Workshop submissions are now closed.
CIMVHR is accepting proposals from individuals interested in hosting a workshop at CIMVHR Forum 2026. All applications must focus on military, Veteran, public safety personnel and family health research.
Workshops are a gathering place for attendees with shared interests to meet in the context of a focused and interactive discussion, an opportunity to move a field forward and build community. Each workshop should generate ideas that will give the military, Veteran, public safety personnel and family health research communities a new, organized way of thinking about the topic or a promising direction for future work.
They should not be a series of short presentations, but focus on community building and communal knowledge creation. Organizers are responsible for the workshop’s content followed by the discussion session. The Forum planning committee will be responsible for scheduling the workshops on the mornings of October 20th or 21st, 2026. Workshop hosts must be available to lead their workshops on both of the above dates. However, each workshop will be allotted one time slot on one day only. All workshops hosts and co-host must be registered for CIMVHR Forum 2026.
Each workshop host will be responsible for a two page report that outlines the workshops objectives, discussion highlights, outcomes and next steps. A template will be provided.
CIMVHR Forum 2026 will have 11 workshops available to all registered Forum attendees. Each workshop will provide an excellent setting for collaboration and discussion with researchers across science, policy and practice who are interested in exploring the art of the possible. Subject matter experts, with relevant insight and experience in the theme areas, will help prompt engaged delegates to explore key issues relevant to military personnel, Veterans, public safety personnel and their families.
All CIMVHR Forum 2026 workshops will run from 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026 from 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM
As researchers we need to be better at incorporating the voices of children and young people with lived experience into our research. Unfortunately, too often the experiences of Military Connected Children and Young People (MCCYP) are explored vicariously through adults. This workshop foregrounds youth voice by recognising the lived experiences of MCCYP as distinct, valuable and essential within service family life. Workshop participants will explore why meaningful engagement with and for MCCYP is central to inclusive, effective practice and research, and how MCCYP perspectives and co-creation can inform decision-making, generate practice-based evidence, shape evidence-informed policy, and enhance knowledge transfer across military and civilian contexts. The workshop will discuss shared learning and the co-development of practical strategies that advance meaningful youth engagement and co-production in both practice and research. It also highlights the value of interdisciplinary and international collaboration, bringing together practitioners, students, researchers, and organisations to share insights and develop sustainable approaches to their practice.
Workshop Hosts:
Faye Acton, PhD
Research Fellow, Anglia Ruskin University
Paul Watson, PhD,
University of Northumbria
Rebecca Wakefield
Ministry of Defence, UK
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming health care and holds promise for improving mental health outcomes for military members, Veterans, and families. This workshop will examine current emerging applications of AI across the mental health care continuum, including AI-enabled assessment and treatment, personalized/precision medicine, resource and service matching, and the responsible use of generative and agentic AI to support clinicians, systems, and individuals. Building on recent advances and lived realities, the workshop will bring together the clinical and research community, people with lived experience, industry partners, and government stakeholders. Through structured dialogue and collaborative activities, participants will identify opportunities, risks, and implementation challenges unique to military and Veteran contexts, and will jointly map a coordinated research and innovation agenda for the next five years. This workshop is further informed by tremendous momentum in the field, including the recent award of a CIHR grant to advance AI in PTSD.
Workshop Hosts:
Col (Ret’d) Rakesh Jetly, MD, FRCPC
University of Ottawa
Venkat Bhat, MD, MSc
University of Toronto
Jitender Sareen, MD
University of Manitoba
Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members often experience injuries that limit their ability to perform physically and mentally demanding roles. Traditional rehabilitation focuses on symptom reduction, but this does not always translate into real-world functional capability.
This workshop introduces Operational Rehabilitation, an approach that moves beyond symptom recovery to prioritize restoring real-world performance. Participants will explore how rehabilitation programs can support the demands of tactical athletes and the needs of CAF members transitioning to post-military life.
Through interactive case-based breakout groups, attendees will work through realistic injury scenarios, identifying functional benchmarks and decision points that support successful return-to-duty. Participants will identify system gaps and areas requiring further research.
By the end session, participants will have contributed to shaping an early, informed foundation for an Operational Rehabilitation Continuum: a collaborative framework integrating clinical, patient, and family perspectives to improve rehabilitation pathways and outcomes for CAF and Veteran communities.
