Join us on April 27 for an interactive afternoon with our Industry Partner AstraZeneca Canada.

Learn how AstraZeneca uses real-world health data to generate insights, address evidence gaps, and navigate challenges in accessing and connecting health data across Canada. Speakers will share perspectives on medical evidence, synthetic data, and decision making in applied commercial data science.

Following the talk, a panel of experts from the University of Toronto and affiliated hospital partners will discuss implementation challenges, data access realities, and opportunities for collaboration between industry and the research community.

Don’t miss this afternoon of networking, dialogue and industry insights.

This session is part of the DSI Industry Speaker Series. This dynamic series brings leaders from across industries to the University of Toronto’s Data Sciences Institute to share real-world challenges, innovative applications, and bold ideas shaping the data-driven world.

April 27, 2026

Data Sciences Institute,
Seminar room
10th floor,
700 University Avenue

April 27, 2026
12:15-12:20	Welcome Remarks Dr. Lisa Strug, Director, Data Sciences Institute, University of Toronto
12:20-1:10	Medical Evidence: Understanding incidence, prevalence & treatment of COPD across Canada Amyn Sayani, Head of Medical Evidence, AstraZeneca Synthetic Data: A path to unlock health data sharing for complex interconnected patient pathways Martin Booth, Head of Analytics & Data Excellence, AstraZeneca Beyond Prediction: Challenges, constraints and trade-offs for decision making in applied commercial data science Devon Prontack, Senior Manager, Data Science & Innovation, AstraZeneca
1:10-1:30	Lunch break and networking
1:30-2:45	*Health Data in Canada: Challenges and Opportunities Panel* Michael Brudno, Chief Data Scientist, University Health Network Devon Prontack, Senior Manager, Data Science & Innovation, AstraZeneca Laura Rosella, Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto Lillian Sung, Chief Clinical Data Scientist, The Hospital for Sick Children Mina Tadrous, Associate Professor, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy Lisa Strug (moderator), Director, Data Sciences Institute
2:45-4:00	*Networking*

Speakers

Fabrizia Mealli
Department of Economics, European University Institute

Professor Mealli’s research focuses on statistical and econometric methods for causal inference in experimental and observational settings, estimation techniques, simulation methods, missing data, and Bayesian inference, with applications to the social and biomedical sciences.

She is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and sits on the Steering Committee of the European Causal Inference Meeting (EUROCIM). She is an Associate Editor for Biometrika, the Journal of the American Statistical Association T&M, The Annals of Applied Statistics, and Observational Studies. Mealli is President-elect of the Society for Causal Inference. Since 2001, Mealli has been teaching Causal Inference in International Schools and in Master and PhD programmes around the world.

Rajesh Ranganath
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU

Professor Ranganath’s research interests include causal, statistical, and probabilistic inference, out-of-distribution detection and generalization, deep generative modeling, interpretability, and machine learning for healthcare. Before joining NYU, he earned degrees in computer science; his PhD was completed at Princeton University working with Dave Blei, and his undergraduate was done at Stanford University. He has also spent time as a research affiliate at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

Max Tabord-Meehan
Department of Economics, University of Toronto

Professor Max Tabord-Meehan’s research focuses on econometrics and causal inference, with particular interest in the analysis of randomized experiments.

He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. He joined the department from the University of Chicago, where he taught since completing his PhD in Economics at Northwestern University in 2019.