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BC Leadership Chair in
Aboriginal Environmental
Health
The BC Leadership Chair is a $4.5 million endowment fund that has been awarded to Dr Laurie Chan of the University of Northern British Columbia on February 3, 2006 with matching funds from the Rix Family Foundation and CANTEST Ltd and the Leading Edge Endowment Fund.
We have entered into the third year of the Chair Program. All cylinders are firing in both our basic and community-based research. We have 12 on-going projects and our research team has grown to have 3 post-doctoral fellows, 2 PhD students, 4 MSc students, 3 research associates, 4 research assistants, 5 contract researchers and 37 community research assistants. We were happy to see our first MSc student at UNBC, Mr. Aaron Shapiro, graduate this year and continue his PhD studies at the University of Toronto, but we were very sad to lose Ms. Tamara Charlie in a tragic accident.
The First Nations Environmental Health Innovation Network (FNEHIN) has achieved great success in providing a virtual meeting place for researchers and First Nations communities. It also strives to help build capacity for First Nations to engage in research in a meaningful way. We have successfully completed data and sample collection for the Inuit Health Survey; over 1200 people from 30 coastal Inuit communities in northern Canada participated in the study. Data analysis and results reporting will begin this year. Additionally, the First Nations Food, Nutrition and Environment Study began data collection in 2008 in 8 northern BC First Nations communities. We anticipate collecting data from 12 additional First Nations communities in southern BC this year. Over the next ten years we aim to collect samples in 100 First Nations communities across the country. These studies will provide invaluable results on the state of knowledge of the environment and the health status of Aboriginal peoples throughout the country. The number of Aboriginal communities that we support through both research and service continues to increase.
In the laboratory, we have developed various new tools and collaborations to study the relationships between exposure to environmental toxicants and obesity, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson Disease.
Much time and effort this year has been devoted to drafting the 2nd edition of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. It is now being circulated for national consultation and is expected to be implemented in 2009. The awarding of the Leopold Leadership Fellow from Stanford University provided me two weeks of intensive training in communications and leadership skills, making us better champions for environmental causes. With the change of leadership in the US, there is optimism that there will be increasing global support for sustainable development and environmental protection. We will keep working hard to generate new information and train the next generation of researchers to better our local and global environment.
Greeting from 2007
Greeting from 2006
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