3rd Annual national divert meeting – Meet our speakers!

Dr. Pillai Riddell is the Tier 1 York Research Chair in Pain and Mental Health and Director of the Opportunities to Understand Childhood Hurt Laboratory (OUCH Lab) in the Department of Psychology of York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is also a registered clinical psychologist, licensed to work with children and adults in clinical and health psychology. As both a basic-behavioural scientist and a clinician-scientist, Dr. Pillai Riddell currently leads a multi-national, multi-million dollar research program that studies preterm infants and their parents in Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Her research programs ultimately seek to advance a transdimensional understanding of infant pain (cortical, cardiac, behavioural, and social) and support applications of this understanding for real clinical practice. Her research is funded by all three national Canadian research councils (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council). She has also been involved extensively in supporting EDI initiatives in research contexts at both the institutional and federal levels. She is the founding director of the POLARIS training collaboration to teach academics how to adjudicate faculty for awards and jobs inclusively and is the Nominated Principal Investigator for DIVERT Mental Health.

Dr. Ruth Green is a Co-Principal Investigator of DIVERT Mental Health. Dr. Green is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at York University. She has served as the co-chair of the Indigenous Council at York University and the Special Advisor to the President on Indigenous Initiatives. Green identifies as an urban Indigenous person and is a citizen of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She is from the Mohawk Nation and is a member of the Turtle Clan. She was born a Canadian but was 1/2 disenfranchised when she was 10 years old. By the time she was 34.5 years old she was completely disenfranchised. She acknowledges the privileges she gets in a world of identity politics to be governed by legislation that is 100 years older than she is! She also acknowledges her paternal Celtic heritage Green likes to think about Indigenous education and social issues that impact Indigenous communities

Dr. Venkat Bhat is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Interventional Psychiatry Program, leads AI & Analytics at iBEST, and serves as lead of the Mental Health Community of Practice for T-CAIREM. His work advances AI in mental health, spanning digital therapeutics, LLM conversational agents, and multi-agent AI systems. Dr. Bhat has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers and delivered more than 200 presentations, establishing himself as a national leader in AI-enabled psychiatry. He is building a pan-Canadian and global community of practice at the intersection of AI and mental health, as well as AI applied to the interface of mental health and medical illness. His research integrates computational psychiatry, neurostimulation, and psychopharmacology with AI to personalize treatment and improve outcomes. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including 2025 Emerging Leader (Digital Health Canada) and the 2024 Leadership Award (RCPSC).

Guillaume Dumas is Associate Professor of Computational Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Montréal and Principal Investigator of the Precision Psychiatry and Social Physiology Laboratory at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center. He holds the IVADO Professorship in AI for Mental Health and is an academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. Recognized as a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in Brain, Mind, and Consciousness (2023) and a Future Leader in Canadian Brain Research by the Brain Canada Foundation, his work bridges disciplines from engineering and physics to cognitive neuroscience and computational medicine. His research investigates the neural foundations of human social cognition, integrating biological, psychological, and social dimensions to advance precision psychiatry and AI. Beyond academia, Dumas promotes open science, advises on AI strategy for French national initiatives, and defends cognitive freedom, including twice serving as an invited expert at the United Nations..

Dr. Alexandre Hudon is a psychiatrist, full-time researcher at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal (IUSMM and CR-IUSMM), and an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Addictology at the Université de Montréal as well as an IVADO professor (Institute for data valorization). Passionate about innovation and digital technologies, his research focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence into clinical psychiatry, on modeling violence and rare phenomena, as well as on the use of digital technologies in health sciences teaching and learning. He holds advanced training in psychiatry, addiction, and medical education (Université de Montréal, Université Laval), combined with a background in software engineering (Concordia University) and data science/machine learning (MIT), which uniquely positions him at the crossroads of clinical care, research, and technological innovation.

Dr. Leslie E. Roos is a clinician-scientist and Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba and licensed clinical psychologist. She co-leads the PRIME Initiative at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba and holds the CIHR Chair in Implementation Science, advancing eHealth and culturally grounded interventions co-designed with Indigenous, newcomer, and immigrant communities. Her research addresses gaps in access to family mental health care, with a focus on parental mental illness and early-childhood origins of youth disorders. She has authored 100+ publications, led 16 clinical trials, and developed evidence-based programs, including the BEAM app for dual-generation mental health.

Bio is coming soon.

Bio is coming soon.

Bio is coming soon.

Bio is coming soon.

Bio is coming soon.

Beverly Keeshig-Soonias is anishinaabekwe. Her community of origin is Neyaashiinigmiing. She is a registered psychologist in Alberta. She has a Law Degree from the University of Saskatchewan and a Master’s Degree in Family Therapy from Loma Linda University. Indigenous principles with kindness and humour are her gifts when serving Indigenous children, adolescents, and families.

Beverly is currently serving as an elder with the Indigenous People’s Section of the Canadian Psychological Association.

Bio is coming soon.

Bio is coming soon.

Bio is coming soon.