Professor Daniel Krewski, director of the R. Samuel McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment at the University of Ottawa, will deliver the 2009 Morris Katz Memorial Lecture in Environmental Research next week.
“Population Health Risk Assessment: Theory and Practice” will take place on Friday, Nov. 20, at 2:30pm in the Senate Chamber, N940 Ross Building, Keele campus. The 2009 Morris Katz Memorial Lecture in Environmental Research is hosted by York’s Centre for Atmospheric Chemistry.
Right: Daniel Krewski
The traditional medical model of health and health policy development has focused on individuals and the role of medical care in preventing and treating disease and injury, says Krewski.
Recent attention to health inequities and social determinants of health has raised the profile of population heath and evidence-based strategies for improving the health of whole populations. At the same time, risk science has emerged as an important new discipline for the assessment and management of risks to health.
This presentation traces historical developments in the fields of risk management and population health, and proposes a joint population health risk management framework that integrates the key elements of both fields, says Krewski. The use of the framework is illustrated through analyses of specific population health risk issues, including environmental radon, ambient air pollution and prion diseases, which are untreatable, transmissible and fatal neurodegenerative diseases of both humans and animals.
Krewski is the associate scientific director of PrioNet Canada, a Network of Centres of Excellence for research into prions and prion diseases. He is also the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Chair in Risk Science. He has been professor in the Department of Epidemiology & Community Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa since 1998.
His professional interests include epidemiology, biostatistics, risk assessment and risk management, and he has broad experience applied to national and international panels of experts in the fields of health, life sciences, chemical safety, cancer and environmental hazards.
A Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Society for Risk Analysis, and a lifetime National Affiliate of the US National Academy of Sciences, Krewski is also the author or editor of six books.
For more information contact Carol Weldon, Centre for Atmospheric Chemistry administration assistant, at ext. 55410, by fax at 416-736-5411 or by e-mail to cac@yorku.ca, or visit the Centre for Atmospheric Chemistry Web site.