Turning Strategy into Impact

Amy serves as the Executive Director and spokesperson for The Women’s Health Collective Canada (WHCC), driving strategic partnerships, fundraising, and advocacy to foster collaboration across member foundations and research institutes. She previously held leadership roles at Heart and Stroke Canada and Canada’s Children’s Hospital Foundations, managing business development across major national corporate portfolios. Backed by over 18 years of corporate brand-building experience, Amy holds an HBA in Mass Communications from the University of Ottawa and a certificate in Integrated Marketing Communications from Stanford University.

Avvey Peters is President at NorthGuide and former Chief Strategy and Communications Officer for Communitech Corporation. Over two decades, she has helped raise more than $800M in public investment and built innovation infrastructure in 27 communities across Canada. She previously served as managing director of Canada’s Tech Network and received the inaugural SAAS NORTH STAR Award in 2021 for her long-standing impact on Canada’s tech and innovation ecosystem. Avvey holds a BA from the University of Waterloo and a Master of Journalism from Carleton University.

Baljit Sidhu is a global advocate for women’s health innovation and the founder of Women, Health & Innovation, a platform dedicated to accelerating collaboration, investment, and leadership in women’s health. She convenes leaders across healthcare, technology, and policy to spotlight practical solutions, strengthen digital health ecosystems, and advance better outcomes for women across emerging markets and Africa.

Dr. Aline Talhouk is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia and Director of the Uterine Health Research Lab, where she applies AI and predictive models to large-scale clinical and molecular data. Her work focuses on endometrial and ovarian cancers, developing minimally invasive biomarkers and data-driven approaches to identify women at increased risk and connect risk prediction with prevention. She also explores federated and distributed analytics methods that let institutions learn from shared health data while addressing data governance challenges.

Dr. Diane Francoeur is an active obstetrician-gynecologist at CHU Sainte-Justine and a passionate advocate for women’s health, sexual and reproductive rights, and physician leadership. From 2014 to 2021, she served as the first female President of the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec, where she founded the IPAM Institute, focused on the appropriateness of medical acts. Since 2022, she has been CEO of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada and, in 2025, was elected Honorary Treasurer of FIGO.

Jovan Matic is Director of the Health Innovation Policy Branch in Ontario’s Ministry of Health, where he leads a multi-disciplinary team accelerating health innovation adoption across public and private sectors. In 2025, he led the launch of Ontario’s Health Innovation Pathway, a single-window process connecting innovators with health service providers to adopt new technologies. Jovan holds an Honours BA in Public Policy Administration and Communications from the University of Ottawa.

Karen Brunet is the Founder and CEO of Cntrl+ Inc., a Canadian women’s health company turning an overlooked health need into a commercial opportunity. Inspired by her own experience with stress urinary incontinence, Karen invented Cntrl+’s patented flagship bladder support. The device has received FDA and Health Canada clearance, and Cntrl+ has moved from product development to U.S. commercialization. The company is now scaling its reach through direct sales and healthcare partnerships while pursuing new indications for pelvic organ prolapse. A three time founder with more than 25 years of international sales and leadership experience, Karen previously built a medical device distribution company that was acquired in 2024.

Dr. Liisa Galea holds the inaugural womenmind™ Treliving Family Chair in Women’s Mental Health and is a Senior Scientist at CAMH and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She leads the Women’s Health Research Cluster, a network of more than 1,200 members across 48 countries, and spent 25 years as a Professor at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on how sex hormones influence brain health and behaviour, particularly in dementia and stress-related psychiatric disorders. She has published over 242 papers (20,000+ citations), is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and was named a Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada in 2025.

Meagan Furnivall, RM, MSc, is a registered midwife, health system leader, researcher, and founder of Revara Care, a women’s health innovation company focused on improving maternal-newborn connection, dignity in care, and safe skin-to-skin contact at birth. She serves as Head Midwife at London Health Sciences Centre and was the inaugural Research Lead, where she has helped build one of Canada’s first hospital-based midwifery research leadership structures and a sustainable pathway for midwives to lead clinically grounded scholarship within a tertiary care setting. Her academic affiliations are in the departments of Family Medicine at Western and McMaster University.

Her work spans maternal-newborn health research, evidence synthesis, knowledge translation, implementation, and policy responsive practice, with a focus on shared decision-making, continuity of care, equity in perinatal services, and skin-to skin contact during cesarean birth. She is the Ontario Site Lead for the Justice and Equity in Perinatal Services (JEPS) Hub, supporting the implementation of equity-focused tools, service-user engagement, and respectful care initiatives across perinatal systems.

Through Revara Care, she developed a clinical gown designed to improve the birth experience by enhancing comfort and dignity, sustaining immediate skin-to-skin contact, and reducing unnecessary separation between birthing people and their newborns. Her work has attracted significant support to commercialize her clinical product. Over the past five years, across all her roles, she has helped secure $1.9 million in funding to advance research, innovation work, and her teams. Meagan’s work sits at the intersection of bedside care, leadership, research, and innovation, with a commitment to building systems that improve outcomes for mothers, birthing people, infants, and care teams.

Parnian Majd is a biomedical engineer and the Founder & CEO of Fibra, a women’s health technology company building the missing data layer for women’s health by making the reproductive system continuously measurable. Inspired by her own experience being diagnosed with PCOS as a teenager, Parnian founded Fibra to address the lack of continuous, objective data available about women’s reproductive health.

Under her leadership, Fibra has developed patented smart-textile sensors embedded into everyday underwear that continuously capture reproductive biomarkers directly at the source and transform them into personalized insights. The company has generated 5M+ biomarker data points and 500,000+ minutes of real-world wear, built a community of 5,000+ women, secured 10+ distribution partners, and raised $1.7M to date. Parnian is passionate about advancing women’s health through better data, technology, and research—and building a future where women have a deeper understanding of their bodies throughout every stage of life.

Rachel Bartholomew is a 2 time entrepreneur who is now working on her second company, Hyivy Health, created after her recent fight with cervical cancer. Hyivy Health is creating a medical device for the 1 in 3 women worldwide who will experience a gynecological complication in their lifetime. Rachel is a graduate of the University of Waterloo and has been working in various roles in the entrepreneurship ecosystem for over 15 years, including the Founder of Femtech Canada and Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University in Biotech Innovation.

Renee Kokts-Porietis is a trained epidemiologist specializing in person-first and population-level female health research. As Research and Development and Machine Learning lead at My Normative, she draws on experience in clinical studies, data analytics, and time-to-event biostatistical modelling to address gaps in knowledge for underrepresented female populations.

Skaidra (pronounced “sky-dra”) is Senior Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Council of Canadian Innovators, where she coordinates CCI’s national government affairs work across regions. She previously served as CCI’s Director of Ontario Affairs, leading engagement with the Ontario government on policy, procurement, and the digital economy. Before CCI, she held roles in the Ontario Government, including at the Chief Corporate Information Office and the Ontario Digital Service, supporting the province’s first Chief Digital and Data Officer and Minister Responsible for Digital Government. She is an advisory member of FWD50 and is developing a Canada-Nordic-Baltic Innovation Dialogue series connecting innovators and policymakers.