Pronouns: she/her
Women's Heart Health Sex and Gender Science
Degrees
Dr. Colleen Norris is a Professor and Clinician Scientists with University of Alberta’s Faculties of Nursing, Medicine and School of Public Health. Her PhD, is in clinical epidemiology. Dr. Norris, a Nurse by training, completed post-doctoral training with the Canadian Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Team (CCORT) and Tomorrows Outcome Researchers in Cardiovascular Health (TORCH) in health outcomes research and developed the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcome Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACH) follow-up program. Dr. Norris is the Scientific Director of the Cardiovascular Health and Stroke Strategic Clinical Network for Alberta Health Services. Her program of research focuses on the sex and gender factors that impact women’s heart health. She is the Chair of the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Alliance (CWHHA), Health Policy and Services (HP&S) working group, whose mandate is to implement policies that advance our understanding of the unique sex and gender factors affecting the outcomes of women’s heart health. She is a committee member on the Women’s Heart and Brain Health Network Research Steering Committee, and is actively involved in advancing sex and gender-based analysis & reporting in Heart & Stroke funded research. In 2018, Dr. Norris was designated as the sex and gender champion on the CCS clinical guidelines committee where she established and published (JAHA-2019) a methodology that will be used going forward to incorporate sex and gender specific information into CCS Clinical practice guidelines. Dr. Norris is a Fellow of the American Heart Association, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the CO-PI in a CIHR/GENDER-NET Plus research project- GOING-FWD, an international collaborative of researchers from 5 countries, evaluating the impact of sex and gender factors on outcomes. Dr. Norris has mentored over 80 students/trainees. She has presented extensively and has over 300 publications in the areas of sex and gender differences in cardiovascular treatment and outcomes, and women’s heart health.
Through her research associations Dr. Norris has collaborated with researchers locally, nationally and internationally from various health care disciplines in the general area of cardiovascular epidemiology and health outcomes research. She has held operational grant funding from CIHR and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada as both a PI and Co-Investigator of studies focusing on outcomes research. She presently has joint appointments with the Divisions of Cardiology in the Faculty of Medicine, and the School of Public Health. As a member of the APPROACH team, and an Epidemiologist, her role in these cross-appointments includes assisting medical students, residents and clinicians both from a methodological and a statistical perspective with their research projects.
Based on her growing expertise in Cardiovascular health outcomes research, in particular sex and gender differences in CV outcomes, Dr. Norris has been invited to speak at National and International plenary sessions including the American Heart Association Health Outcomes Conference, an International forum on health outcomes research, as well as the Canadian Cardiovascular Nursing Congress (closing address), the American Heart Association Annual Meeting (Chicago) and most recently at the European Cardiovascular Congress (Munich Germany). She has and continues to serve on research committees and peer Review Panels of the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, the University of Alberta, CIHR, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and the American Heart Association. Dr. Norris’ research activities have led to over 300 peer reviewed publications including high profile papers published in journals including Circulation, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Most recently Dr. Norris as Chair of the Can Women's Heart Health ALLIANCE health policy group, along with Dr. Sharon Mulvagh, (Chair of the KT working group) spearheaded the creation of an ATLAS on WOMEN's HEART HEALTH including 9 chapters that are or will be published in CJC-Open. https://www.cjcopen.ca/womens_heart_health_alliance
Dr. Norris presently teaches undergraduate and a graduate statistics and research courses and mentors Masters and Doctoral students in Nursing, Medicine and Public Health Science.
Dr. Norris is the Scientific Director for the Cardiovascular Health and Stroke Strategic Clinical Network (SCN) . Scientific Directors are responsible for the development, implementation and assessment for the outcomes of the SCN research strategy. In the role of Scientific Director Dr. Norris engages network colleagues to champion a broad provincial health research agenda to address the health needs of the Cardiovascular and Stroke population. She is particularly interested in translating evidence into action/practice to ensure every Albertan has access to high-quality health care.