Biography

University of Toronto St. George Campus - Pharmacology

Research Scientist at Facebook, focused on developer productivity
Elise
Paradis
San Francisco Bay Area
I am a high-energy, data-driven, people-oriented researcher, always looking for ways to better understand the social world and improve healthcare delivery. I am currently Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, with appointments in Pharmacy, Anesthesia, Sociology, Health Professions Education, and Public Health. I am an internationally-recognized expert in qualitative research methods, and a specialist of teamwork.

My research seeks to improve teamwork in a range of clinical contexts: the ICU, OR, and primary care. By bringing social theory to the study of clinical work, my work uncovers and addresses false assumptions about how things "work" in healthcare. It is funded by CIHR, SSHRC, and other prestigious funders. It uses a combination of historical and qualitative methods--with an emphasis on observation research--to understand teams and improve their work.

Previously, I was Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, where I worked with Scott Reeves on a project titled “Understanding the Nature of Team-Based Care & Patient & Family Involvement in Intensive Care Settings,” is a comparative ethnography funded by the Moore Foundation.

I finished my Ph.D. in Sociology of Education at Stanford University in 2011. I held a $70,000 per annum Currie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wilson Centre, University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine from July 2011 to September 2012, where I worked under the supervision of Mathieu Albert, Ph.D., and Ayelet Kuper, M.D., D.Phil. I am also the holder of a Masters of Arts in Sociology from Stanford University, and of an Honours Bachelor of Arts and Science from the University of Toronto.

I am a former SSHRC Doctoral Scholar (2006-10), and a former TD Canada Trust Scholar for Outstanding Community Leadership (2002-06).