Workshop Hosts:
Major Nicole Mahoney, CD, PT
Staff Officer Physical Rehabilitation (Clinical), Canadian Forces Health Services Headquarters, Canadian Armed Forces
Jody-Lynn Young, MD
University of Ottawa
Amanda Campbell
Department of National Defence
This interactive workshop brings together the evaluation community working across CAF, Veteran, and family contexts, including evaluators, researchers, program leaders, and policy professionals, to build consensus on evaluation principles grounded in Canadian standards and responsive to military populations. Starting from established foundations from the Canadian Evaluation Society (CES) and the Treasury Board of Canada, participants will work collectively to adapt and clarify what these standards require in contexts shaped by service, mobility, transition, and family impact.
Participants will identify key features of strong evaluation practice, including putting program participants at the centre, ensuring ethical and feasible design, strengthening information quality, and applying an equity lens that makes differences visible and actionable. Rather than prescribing a single method, the workshop supports the community in co-creating a shared set of principles and a roadmap for consistent, high quality evaluation practice that can guide future program evaluations across CAF, Veteran, and family settings.
Workshop Hosts:
Neill Baskerville, PhD, CE
Senior Manager, Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services – Personnel Support Programs
Caroline Dutil, PhD
Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services – Personnel Support Programs
Geoffrey Harrison, PhD
Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services – Personnel Support Programs
As funders and institutions increasingly expect meaningful Veteran engagement in research, many teams remain insufficiently equipped to respond in a structured and culturally informed manner. Persistent barriers include limited understanding of Canadian Armed Forces and Veteran culture, lack of formal pathways for connection, and uncertainty about how to assess partnership readiness, fit, and impact.
This interactive workshop introduces a practical framework and sets of tools co-developed with a community of Veterans to support authentic, reciprocal research partnerships. Through applied exercises and guided discussion, participants will examine strategies to identify, recruit, and sustain Veteran research partners; strengthen cultural competence; establish shared principles of collaboration; and implement mechanisms to evaluate partnership processes and outcomes.
Participants will leave with adaptable templates and a step-by-step Veteran engagement plan that can be integrated into current and future research initiatives, enhancing both scientific relevance and community impact.
Workshop Hosts:
Chelsea White, MBA
Director of Veteran Engagement, Chronic Pain Centre of Excellence for Canadian Veterans (CPCoE)
Hélène Le Scelleur, M. Soc. Serv
Chair, Centre of Excellence Advisory Council for Veterans, CPCoE
Abhimanyu Sud, MD, PhD, CCFP, FCFP
Chief Scientific Officer, CPCoE
Wednesday, October 21, 2026 from 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM
Research shows that first responders face elevated suicide risk due to repeated trauma exposure and cumulative occupational stress. Yet current responses are often fragmented, reactive and hindered by organizational barriers, limiting prevention effectiveness and eroding trust. There is a need for systemic reform to make sure there is a proactive response to this kind of event. This workshop will be drawing on lessons learned from Australian national Defence and Veteran suicide initiatives to help coordinate an approach tailored to Canadian emergency services.
This bilingual workshop will convene leaders, unions, families, researchers, policymakers, lived experience representative, and suicide prevention experts to discuss suicide postvention and the development of a national roadmap for suicide postvention. Participants will be invited to map gaps, define minimum standards and identify federal priorities.
The workshop aims to lay the groundwork for a coordinated, trauma-informed framework that better protects first responders, their families and organizations nationwide.
Workshop Hosts:
Christine Genest, PhD
Associate Professor, Université de Montréal
Henry Bowen, PhD
Flinders University
Margaret Campbell, PhD
Mount Saint Vincent University
MBC has demonstrated benefits for mental health and substance use outcomes. Although already in use across CAF and VAC services, uptake and sustained implementation have been variable across settings. Some factors influencing initial uptake and longer-term integration into routine care have been identified, although evidence on implementation processes and outcomes remains limited. This workshop focuses on strengthening uptake and sustained use through renewed approaches to implementation and clarifying how re-implementation efforts can be pragmatically evaluated through planned and prospective approaches from the outset.
This interactive session will bring together clinicians, leaders, and implementation experts. Participants will identify practical indicators to help teams monitor and improve MBC uptake and sustainment, compare implementation approaches across settings, and inform renewed efforts to integrating MBC effectively and consistently into military and Veteran care, with greater attention to embedding evaluation into re-implementation planning.
