Researcher profile

Brittany Dennis

I am a clinician scientist with training in general internal medicine and an area of focused competency in addiction medicine. I recently joined the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine (Division of Social Medicine). I have also joined the British Columbia Center on Substance Use (BCCSU) as a clinician scientist, with protected time from my role as an attending physician in Providence Health Care’s (PHC) Division of Addiction. I have been awarded the 2023 Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar award to support my leadership role on the research evaluation of the Road to Recovery Initiative (R2R). Prior to my undergraduate medical training at the University of London (MBBS), I completed a PhD in health research methodology at McMaster University. To establish capacity in large-data base analytics I received post-doctoral training at Stanford University, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), and through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Research in Addiction Medicine Scholars Program (Boston and Yale University). I have been an important contributor to over 90 peer-reviewed publications, 20 national and international presentations, an expert panel for Canada’s 2023 national guidance on opioids for chronic non-cancer pain, and a textbook chapter on opioid use disorder. I have held five grants as a junior principal investigator (CDN $103,800.00 total funds) since 2020. My most recent grant includes the Early Career Investigator Award (CDN $35,000.00) from the Carraresi Foundation through Providence Health Research to support her work on the R2R. As one of Canada’s first addiction focused research methodologists, my work has advanced the prioritization of patient important outcomes and directly informed methods to improve evidence synthesis, enhance measurement selection, increase generalizability, and promote guideline development for studies evaluating therapies for patients with addiction. Pivoting to identify health inequities driving the imbalanced consequences of addiction, my work has also been foundational in establishing health disparities observed in female patients with substance use disorders. Areas of interest include: opioid use disorder and opioid agonist therapies, in addition to clinical epidemiology and risk factors impacting response to substance use treatment.