Nicole Bourgeois is a Registered Dietitian with the Women’s College Hospital Academic Family Health Team. She has a practice focus on pediatric nutrition, in which she counsels families with young children regarding nutrition and healthy feeding.

Dr. Jill Hamilton is Head of the Division of Endocrinology at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Senior Associate Scientist at the Research Institute, and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto. Her clinical work is in endocrinology and diabetes, with a particular focus in the areas of complex obesity. She is Medical Director of the SickKids Team Obesity Management Program (STOMP).

Her research focuses on: the metabolic complications of obesity in childhood, biologic and psychosocial determinants of obesity, and obesity treatment outcomes and interventions. She has over 150 peer reviewed publications and has received research funding from agencies including Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), National Institute of Health (NIH), Heart and Stroke Foundation, and Diabetes Canada.

Dr. Rebecca Hoban is Director of Breastfeeding Medicine and a staff neonatologist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Hoban graduated from Indiana University School of Medicine, and then completed a pediatric residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a neonatal perinatal medicine fellowship at Tuffs University, and a Master’s in Public Health in Global Health at Harvard, before joining the neonatology staff at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. She brings extensive international clinical, educational and training experiences from a dozen countries. Dr. Hoban joined SickKids in 2017 as neonatology staff, where her focus is on nutrition and human milk.

She has been an invited speaker on breastfeeding topics locally and internationally, and is active in clinical and translational human milk research. Current research and projects include: improving term human milk provision in the high risk neonatal population, milk biomarkers to predict lactation success, inflammatory markers in human milk, and human milk as stem cell therapy in premature infants with intraventricular hemorrhage.

Dr. Jessie Hulst is a staff gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition of The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. Prior to 2018, she was a Staff Gastroenterologist in Sophia Children’s Hospital, Rotterdam (Netherlands), from 2011-2018. Dr. Hulst obtained her PhD on the topic of nutritional assessment in critically ill children in 2004.

Her research aims to find and apply appropriate methods for nutritional screening and nutritional assessment in children with medical conditions at risk for malnutrition, with the ultimate goal of improving their outcome with appropriate individualized intervention that evolves from screening and assessment. She is currently the co-chair of the Pediatric working group of the Canadian Malnutrition Task Force and working on the implementation of a pediatric Malnutrition Pathway in Canada. She has published > 90 peer-reviewed manuscripts and >10 book chapters.

Dr. Hulst’s clinical work is focused on complex nutrition patients and patients with intestinal failure (within the Group for improvement of Intestinal function and Treatment (GIFT)). She is the hospital Parenteral Nutrition medical lead and the chair of the Nutritional Advisory Committee.

Dr. Jonathon Maguire holds the Lawson Chair in Patient Engagement in Child Nutrition at the University of Toronto, through which he conducts patient-oriented research — an approach in which families and children provide input throughout the research process, especially on specific questions they want answered and which results they are most likely to use in their day-to-day lives.

Dr. Maguire is a staff pediatrician in the Department of Pediatrics at St. Michael’s Hospital, with a pediatric hospitalist and outpatient clinical practice. His research focus is clinical trials involving nutrition and development in young children, as well as the creation of tools to facilitate evidence informed child health practice. He also co-leads TARGet Kids!, the largest primary care research network for children in Canada.

Lauren Scott is a Primary Care Nurse Practitioner at Women’s College Family Practice Health Centre. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto Master of Nursing and Primary Care Nurse Practitioner Global Health program. She is an adjunct lecturer with the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto and a lecturer with The Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. Her practice focuses on well children and developmental monitoring.

Dr. Valerie Tarasuk is a Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her primary research focus is household food insecurity. She has led several tri-council research grants to elucidate the scope, nature, and health implications of this problem in Canada, assess the effectiveness of community responses, and determine how public policies and programs impact food insecurity, prevalence, and severity. For the past decade, she has led PROOF — an interdisciplinary research program designed to identify effective policy approaches and mobilize knowledge to reduce household food insecurity in Canada.

Dr. Julia Upton is a clinical immunologist and allergist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Co-Director of the SickKids Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Program, and Medical Director of the SickKids Clinical Research Centre. She is on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and on the Health Care Advisory Board of Food Allergy Canada. She is the 2022 recipient of the national Robyn Allen Leadership Award through Food Allergy Canada. She graduated from Western University Medical School, completed residency at McMaster University, fellowship in Clinical Immunology and Allergy at the University of Toronto, and a Master’s in Public Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

Her clinical practice focuses on both clinical immunodeficiency and allergy. Her research interests include the identification and optimal care of people with immunodeficiencies and exploring the risk factors, severity, prognosis and optimizing the treatment of food allergies.

Dr. Meta van den Heuvel is a staff pediatrician at the Hospital for Sick Children and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. She completed a social pediatric fellowship and a PhD in “Developmental and Behavioral Problems in Pediatric Primary Care” in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on early child development and nutrition and its relation with the social determinants of health in both low- and high- resource setting. In Toronto, she investigates how the social determinants, specifically food insecurity, can best be addressed in clinical settings. She works clinically in the Infant & Toddler Growth and Feeding Clinic in the Hospital for Sick Children and one day in a community pediatric practice.