Workshop Hosts:
Jen Olson, PhD
Senior Methodologist - Implementation Science Ottawa Hospital Research Institute
Deniz Fikretoglu, PhD
Defence Research and Development Canada
Bryan Garber, MD
Department of National Defence
In research, generating knowledge is only the first step. Ensuring it is understood, used, and impactful requires intentional knowledge translation and mobilization. This session will be hosted by KT/KMb experts from Canadian research organizations with experience advancing evidence into policy, practice, and system-level change. We will share insights, challenges, and lessons learned from designing for impact.
Attendees will be equipped with KT/KMb tools to move research beyond publication into policy, practice, and community. Through guided exercises and collaborative discussion, participants will clarify impact goals, identify priority audiences, map influence pathways, and explore evaluation approaches. Real-world scenarios will be used to examine how research is understood and used by Veterans, families, clinicians, policymakers, and other knowledge users. Participants will leave with tools, insights, and strategies to strengthen the visibility, relevance, and impact of their work.
Workshop Hosts:
Jenny Jing Wen Liu, PhD
Head of Scientific Development and Knowledge Mobilization, Western University
Cara Kane, M.Ed
Acting Director, Knowledge Mobilization, Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families
Deborah Denman, BA, BBA
Director of Integration and Knowledge Mobilization, Chronic Pain Centre of Excellence for Canadian Veterans
This interactive workshop explores how intersectionality and a life-course perspective can be applied to understand and improve military family services across the military family journey. Using short, fictionalized CAF family persona scenarios, participants will examine how intersecting life circumstances influence families’ access to, navigation of, and outcomes from multiple service systems over time.
Through guided activities, participants discuss community-level service contexts that affect most military families and explore how challenges or supports in one context can compound or mitigate pressures in others as circumstances change.
The workshop is designed for mixed participation by policymakers, researchers, service providers, and military or Veteran family members, enabling shared sense-making across perspectives. Where helpful, illustrative community-level data examples and existing tools or frameworks may be used to support discussion. Emphasizing systems-level analysis, the session supports participants to identify service gaps and surface actionable ideas for policy, practice, and future research.
Workshop Hosts:
Clément Habiyakare, MPH
Senior Manager, Military Family Services, Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services
Jieyi Liang, MSc
Policy Development and Research Manager, Military Family Services, Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services
Carley Robb-Jackson, MA
Senior Manager, Military Family Services, Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services
Blast exposure is a routine part of military and some public safety training and operations worldwide. While many exposures do not cause immediate, visible injury, growing evidence suggests that repeated low-level blasts may contribute to mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) and long-term neurologic risk.
This workshop will be led by Veterans who now work at the interface of operators, research and policy. The session is co-developed through international collaboration and includes Australian leadership, bringing a global perspective to a shared challenge across allied nations.
Rather than formal presentations, the workshop will focus on structured discussion and collaborative problem-solving. Participants will examine gaps in exposure measurement, diagnostics, longitudinal monitoring and family impact, and identify practical steps to align science with better care.
The goal is to generate a coordinated, internationally relevant roadmap that bridges lived experience and technical capability to strengthen brain health systems for military members, Veterans and their families.
Workshop Hosts:
LCol (Ret’d) Paul Scanlan, MA, MBA
Retired Special Forces Officer, and Founder, Vigil Australia
Gordon Hurley
All the Way
This workshop, organized by the Student and Postdoctoral Engagement Community (SPEC), focuses on leveraging technology to support master’s, postdoctoral and PhD students working in virtual environments and digital or remote labs. Participants will explore tools and practices that enable effective collaboration, experimentation, supervision, and knowledge sharing at a distance. The session will discuss strategies for navigating virtual research spaces, managing data and workflows online, and building strong academic communities in fully or partially remote settings, empowering graduate researchers to thrive in technology enabled labs and learning environments.
The session also emphasizes the role of mentors and supervisors in virtual and technology enabled spaces, inviting mentor perspectives on how tools can strengthen guidance, feedback, and relationship building with graduate learners. Through examples, discussion, and shared insights from both students and mentors, the workshop highlights how thoughtfully integrated technologies can streamline workflows, foster community, and support meaningful mentorship in modern graduate education.
Workshop Hosts:
Olivia Ardilliez, BA Hons
Graduate Student, University of Ottawa
Kayla Kirby, BSc Hons
University of Regina
Siobhan Cambridge, PhD Candidate, RMN, MSc, MSc, BA Hons
Anglia Ruskin University
NOTE: This workshop has been developed for students.