Dr. Seonaid Nolan, MD is an Associate Professor with the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC), the recipient of UBC’s Steven Diamon Professorship in Addiction Care Innovation, a Clinician Scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU), the Division Head for Providence Health Care’s Interdepartmental Division of Addiction, and Medical Director of BC’s Provincial Addiction, Recovery, Treatment, and Support (prov-ARTS) Network.
Dr. Nolan completed her internal medicine residency and fellowship at UBC. Additionally, she completed a one-year clinical addiction medicine fellowship as part of the St. Paul’s Goldcorp Addiction Medicine Fellowship and two National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) sponsored addiction medicine research fellowships, including the International Collaborative Addiction Medicine Research Fellowship and the Research in Addiction Medicine Scholars program (jointly let by Boston and Yale University). During this time Dr. Nolan demonstrated the benefits of methadone as a treatment for opioid use disorder including a reduction in mortality and hepatitis c incidence. Her work was recognized as being impactful, resulting in the Vincent P. Dole Award for Research Excellence (2014), a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research’s Health Professional Investigator award (2017 – 2022) and a St. Paul’s Hospital/Providence Health Care Research Initiative’s Early Career Research award in 2017.
Dr. Nolan currently provides clinical care for individuals with a substance use disorder at St. Paul’s Hospital. As an addiction medicine physician, Dr. Nolan contributes substantially to the Clinical Care Guidance and education programs of the BCCSU, is a mentor for the International Collaborative Addiction Medicine Research Fellowship and is a preceptor for the BCCSU Addiction Medicine Fellowship.
Dr. Nolan’s clinical practice and research aims to improve the substance use system of care in BC. More specifically she has secured over $100M to operationalize 95 new addiction treatment beds at St. Paul’s Hospital and provided leadership to coordinate existing clinical services in the Vancouver Coastal Health region as co-founder of the Road to Recovery Initiative. In her Medical Director role for prov-ARTS, Dr Nolan also works directly with each of BC’s regional and provincial health authorities to develop a provincial substance use system of care. To date, Dr. Nolan is Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on 4 active competitive grants ($5.3M total) and is a Co-investigator on an additional 5 grants ($5.7M total). She has 115 peer-reviewed publications (13 first author, 36 senior author) with several in high-impact journals (4 in JAMA, 2 in Lancet Infectious Diseases, and 8 in Addiction [impact factors 63, 36 and 6 respectively]), and is an Associate Editor for the peer-reviewed journal, Addiction. Beyond this, Dr. Nolan has also demonstrated an unwavering commitment to knowledge translation. Since 2014, Dr. Nolan has delivered over 55 presentations to varied audiences (including the Public Health Agency of Canada, BC’s Ministry of Health, BC Corrections, the Vancouver Police, former President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation), was one of the Keynote Speakers at the 6th Annual BCCSU Conference, and has appeared in the media over 165 times. Dr Nolan’s unwavering dedication to the substance use field was recently honoured through the bestowment of one of Canada’s King Charles III Coronation medals (2024).
