Jonathon Maguire is the new Lawson Chair in Patient Engagement in Child Nutrition at the University of Toronto.
Maguire, an associate professor of paediatrics and nutritional sciences at U of T and a staff pediatrician and scientist with St. Michael's Hospital at Unity Health Toronto, will hold the chair over a five-year term through the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition.
"I'm very grateful to the university and the Lawson Centre for choosing to support patient engagement in the research process," says Maguire. "It's forward-thinking because it will enable children and families to co-design research with us and help us produce results that are most meaningful to them."
Patient-oriented research has garnered strong interest from medical researchers recently. The approach shares some of the goals of applied and practice-based research, but differs in that patients provide input throughout the research process - on which questions they want answered, the content and format of findings they are most likely to use, and even on how to share research results broadly with the public.
Maguire has worked to develop that process for more than a decade as a co-principal investigator of TARGet Kids!, the largest children's cohort study in Canada. That group has generated several findings of note for parents, including that 10 per cent of the TARGet Kids! cohort have low iron levels, 30 per cent are low in vitamin D and one quarter are at risk for future health problems on account of body weight.
"We are delighted to welcome Jonathon to this role. He has a well-connected and established research program in patient-oriented research and will hit the ground running," says Daniel Sellen, director of the Lawson Centre and distinguished professor of anthropology and global health at U of T. "He and his team are asking relevant research questions to help practitioners and families agree on healthy and feasible child-feeding options in a rapidly changing dietary and child-care landscape."
In the near term, Maguire hopes to involve more patients in research, in the form of a family advisory panel set up through the Lawson Centre. "I would like to see networks of families, which could join research teams to help us do research better so that we all learn from each other," he says.
