 2020 – March 2021)
Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health, Nova Scotia Public Health
Dr. Gaynor Watson-Creed is the Deputy Chief Medical Office of Health for the Province of Nova Scotia. She has been with the Nova Scotia Health Authority since 2005. Dr. Watson-Creed has an MD from Dalhousie University, an MSc from the University of Guelph and a BSc from the University of Prince Edward Island. In addition to her role as Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health for Nova Scotia, she is the Assistant Dean of Serving and Engaging Society for Dalhousie University's Faculty of Medicine. She also sits as chair or member of several national population health councils and boards and is a passionate advocate for high-quality public health services in Canada.