Biography
Dr. Nadia Fairbairn is an assistant professor and holder of the Philip Owen Professorship in Addiction Medicine at the University of British Columbia. She is a board-certified general internal medicine specialist and addiction medicine specialist at St. Paul’s Hospital, as well as a practicing physician. She is program director and principal investigator of the International Collaborative Addiction Medicine Research Fellowship that trains the next generation of clinician scientists in addiction medicine. She has held other leadership roles, including as physician lead for the Addiction Medicine Consult Service and interim head of the Interdepartmental Division of Addiction at Providence Health Care.
As a scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Substance Use, Dr. Fairbairn’s research program is focused on strategies to close the evidence-to-practice gap in addiction medicine through clinical, educational and research innovation. As part of these efforts, she conducts research focused on the epidemiology of addiction, quantitative and qualitative data analyses and clinical trials. She has over ten years of experience conducting observational and interventional research and has published extensively in these areas. She regularly serves on clinical guideline committees at the provincial and national level to inform evidence-based practice for treatment of substance use disorders, and led the development of the Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse national injectable opioid agonist treatment guideline (CMAJ 2019).
Dr. Fairbairn’s research on substance use is widely cited, with more than 100 publications. She holds a scholar award with the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and St. Paul’s Foundation. She serves on CIHR’s Institute Advisory Board for the Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction. She was the recipient of the Department of Medicine Martin M Hoffman Award for Excellence in Research in 2021, and the Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Achievement Award for Overall Excellence – Early Career in 2022.
