Rehabilitation & Exercise Working Group: Rationale, Mandate & Action Plan

Dr Erin Howden is the head of the Human Integrative Physiology Lab, co-lead of the Physical Activity Program at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. In 2020, Erin was awarded a prestigious Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship to investigate the cardioprotective role of exercise in patients treated for cancer. Erin’s background is in clinical exercise physiology with further training in cardiovascular imaging and invasive haemodynamics. Her program of research seeks to enhance the prevention and treatment of cardiometabolic disease in at risk cancer groups through developing innovative multidisciplinary approaches, with a particular focus on “exercise as medicine”. Her research combines ‘state-of-the-art’ cardiac and vascular imaging approaches, exercise testing and classic hemodynamic techniques and big data/bioinformatics approaches to gain a deeper understanding of human integrative physiology.

Dr Scott Adams is an Assistant Scientist (Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, University Health Network [UHN]) and the Exercise Lead (Ted Rogers Cardiotoxicity Prevention Program, UHN). He is the Director of the ‘Research in Exercise & Cardiorespiratory Health in Oncology’ laboratory (UHN) and a member of the Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology Program (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) and the Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation Program (Toronto Rehab Institute). He completed his PhD at the University of Alberta and two post-doctoral fellowships at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the University of Toronto. His research adopts precision medicine and knowledge translation approaches to (1) phenotype cancer patients and survivors using complementary cardiovascular profiling tools (e.g. cardiopulmonary exercise testing, vascular imaging, autonomic function assessments) to augment cardiovascular risk screening and stratification, (2) develop targeted exercise-based multi-modal therapies that target the discrete mechanisms of risk and injury within these phenotype-defined groups, and (3) facilitate the translation of this and related research into practice.