Kristin Danko, PhD, has been presented with the Worton Researcher in Training Award at The Ottawa Hospital Gala on Saturday, October 27, 2018 for work completed during her PhD on methods for optimizing evidence synthesis of complex interventions.

Several of the advanced methods Kristin used in her thesis were developed in collaboration with CESH faculty (Professors Thomas Trikalinos and Issa Dahabreh). Professor Dahabreh served on Kristin' Thesis Advisory Committee and the CESH hosted Kristin for two training visits during her PhD, including one 3-month visit June-September 2018, funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement.

Part of this work was supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR, FRN-123345) on which Professors Dahabreh and Trikalinos are listed as collaborators. In addition, Kristin's PhD was supported by a CIHR Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship (Doctoral Award).

Using a large review of diabetes quality improvement trials as a case example, Kristin's thesis demonstrated the utility of three methodological approaches (contacting authors by telephone, imputing missing ICCs from cluster trials using a predictive distribution, estimating complex intervention effects using a hierarchical multivariate meta- regression) to optimize the processes of synthesizing complex interventions.