Cal Robinson is currently a pediatric nephrology fellow at SickKids in Toronto and a PhD student in Clinical Epidemiology and Health Care Research at the University of Toronto. I completed medical training in the United Kingdom at St. Andrews and Manchester before returning to McMaster for pediatric residency. At McMaster I developed a passion for research using population-based health administrative databases. As a pediatric nephrology fellow at SickKids, I learned that the evidence basis used to treat most childhood kidney diseases was limited, with few clinical trials. Most therapeutic decisions are made without evidence derived from children. This limits a child’s access to beneficial treatments and may expose them to unnecessary harms. Significant barriers to conducting clinical trials in rare pediatric diseases exist. However, I am motivated to find solutions to these challenges.

This led me to pursue an MSc/PhD in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Toronto. The focus of my PhD research is the use of novel clinical trial and causal inference methods to compare immunosuppressive treatments in childhood nephrotic syndrome, including Bayesian adaptive trials and target trial emulation. My mission as an aspiring clinician-scientist is to advance the evidence-based treatment of pediatric kidney diseases, to prevent adverse long-term outcomes, and minimize disease burden.