Thank you. I'll make this brief. We won't go through it all. I believe you have access to it. If not, you will have access.
Good evening, Chairman and members of the committee. Thank you very much for having us here.
My name is Nicholas Held. I'm the assistant scientific director of the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research. The acronym I'll be using is CIMVHR, just so you have that background.
Before we begin, I'd like to take this time to acknowledge that CIMVHR is situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinabe, otherwise known as Kingston. We are grateful to be able to live, learn and play on these lands.
Our mission at CIMVHR is to enhance the lives of Canadian military personnel, veterans and their families by harnessing the national capacity for research. Since 2010, CIMVHR has built a network of 46 Canadian universities that have agreed to work together to address the health research requirements of the Canadian military, veterans and their families. This institute acts as a conduit between the academic community and research-funding organizations.
On behalf of funding organizations, CIMVHR distributes requests for proposals for research to researchers through its network of universities and manages all the tasks from there, through scientific peer review process to the completion of the projects.
We also publish a peer-reviewed academic journal, called the Journal of Military, Veteran and Family Health. We conduct knowledge translation of the research that's out there and we host an annual conference that involves anywhere from 600 to 1,000 people every year across Canada. Our latest one was CIMVHR Forum 2024, which recently took place in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
CIMVHR is committed to equity, diversity, inclusion and indigenization. We fully acknowledge that there has been a gap on our end institutionally on researching the two respective populations we are discussing today. In the past few years, however, we have worked towards bridging this gap to ensure that we leave nobody behind in the discourse of military and veteran health research.
Within our journal, we have mobilized important information on indigenous and Black veterans, including a complete special edition of our journal completely dedicated to these groups. It was in 2022 and was entitled “The many faces of diversity in military employment”. I won't go through all the other papers that are part of this; they will be part of a note.
The same thing goes for our annual forum. Indigenous and Black veterans, as well as other minorities in the military, such as women, are topics of discussion for a lot of presentations that take place at our forum, both at the podium and as poster presentations.
From there, I'll pass it over to Mr. Hook. We'll be able to chat about the rest of this, and it will be sent to you as well.