Abreviations:  
PhD

Title:   
Senior Investigator and Professor

Institute:
Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Department:  
Prosserman Centre for Health Research

Province:
Ontario

Training:  
PhD, University of Toronto
MSc, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario
BSc, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario

Research interests:
Cancer epidemiology, gene-environment interactions, population studies

Career highlights:

• Leader of teams that advance knowledge of the relative contribution of genetic and environmental causes of ovarian cancer, colorectal cancer and lung cancer.
• Executive responsible for applying research findings to cancer control, including the launch of Canada’s first population-wide colorectal screening program.
• Leader of interdisciplinary teams that established platforms for integrative population studies, including familial cancer registries and prospective cohorts.

Research Projects

Project title:
Advanced spatial analyses to characterize environmental impacts on cancer risk: Phase 1

Funding period: 
2011-2013

Program:
Operating Grant (environment-cancer)

Summary:
This research project on cancer and the environment aims to improve Canadian understanding of the links between cancer risk, known risk factors (like smoking and obesity), and environmental hazards. This will be done by developing, deploying and testing a comprehensive, standardized geographic information system (GIS) for assessing these relationships at larger and smaller scales of geography. It will generate a broad array of results and information products in a timely fashion that will be useful to researchers, practitioners, policy makers and the public. New and powerful methods will be used to process huge volumes of geographically classified data, and sophisticated statistical approaches will be used for mapping and spatial analysis. The seed funding requested in this proposal will allow cancer patterns to be better understood for one region of south-western Ontario, leading ultimately to implementation in other regions across Canada.