Leadership & Specialists

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 (PA) 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 (PA), 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 (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.

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 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.

Eleanor Setton is the Managing Director of CANUE. As an Adjunct Associate Professor (2008-May 2016), Eleanor has 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.

Dan L 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.

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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.

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

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.

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

Location: Stockholm University, Sweden

Elisabet Lindgren is a physician and associate professor in Sustainability Science that has for more than 25 years worked transdisciplinary, both within academia and in the interface between science and policy, with issues concerning health and global environmental changes, in particular climate change, sustainable healthy food systems, and sustainable healthy cities.

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.

Affiliation: President, The Deerfield Group Inc.

Location: Burlington, Ontario

Prior to launching The Deerfield Group in 2002, Dr. Royce was Managing Director of an NCE in Health Informatics at McMaster University (The Health Evidence Applications Network [HEALNet) NCE) (1998-2002), and Senior Policy Advisor in the Ontario government specializing in university finance, system planning and coordination at the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (1985-1998). Since 2002, The Deerfield Group Inc. has provided grant preparation and Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer services to AllerGen NCE Inc.

The Deerfield Group has worked with “classic” NCEs; Centres of Excellence for Commercialization of Research (CECRs); Business-Led (BL) NCEs; Knowledge Mobilization (KM) NCEs; CIHR Institutes; CIHR Networks and Strategic Teams; Genome Canada; Compute Canada; Public Health Agency of Canada; Terry Fox Research Institute; universities and colleges across Canada; as well as numerous not-for-profit, organizations, foundations and institutes.

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, 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 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.

Affiliation: Director, Occupational Cancer Research Centre, Cancer Care Ontario and Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Location: Ontario

Epidemiology; occupational hygiene; occupational and environmental exposure assessment; cancer; creating new linkable dataset related to workplace; work-related and environmental risk factors

Affiliation: Professor, Department of Family Medicine,Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine, University of Ottawa; Senior Medical Advisor, Health Analysis Division, Statistics Canada; Senior Scientist, Clinical epidemiology POrogram, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute

Location: Ontario

Affiliation: Chief Science Officer and Senior Scientist, Public Health Ontario and Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Location: Ontario

Interdisciplinary population studies; chronic disease epidemiology; environmental and genetic risk factors; integration of population and biological sciences; cohort and data platform development, use and governance; implementation and KT

Affiliation: Associate Professor of Medicine, University of British Columbia

Location: British Columbia

Air pollution; controlled human exposure for environmental health observations, asthma, co-exposures as modifiers of health effects; diesel exhaust, phthalates; allergens, gene-environment interactions

Affiliation: Research Scientist, Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba and Assistant Professor, Pediatrics & Child Health, University of Manitoba

Location: Manitoba

Developmental origins of chronic disease; infant feeding; human milk composition; asthma; allergy; obesity; epidemiology

Affiliation: Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University

Location: Ontario

Board of Directors, MICYRN (maternal infant child and youth research network); ReACH

Affiliation: Senior Research Scientist, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Health Canada

Location: Ontario

CanCHEC; outdoor air pollution risk assessment

Affiliation: Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Location: Ontario

Biostatistics; statistical modeling; correlated data; birth cohorts

Affiliation: Associate Professor & Endowed Chair in Sustainability and Environmental Health, Dalhousie University

Location: Nova Scotia

Population health science; health geography; human-environment behaviour; wearable sensors; spatial analytics; exposure assessment

Affiliation: Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Location: Ontario

Air pollution characterisation; exposure assessment; vehicle emissions and traffic pollution; pollution sources; energy systems; education; Director of Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research

Affiliation: Chief, Environmental and Occupational Health, Public Health Ontario and Associate Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Location: Ontario

Exposure assessment; physical environment as a determinant of health; biomarkers; exposome; interventions to reduce exposure

Affiliation: Canadian Institute of Planners and Senior Planning Advisor, Government of Alberta

Location: Alberta

Chair, Health Communities Committee

Affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of Montreal

Location: Quebec

Ambient air pollutants, environmental noise, climate change; exposure estimation, health risk estimation, population impact assessment, environmental epidemiology; cardio-respiratory and inflammatory diseases

Affiliation: Associate Professor, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia

Location: British Columbia

Environmental noise assessment; environmental epi of noise and chronic disease

Affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Health Sciences, Carleton University

Location: Ontario

Epidemiology; biostatistics; air pollution; green space; cancer; cardiovascular disease; record linkage studies

Affiliation: Assistant Professor, School of Population and Public Health and the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia

Location: Vancouver, British Columbia

Health protection, disease prevention, and climate change mitigation by natural environments.

Affiliation: Team Leader, Climate Scenarios and Services, Ouranos – Consortium on Regional Climatology and Adaptation to Climate Change

Location: Quebec

Impacts and adaptations to climate change

Affiliation: Professor and Chair, Department of Geography, University of Victoria

Location: British Columbia

Climatology; climate change; human impacts on climate; water balance climatology and urban climatology

Affiliation: Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University

Location: British Columbia

Medicine; public health;occupational and environmental epidemiology; toxicology; use of biomarkers; medical surveillance; health impacts of climate change

Affiliation: Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carleton University

Location: Ontario

Air quality modelling; air pollution exposure; air pollution health impact assessment; health benefit source attribution; uncertainty analysis; decision support systems

Affiliation: Air Health Science Division, Exposure Assessment Section, Health Canada

Location: Ontario

Air pollution exposure assessment; temporal and spatial air quality modelling and measurement; evaluating alternate approaches for estimating exposure in health studies; environmental epidemiology; identifying vulnerable periods during pregnancy and early childhood; environmental justice – social and environmental disparities

Affiliation: Professor, Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI), University of Toronto

Location: Ontario

Traffic and emissions modelling; atmospheric dispersion; air pollution exposure; near-road air pollution characterization

Affiliation: Associate Professor, School of Planning, and Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University and Director, Dalhousie Transportation Collaboratory (DalTRAC)

Location: Nova Scotia

Travel behavior analysis; transportation-land use interactions; health and built form; and microsimulation of urban systems