“Insomnia affects one in five Ontarians, with the burden falling disproportionately on women and the socioeconomically disadvantaged. The impacts extend beyond poor sleep as people with insomnia experience reduced quality of life, workplace accidents, and significant health care costs. In Canada, insomnia’s economic impact reaches $1.9 billion in direct and indirect health care costs, with annual GDP losses estimated at $26 billion. While a specialized talk therapy for insomnia called CBT-I is a safe and highly effective treatment, access to trained therapists remains limited. Because of this gap, many rely on potentially harmful prescription medications or over-the- counter remedies. Through this fellowship, I will translate Ontario’s new Quality Standard for Insomnia into practical tools for health and social providers across primary care and adapt these principles to create resources and programs tailored to older adults in long-term care, and those living with dementia. By equipping clinicians with evidence-based approaches and reducing reliance on potentially harmful medications, this work will improve health outcomes, safety and quality of life for Ontarians.” – Dr. Sophiya Benjamin
PSI Foundation is pleased to announce Dr. Sophiya Benjamin as the recipient of the 2026 PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship.
About Dr. Sophiya Benjamin
Dr. Sophiya Benjamin is Geriatric Psychiatrist and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University. She is the Schlegel Chair in Mental Health in Aging at the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging (RIA) and the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of GeriMedRisk, a publicly funded, not-for-profit organization that optimizes medication use in older adults through clinical consultations across Ontario and the education of clinicians both nationally and internationally. She is on the medical staff of Waterloo Regional Health Network, and her clinical practice is in the Kitchener-Waterloo Region.
Her work is dedicated to addressing system-level challenges in the care of older adults, focusing on implementing and integrating evidence-informed solutions for issues such as polypharmacy and insomnia.
About the PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship
The PSI Mid-Career Knowledge Translation Fellowship is intended to provide salary support for a mid-career physician researcher in Ontario, who has demonstrated the ability to successfully complete high impact knowledge translation research. The total amount of the award is $400,000 over two or three years, with the sponsoring institution providing matching funding, contributing to 50% of the total award.
PSI acknowledges that mid-career can be a challenging time for physician researchers. During this phase, there are often additional academic roles and responsibilities including committee work, leadership positions, and mentoring of junior investigators, while clinical work continues. PSI recognizes the importance in supporting this phase of an investigator’s trajectory.
Dr. Benjamin highlights the significance of salary support awards for physician researchers at the mid-career level conducting knowledge translation research:
“Salary support awards, particularly for knowledge translation, are an investment that ensures important research doesn’t remain confined to the lab or journal but is mobilized for clinicians and policymakers and ultimately benefits patients. These awards provide protected time and strategic support to physician researchers, helping us bridge this gap and ensure the implementation of high-impact research that improves health outcomes for people across Ontario.”
Fellowship Funds to be Used to Improve Sleep Health for Older Adults in Ontario
Dr. Benjamin’s fellowship work extends from her experience with GeriMedRisk. Beginning with a stepped wedge randomized controlled trial in 2017, it showed decreased harmful medication use and hospital avoidance while reducing wait times for older adults to receive specialist expertise. This evidence led to sustainable funding from the Ontario Ministry of Health, enabling GeriMedRisk to spread and scale across Ontario. GeriMedRisk was recognized in Canada’s National Dementia Strategy in both 2019 and 2023.
GeriMedRisk’s work with older adults on multiple medications highlighted the well-known connection between sleep disturbances and problematic sedative medication use. This informed Dr. Benjamin’s work in establishing the Older Adult Insomnia Collaborative in 2022 to address this problem across health care settings. The collaborative now has over 45 members representing expertise in multiple areas. In conjunction with this work, Dr. Benjamin co-chaired the Ontario Health Quality Standard Advisory Committee resulting in Ontario’s first Quality Standard for Insomnia in February 2025.
This fellowship will support the next phase of this work in enabling knowledge translation of Ontario’s new insomnia quality standards into practical tools, resources and programs across three key areas: integrating evidence-based sleep pathways in primary care, designing and implementing long term care specific interventions through co-design with residents and staff, and developing resources for people living with dementia and their care partners. By partnering with experts by experience, clinicians, and researchers from more than 25 organizations, this work will improve sleep health for Ontarians while reducing reliance on inappropriate medications and enabling equitable access to evidence-informed care.
