The Banting Research Foundation and CANSSI Ontario are pleased to announce the U of T recipient of the 2021 Banting–CANSSI Ontario Discovery Award is Dr. Alanna Weisman.
Dr. Alanna Weisman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, a clinician-scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, an endocrinologist at the Leadership Sinai Centre for Diabetes in the Sinai Health System, and an adjunct scientist at ICES.
Dr. Weisman’s research is focused on investigating access to and outcomes of care for people with diabetes. She has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, JDRF, Diabetes Canada, and the Canadian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism.
She received this year’s award for the project: Impact of socioeconomic factors on insulin pump use in type 1 diabetes.
Insulin pumps are one method of insulin treatment for people with type 1 diabetes and insulin pumps have a number of advantages. Although the Ontario government provides funding for all individuals with type 1 diabetes to use an insulin pump, previous research has demonstrated that people with lower income may still be less likely to use insulin pumps. The current study will use anonymized provincial health care data to determine whether factors such as sex, income, and other socioeconomic factors are barriers to insulin pump use despite the availability of government funding for insulin pumps, and how this, in turn, affects health outcomes for people living with type-1 diabetes.
About the Banting–CANSSI Ontario Discovery Award in Data Science
In 2019 the Banting Research Foundation and CANSSI Ontario partnered to offer two Banting-CANSSI Ontario Discovery Award in Data Science for new investigators appointed at Ontario universities. These new investigator awards are a one-year grant of up to $25,000 and are intended to support statistical or computational research related to a health or biomedical problem