John Kildea – CTO and co-founder of Opal Med Apps Inc.; Co-lead of the Opal Health Informatics research group at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre
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John Kildea is a medical physicist at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) in Montreal and an assistant professor in oncology at McGill University.
Dr. Kildea’s background is in astrophysics, with a PhD in high-energy astrophysics from University College Dublin and postdocs at McGill and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He transitioned into Medical Physics in 2010 and worked for seven years as a clinical medical physicist at the MUHC before joining McGill’s Gerald Bronfman Department of Oncology as an academic assistant professor in 2017.
Together with radiation oncologist Dr. Tarek Hijal, Dr. Kildea co-leads the development of the Opal patient portal project in Quebec (opalmedapps.com), which provides patients with access to their medical data and tools to submit patient-reported outcomes that may be used in AI research. Opal was named Quebec eHealth solution of 2019 and was awarded the 2019 Prix d’excellence – coup de couers des ministres by the Quebec Ministry of Health, the ministry’s highest accolade. Opal is currently in use at the MUHC and is being expanded to five other cancer centres in Montreal.
