Dr. Monica Aggarwal is a primary care and health services researcher whose work is dedicated to building equitable, high-performing systems of care in Canada and beyond. Her scholarship focuses on how primary care-led governance, interprofessional teams, digital technologies, patient-provider attachment, workforce and primary care research shape the performance of primary care systems, and how evidence can be translated into sustainable policy and delivery reform.

Monica is best known for co-developing the Aggarwal-Hutchison Framework, the first empirically grounded framework outlining the structural attributes of high-performing primary care systems. That framework has been used across provinces, informed the first longitudinal assessment of Canadian reform published in the Milbank Quarterly, and now underpins strategic direction, evaluation and standards across the country.

Her research program has secured more than $2M as principal or co-principal investigator, with collaborations exceeding $22M. Through these initiatives, she has informed major provincial and federal policy directions, including standardized definitions of patient attachment, the design of primary-care-led governance models, the evaluation of innovation and interprofessional team-based care, and the reform of workforce and training pathways in family medicine.

Monica’s work is deeply rooted in equity. Synthesizing qualitative and mixed-methods inquiry, she has led studies on structural barriers affecting racialized, immigrant, LGBTQ2S+, newcomer, and low-income communities, with particular attention to how access to care, policy design, and workforce participation reproduce inequity. Her Lancet Regional Health paper documenting the triple burden facing racialized women in academic health sciences was recognized nationally for advancing conversations on equity, representation, and institutional reform. It was selected as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s top 10 articles of 2024.

She engages widely with policy partners, including Health Canada, Healthcare Excellence Canada, the Canadian Primary Care Research Consortium, and provincial governments, and has delivered invited lectures and advisory support to national and provincial bodies shaping the future of primary care.

Monica is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Department of Family and Community Medicine. She is committed to mentorship and training, having supervised and supported emerging scholars and early-career clinicians who are advancing policy-relevant, system-changing research.

Dr. Eric Filice is a Research Associate at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Lab Coordinator for the Integrated Primary Care Lab. Working at the intersection of social and behavioural science and health systems research, he leads qualitative, mixed-methods, and evidence synthesis projects that inform primary care transformation, health system design, patient engagement strategies, and digitally-supported models of care.

His work spans a wide range of system- and community-level priorities, including primary care governance and team-based care, digital health behaviour and communication, and equity-focused approaches to public health planning. Across these areas, he brings a commitment to understanding how policy, organizational structures, and lived experience interact to shape care access, quality, and outcomes.

Alongside his applied health systems work, Eric maintains active scholarly interests in gender, sexuality, embodiment, and digitality. His research examines how networked technologies shape health behaviours, identity, and culture—bridging sociotechnical inquiry with contemporary issues in population health.

In his role with the Integrated Primary Care Lab, Eric supports strategic planning, project development, research operations, and knowledge mobilization—helping to build the Lab’s capacity to translate rigorous evidence into meaningful system transformation.