IHPME Researchers Secure Federal Funding Support For New Health Research Initiatives

New federal funding highlights the growing need for impactful, future-focused health research, with IHPME faculty among those recognized and ready to advance interdisciplinary projects that drive transformative change.

By: Marielle Boutin

As part of the Government of Canada’s May 2026 funding announcement, three IHPME faculty members were named among new Canada Research Chairs and recipients of New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).

Drs. Kuan Liu and Zahra Shakeri were named among 7 U of T recipients of the NFRF’s Exploration stream.

Dr. Shakeri’s project “PROOF-Health: Provenance-first, retrieval-only agents for detecting high-harm health misinformation,” addresses the spread of harmful health misinformation and involves the development of an AI system designed to detect, trace and prioritize health misinformation without contributing to its amplification.

According to Dr. Shakeri, her work was motivated by a simple concern: in health, information that appears credible can still be inaccurate, or, more critically, impossible to trace to a reliable source, making it especially dangerous when dealing with claims about vaccines, cancer treatment, fertility or infectious disease.

“I wanted to build a system that does not just respond to a claim after it has gone viral, but asks where it came from, how it is changing, who it is reaching, and what evidence exists to address it,” says Dr. Shakeri. “For this project, I did not want a system that mainly sounds confident. I wanted one people can check. In practice, that means using AI for retrieval, pattern detection, and language understanding, but keeping factual claims tied to evidence and not allowing the system to present unsupported statements as knowledge.”

New Frontiers Research Funding will support the development of a rigorous, interdisciplinary system that addresses health misinformation as a technical problem, but also a social challenge, ensuring it is practical for real-world use.

Dr. Kuan Liu’s project, “Urban Environmental Exposures and Cognitive Aging: Machine Learning Exposure Mapping and Causal Modelling of Air Pollution and Heat” examines how air pollution and urban heat together affect cognitive decline, using machine learning and population-level data to create detailed exposure maps, marking the first study of its kind in Canada.

According to Dr. Liu, this work is crucial, seeing as older adults are exposed to multiple environmental and social factors at the same time, and understanding their combined effects can help inform more effective, targeted policies to improve brain health and reduce inequities.

“My hope is that this research can help produce evidence that is useful not only to researchers, but also to public health practitioners, health systems, and policymakers working to support healthy brain aging in a changing climate,” says Dr. Liu.

According to Dr. Liu, this work is a natural extension of her new role as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Causal Methods for Health Research, a program focused on developing statistical methods to determine what causes health outcomes, and for whom, using complex data.

“The CRC gives me the methodological foundation to study exactly this type of question, while the New Frontiers project allows us to apply and extend these approaches in an urgent environmental health setting,” says Dr. Liu. “The CRC is not only supporting one project, it is building a broader causal methods program, and the NFRF project is one important example of how these methods can be used to answer real public health questions.”

Alongside Dr. Liu, Dr. Emily Seto was also named a Canada Research Chair, Tier 1 in Accessible Virtual Care Innovations. Dr. Seto notes that this appointment comes at a critical time, when virtual care risks deepening the inequities it is intended to address.

“As AI unlocks new possibilities for virtual care, this is a pivotal time to intentionally design technologies and services that ensure the most underserved are not an afterthought, but at the centre,” says Dr. Seto. “My [CRC] will provide the dedicated resources for my work on advancing AI-enabled virtual care solutions that are inclusive by design, and implementing these solutions to meaningfully improve access, outcomes, and health equity.”

Together, these funding announcements highlight IHPME faculty’s pivotal role at the intersection of discovery and research leadership, and their commitment to shaping a more resilient and equitable health system.