Rita Cassola is an Executive Director of Pharmacovigilance at Certus PV Services Inc. Rita is a registered pharmacist with over 20 years of experience in global and Canadian pharmacovigilance. Rita’s experience includes over 10 years of senior PV consultancy and 10 years in increasingly senior PV roles within the pharmaceutical industry. Prior to joining the pharmaceutical industry, Rita spent 4 years in academia and 10 years in hospital pharmacy. Rita is engaged in teaching pharmacovigilance courses and has presented at several conferences/webinars organized by professional associations.

Although most of her regulatory career in Health Canada has been spent in the pharmacovigilance world, she has recently migrated to the pre-market assessment of pharmaceuticals program in the Therapeutic Products Directorate. Lucye has significant work and management experience in the Health Products and Food Branch (HPFB), where she has held a number of management positions in different Directorates. She is currently Acting Director of the Bureau of Gastroenterology, Infection and Viral Diseases. Her academic specialization is pharmacology.

Sarah holds a Masters Degree in Physiology and Phd in Epidemiology. Sarah holds the position of the Global Head Safety Epidemiology and Risk Management at AstraZeneca. She is an active member of many Pharmacovigilance and Safety epidemiology working groups including Beyond Covid Monitoring (BeCOME), ISPE BRACE, IMI Gravitate. In addition to pharmacoepidemiologic methods related to the conduct of Safety Epidemiology studies, she has a special interest in designing and implementing Risk Minimisation/Mitigation Interventions and assessing the effectiveness of these interventions.