BRETT THOMBS, PhD
Biography
Dr. Thombs completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Fordham University in 2004, including clinical internship training at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, then was a postdoctoral fellow and instructor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He began his career at McGill in 2006, when he was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2011 and to Full Professor in 2015. In addition to the Department of Psychiatry, he holds Associate Memberships in the Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health; Medicine; Psychology; and the Biomedical Ethics Unit. He is a Senior Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research of the Jewish General Hospital. In 2020, Dr. Thombs was named a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1).
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Since 2006, Dr. Thombs has published 400 peer-reviewed articles (first, supervising, or senior author on > 70%), including many in the world’s leading general medical journals (e.g., JAMA, BMJ, JAMA Internal Medicine, Lancet Rheumatology), and his h-index per Google Scholar is 84. Dr. Thombs has been awarded $45.6 million in grant funding, including $23.2 million as Principal Investigator and $22.5 million as Co-investigator. He has been awarded 39 CIHR team or operating grants as Principal Investigator.
Dr. Thombs is known for his leadership in (1) developing, testing, and disseminating educational, self-management, rehabilitation, and psychological interventions for people living with the rare autoimmune disease scleroderma; (2) his work on depression screening and the evaluation of depression screening tools; and (3) meta-research, which involves examining how the design, conduct and reporting of medical research may lead to bias. He founded and directs the Scleroderma Patient-Intervention Network (SPIN), a collaboration of over 150 investigators, health care providers, patients, and patient advocates from 9 countries and 50 scleroderma expert centers. He also founded and directs the DEPRESion Screening Data (DEPRESSD) Project, which currently includes more than 350 investigators from > 50 countries, who have contributed > 300 primary datasets for use in a shared database to conduct individual participant data meta-analyses.
Dr. Thombs was one of two inaugural recipients of the McGill Principal’s Prize for Outstanding Emerging Researchers in 2013 and has been awarded lifetime research awards from the Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals, the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, and the Canadian Association of Psychiatric Epidemiology. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Thombs was Chair of the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care from 2017 to 2021, the first non-physician ever in this role. His career was profiled in Lancet Rheumatology in 2023.
Trainees under Dr. Thombs’ supervision have first-authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles, including articles in top journals such as JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, BMJ, and Lancet Rheumatology. They have been co-authors of many more articles. Dr. Thombs’ trainees are highly successful in obtaining federal and provincial funding for their training. Please see Dr. Thombs’ CV on this page or the web pages of trainees for more information.