Leadership & Specialists

From the Directors…

We are very excited to be launching CANUE and our website.   It has been a productive few months since our funding support from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) started in June.  We have an ambitious agenda for the rest of 2016 culminating in our first workshop in December when members and leadership will come together to exchange ideas and refine CANUE’s strategic plan.

Leading up to this point we have experienced a tremendous amount of excitement and willingness to work together throughout Canada, to join a team to break new ground in research and to have real and lasting impact.  We are committed to building from this good will to realize as many of our collective ambitions for CANUE as possible while growing in membership and impact within Canada and internationally.  We hope you’re on board for this ride and will spread the word to make sure CANUE is recognized and is responsive to the needs of as many stakeholders as possible.

CANUE truly represents an amazing opportunity to build a dynamic community in Canada that brings the best in urban environmental research and applications to the health research community, ultimately to support decision-making with public health in mind.  We are hopeful that CANUE will enable and conduct highly relevant research on environmental factors, exposures or metrics and their links to health.  Our goal is to empower our members, to foster collaboration, exchange and knowledge translation so that members and non-members alike clearly see our value-added and hence paddle hard to take CANUE to much success and well past our starting five-year time horizon.

Jeff Brook, PhD
Nominated PI and Scientific Director

The CANUE Health Research Consortium is made up of members from academia, government, and organizations active in urban environmental health research and policy. Our leadership and direction comes from a number of interactive teams and an advisory panel.

Jeffrey Brook
Scientific Director and Nominated Principal Investigator

Jeffrey Brook (Principal Investigator and Scientific Director) has 25 years of experience as an Environment Canada scientist working at the science-policy interface. During this time he spent 15 years as faculty at the University of Toronto, where he was involved in research, lecturing and graduate student training. He is one of Canada’s leading experts in air quality, recognized at all levels of government and academically, including for his substantial contributions in air pollution health research. Dr. Brook has led scientific assessments to inform policy nationally and internationally, and advised multi-stakeholder groups shaping policy. He has led a variety of multi-disciplinary research teams in government, government-academic partnerships and in academia. Recently his efforts have expanded beyond air quality, for example for 8 years he has led the Environmental Working Group of the Canadian Health Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study and co-led the Gene x Environment Research Platform within the AllerGen Network of Centres of Excellence.

Philip Awadalla
Director and Prinicipal Investigator

Philip Awadalla (PA) is the leader of a publicly-funded population-based national cohort (Principal Investigator of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project and biobank) and is a Senior Investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. He is also a Professor of Population and Medical Genomics at the University of Toronto and the Director of Genome Canada’s Canadian Data Integration Centre. Dr. Awadalla focuses on developing next-generation genomics approaches, model-based tools, and population-based approaches to study mutation rates, genome biology, and cancer. His main research interests include identifying genetic determinants of blood disorders and cancers, and genomic epidemiology of age related disorders in population cohorts.

Michael Brauer
Director and Principal Investigator

Michael Brauer is an internationally recognized expert in urban and environmental health. He is Director of UBC’s Bridge Program, Professor in UBC’s School of Population and Public Health, and Professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Dr. Brauer’s research has uncovered relationships between transportation-related and biomass air pollution, and reproductive, respiratory, and cardiovascular health, and identified impacts of multiple exposures mediated by urban form on population health. He has participated in studies throughout the world and served on advisory committees to the UN Climate and Clean Air Coalition Scientific Panel, the World Health Organization, the US National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, the Royal Society of Canada, the International Joint Commission and governments in North America and Asia.

Howard Hu
Director and Principal Investigator

Howard Hu, Dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Professor of Environmental Health, Epidemiology, Global Health and Medicine at the University of Toronto, is also internationally renowned as an expert on environmental health. He is a physician-scientist, specializing in occupational and environmental medicine and epidemiology. Previously, Dr. Hu was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Channing Laboratory of the Brigham & Women’s Hospital (1988-2006), and the NSF International Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Professor of Environmental Health, Epidemiology & Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan (2006-2012). His work leading an international team of scientists has won a number of awards, including the 1999 US National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences Progress and Achievement Award, the 2006 Harriett Hardy Award, the 2009 Linus Pauling Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2011 Award of Excellence from the American Public Health Association, and the 2015 John R. Goldsmith Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology.

Kim Mcgrail
Director and Principal Investigator

Kim McGrail (PA) is an Associate Professor in the UBC School of Population and Public Health, and provides expertise in managing big data infrastructure, specifically for confidential health data. She is the Scientific Director of Population Data BC and is PI on the major grants that fund its operations. She has twenty years of experience building and operating data linkage platforms and educating researchers and trainees about the potential of administrative data to address policy-relevant research questions, as well as about the appropriate uses of those data. Population Data BC includes person-specific data that extend well beyond health care, and is the data platform lead for the CIHR-funded BC SPOR SUPPORT Unit. Kim’s contributions in the area of privacy-sensitive governance of research data extend beyond BC as well, most significantly as a founding member of the International Population Data Linkage Network (www.ipdln.org). PopData was the network director for this group in 2013-2014 and Kim co-chaired the network’s international conference in Vancouver in April 2014.

Dave Stieb
Director and Principal Knowledge User

David Stieb, MD, is a Public Health Physician with Health Canada’s Environmental Health Science and Research Bureau and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine, and member of the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Ottawa. In addition to conducting primary research, including linking national administrative cohort data and exposure surfaces, and key systematic reviews and meta-analyses of epidemiological studies of air pollution and health, he has made notable contributions to knowledge translation, working with federal, provincial and municipal public health and NGO partners. These include acting as health science lead in the development of Canada’s Air Quality Health Index, a public health risk communication tool (www.airhealth.ca). He also co-developed the Air Quality Benefits Assessment Tool and other applications that translate knowledge to estimate the human health impacts and costs/benefits of changes in ambient air quality resulting from proposed regulatory or other initiatives.

