Dr. Julio Montaner
Julio Montaner is a co-recipient of the 2015 CIHR Barer-Flood Prize in Health Services and Policy Research. The CIHR Institute of Health Services and Policy Research recognizes Dr. Montaner with this award based on the impact he has made in the field of health services and policy research.
The award’s review committee received nominations for many outstanding professionals and researchers from across the country. Dr. Montaner was named co-recipient in recognition of the incredible contributions he has made over his career across multiple health pillars by revolutionizing HIV treatment and championing public health policies and access-to-care.
Dr. Montaner is Professor of Medicine, Chair of AIDS Research, and Head of the Division of AIDS in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is also the Director of British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS; Physician Program Director of HIV, Addiction Medicine & Urban Health at St. Paul’s Hospital (SPH); a Past President of the International AIDS Society; and UNAIDS Special Advisor on HIV Therapeutics.
Dr. Montaner has made ground breaking contributions across multiple pillars of health research to Canadian and global health and healthcare through his research in HIV treatment, care and advocacy for health policies and treatment implementation. His clinical research led to a new gold-standard triple-drug HIV treatment: Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART). He researched and championed new harm reduction and access-to-treatment strategies and initiatives, including Treatment as Prevention (TasP®), which was implemented to ensure HIV treatment could be readily provided to hard-to-reach and high-risk populations that has yielded highly successful results. In 2003, Dr. Montaner was instrumental in the establishment of Insite, North America’s first legal supervised injection site, which provides people who inject substances with a safer environment to inject, and facilitated access to acute and chronic medical care, including detoxification and recovery program.
He has authored over 750 peer-reviewed scientific publications on HIV/AIDS throughout his career and has been an HIV/AIDS educator to hundreds of physicians, fellows, residents, and research students. He established the Division of AIDS at the University of British Columbia in 2007 and is the first endowed research chair in AIDS research at UBC and SPH.
Throughout his career, Dr. Montaner has been the recipient of countless awards and honours. He received the National Institute on Drug Abuse Inaugural Avant-Garde Award for $2.5 million dollars over five years (2008); CIHR Knowledge Translation Award (2009); Order of BC, Prix Galien Canada Research Award and Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2010); Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012); CMA Frederic Newton Gisborne Starr Award (2013); Canadian Medical Hall of Fame Laureate and Order of Canada (2015).
In addition to receiving a prize of $25,000, Drs. Montaner was honoured at the Federal, Provincial and Territorial Health Minister’s Meeting in Vancouver on January 20, 2016.