In January 2010, the CFRI Board of Directors appointed Dr. Jan Friedman as the Acting Executive Director, CFRI. The following is an interview with Dr. Friedman from March 2010.

Q: What is your vision for the next year at CFRI?
My vision for CFRI is to strengthen the ties and partnerships among the clinicians, clinical investigators, and the translational and lab investigators. I'd like to improve our relationships with our partners. There is great work going on here and I'd like us to be more appropriately proud of ourselves.

Q: What opportunities do you foresee and what challenges do you anticipate?
People have asked me: Why do you want to do this job? The answer is that it's a challenge and an opportunity. The opportunity is that we've recruited a number of terrific people over the last few years and we've built a fantastic building to do research in. The challenge now is to begin fulfilling the promise of making this a world class translational research institute for children's health. We're not there yet - so it remains a challenge.

If we can take advantage of what we have, there's no doubt we can do great things. We can impact the way we diagnose and treat serious diseases in kids. We can improve children's health so they don't get these diseases and we can make things better for them and their families.

When we improve our understanding of how the body works normally and how disease affects it, we have opportunities to do things we've never done before. For example, when I was a resident and a baby was born very prematurely, less than 1000 grams, that baby could stay alive as long as I could pump a bag. We didn't have respirators so the baby often died within a matter of hours.

Today we have machines that can keep many of these babies alive until they get better. Now we understand how to prevent some of the problems in tiny premature babies, and we can save them and give them the best possible start in life. We have new knowledge that helps kids with immune disorders, metabolic diseases, cancers and those facing other health issues. We have new tools to understand diseases like asthma, intellectual disabilities, autism and behavioural disorders. These are opportunities to change the way we approach health issues to help these kids and their families.

Q: Any additional comments?
I would like to extend an invitation to the CFRI community: I love learning and I'd be glad for anybody to teach me how I could do this job better to help this institute succeed and to help our investigators succeed. I welcome your comments.

Dr. Jan Friedman, MD, PhD, FAAP, FABMG, FCCMG, FRCPC
Acting Executive Director
Child & Family Research Institute