Padmaja Subarrao
Director and Principal Investigator

Padmaja Subbarao (PA) has expertise in maternal, fetal, and child health. She is a Clinician Scientist and Respirologist at the Hospital for Sick Children and an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She is Co-Director and Toronto Site Leader of the CHILD study. She has specific expertise in lung development and physiology and is a world recognized expert in Infant and Preschool lung function. As Director of the Pulmonary Function Laboratory at the Hospital for Sick Children, she has developed objective markers of lung disease to improve respiratory phenotyping of infants and children. This work has led to international recognition and opportunities to introduce novel phenotyping tools to North America. She has worked with Environmental Scientists both in and out of the CHILD study to look at the impact of the environment on child health, specifically lung health. Her work has been continuously funded by CIHR and AllerGen NCE to study the development of lung function in health and asthma and the impact of the environment.

Dan Crouse
Director | 2016-2018

Dan Crouse, PhD is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, and is appointed as Epidemiologist with the Maritimes SPOR Support Unit.  Dan’s research bridges knowledge on the environmental and the social determinants of health.  He has been involved in a number of studies investigating the impact of exposure to ambient air pollution on adverse health outcomes including risk of mortality, adverse birth outcomes, and incidence of cancer.

Mark Gibson
Director | 2016-2018

Olimpia Pantelimon
Director | 2016-2018

Audrey Smargiassi
Director | 2016-2018

Audrey Smargiassi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the School of Public Health and a researcher at the Public Health Research Institute of the University of Montreal. She has directed the development of various approaches to estimate exposure of large populations to heat, ozone, ambient fine particles, and environmental noise using statistical and mathematical models, GIS and satellite imagery. She has also directed a number of epidemiological studies to assess associations between exposure to air pollutants and asthma onset and exacerbation, as well as the prevalence and the gravity of systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases. Much of her work is done in close collaboration with Public Health institutions to influence political decisions and orient public health surveillance and interventions.

Eleanor Setton
Managing Director

Eleanor Setton is the Managing Director of CANUE. As an Adjunct Associate Professor (2008- 2016), Eleanor most recently acted as Co-Director of the Spatial Sciences Research Lab (SSRL) at the University of Victoria. This role involved managing the SSRL grants, staff, and students, and conducting a range of research related to spatial aspects of exposure to environmental pollutants as a PI or Co-PI. Of particular value to CANUE is Dr. Setton’s expertise in population-level environmental exposure assessment; direct experience working with large spatial and tabular datasets related to land use, pollutant emissions and socio-economic characteristics; and developing knowledge translation products about cancer and the environment.

Bert Brunekreef
Advisor

Affiliation: Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Director of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University

Location: Utrecht, Netherlands

Co-author of more than 400 peer reviewed journal articles in the field of environmental epidemiology and exposure assessment

Howie Frumkin
Advisor

Affiliation: Dean, School of Public Health and Professor, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington

Location: Seattle, Washington

Previous Director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (NCEH/ATSDR), and later Special Assistant to the CDC Director for Climate Change and Health.

Elisabet Lindgren
Advisor

Affiliation: Associate Professor in Sustainability Science, Stockholm Resilience Centre,

Location: Stockholm University, Sweden

Elisabet Lindgren is a physician and associate professor in Sustainability Science who works with issues concerning climate change, sustainable healthy food systems, and sustainable healthy cities.

Gordon McBean
Advisor

Affiliation: Professor, Geography, University of Western Ontario

Location: London, Ontario

Former Canadian Assistant Deputy Minister of the Environment, Co-Director of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Western Ontario, President-elect of the International Council for Science;l and Co-chair of Future Earth Research for Global Sustainability.

Diana Royce
Advisor

Affiliation: President, The Deerfield Group Inc.

Location: Burlington, Ontario

Dr. Royce was Managing Director of the Health Evidence Applications Network [HEALNet) NCE at McMaster University (1998-2002), and Senior Policy Advisor in the Ontario government. Since 2002, The Deerfield Group Inc. has provided grant preparation and Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer services to AllerGen NCE Inc.

Salim Yusuf
Advisor

Affiliation: Professor, Department of Medicine, Director of the Population Health Research Institute, McMaster University

Location: Hamilton, Ontario

Co-investigator, Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological Study (PURE), societal, biologic and genetic determinants of population health in developing populations; his studies involve over 83 countries in all the inhabited continents of the world

Evan Seed
Geospatial Data Lead

Evan Seed, PhD (abd) has considerable expertise in the development and management of geospatial data, as well as the  use of remote sensing for identifying features and changes of urban, rural and remote landscapes. He is responsible for CANUE policy on data documentation and access, and takes on a large part of the technical work required to produce and distribute CANUE data products.

Mahdi Shooshtari
Data Scientist and Lead Developer

Mahdi has recently completed an MSc at the University of Alberta in Computer Science. He specializes in computer vision – using and developing advanced algorithms to identify unique characteristics and features in images and videos. He will be working with Google Street View and Google Earth Engine, as well as developing tools to turn big data into usable exposure measures for environmental health research.

Dany Doiron
Data Linkage Specialist

Dany is based at Maelstrom Research (MR) group at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal. Dany has worked with a number of epidemiological research consortia in Canada and Europe, helping them implement innovative solutions to facilitate multi-centre data integration and co-analysis, and provides expertise on linking environmental data to confidential health databases for CANUE.