Dr. Carlo Ammendolia

Associate Scientist

As an undergraduate student playing Varsity football at the University of Toronto (U of T), Dr. Carlo Ammendolia suffered an injury and visited a chiropractor for the first time. “I was so impressed with how he skillfully used his hands to heal,” Ammendolia recounts many years later.

This visit captured his imagination—so much so that in 1978, after he received his BSc from U of T, he applied and was accepted to the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC).

Ammendolia graduated in 1982 and set up practice as a solo practitioner with a special interest in sports and occupational related injuries. He also became certified as a rehabilitation specialist and clinical acupuncturist.

In the later 1980s, he moved his practice to Maple, Ontario, where he began to work in a multidisciplinary setting. Today, almost 30 years later, he is the director of the Chiropractic Spine Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital, and still a practising chiropractor.

In the 1990s, Ammendolia’s career shifted from clinical practice to formal research. “I was intrigued at the time with the emergent paradigm shift towards evidence-based health care,” he says. In 1996, he became a research fellow at CMCC and applied to the master’s program in Clinical Epidemiology and Health Care Research at U of T.

He completed his master's degree in 1999 and began PhD studies at U of T in 2001 under the supervision of Dr. Claire Bombardier, the director of the university's Clinical Epidemiology Program and a senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health. “She continues to be my mentor and has guided my research career,” Ammendolia says of Bombardier.