We are pleased to announce that CHÉOS Director Dr. Aslam Anis has been awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award for Overall Excellence (senior faculty) from the UBC Faculty of Medicine (FoM). The award is in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the Faculty in education, research, and/or service.
Since joining the UBC School of Population and Public Health (SPPH) in 1995, (then known as the Department of Health Care & Epidemiology), Dr. Anis has contributed significantly to the success of the School as well as the larger FoM.
From 2002–2013, Dr. Anis served as the Director of the Masters of Health Administration (MHA) Program in the FoM. He led the overhaul of the curriculum resulting in the revitalization of the MHA Program and helping it achieve its current level of success and international recognition.
As the Director of CHÉOS, the National Director of the CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network (CTN), and a Senior Scientist at the Arthritis Research Centre of Canada, Dr. Anis has had the opportunity to mentor junior UBC faculty members and advise them on their career development. He has also supervised all levels of graduate students, many of whom have gone on to secure faculty positions. In total, he has served as principal or co-supervisor for 46 graduate-level students and has also taught several courses at SPPH over the years in Health Economics and Economic Evaluation in Health. In 2012, Dr. Anis received the Award for Excellence in Mentoring Early Career Faculty from the Faculty of Medicine.
Aside from fostering rising talent, Dr. Anis is a well-respected researcher who is recognized as one of Canada’s most distinguished health economists. In a career spanning more than 25 years, he has made seminal contributions to the fields of pharmacoeconomics, pharmaceutical industry regulation, and drug pricing. His early work focused on the impact of formulary restrictions, drug substitution legislation, and effects of deductibles and co-payments on drug utilization. Dr. Anis is the founding Director of the Pharmacoeconomic Initiative of BC and, in this capacity, he developed a framework under which pharmaceutical companies seeking to list drugs on the provincial formulary are required to submit cost-effectiveness data to inform the government’s decision. He has recently been awarded the 2018 Providence Health Care Research and Mission Award in recognition of his outstanding research.
Dr. Anis was among the first health economists to examine the cost-effectiveness of combination antiretroviral therapies (cART) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS — work which resulted in improved access to treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS. His research has also investigated the cost-effectiveness of treatments for inflammatory arthritis (a field in which he is considered an international expert), and his methodological approaches in this area have been adopted across Canada and internationally.
Dr. Anis has also been successful in obtaining significant funding to support his programs of research, with his total grant funding exceeding $150 million — $82 million of which he held as the Principal Investigator. This funding has resulted in over 220 peer-reviewed publications and more than 150 invited presentations. He is also an active and engaged member of numerous societies and organizations, including the CIHR College of Reviewers, the American Economics Association, the American College of Rheumatology, the Society for Medical Decision Making, and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcome Research, among several others.
Past winners of the award include Martin Schechter (2016), Bruce McManus (2015), and Jean Shoveller (2014). More information about this year’s Faculty of Medicine Awards Recipients is available here.
