Dr. David Tolusso

Associate Scientist

PhD, Statistics, University of Waterloo

A keen interest in statistics brought Dr. David Tolusso into the scientific fold at the Institute for Work & Health.

Dr. Tolusso left his home town of Winnipeg — where he earned his MSc in statistics at the University of Manitoba — to pursue his PhD in statistics at the University of Waterloo. His PhD thesis applied statistical methods to multi-state models. That is, he looked at the probabilities of people making transitions from one state to another; say, from employed to unemployed.

Hoping to find a place where his particular knowledge of statistics could be applied, Dr. Tolusso was delighted to find himself in a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the IWH beginning in September 2008. “At the IWH, the two states of ‘working’ and ‘not working’ are common to many research projects,” he says. “So, for example, I can help determine the probabilities of, and factors contributing to, someone returning to work or not after an injury.”

Dr. Tolusso values the practical application of numbers. “Although I was always good at math, at university I gravitated toward statistics because I could see its real-world applications,” he explains. “Now, here at the Institute, I can use math and statistics to solve problems that are very important to people, like preventing work disability.”

Currently, Dr. Tolusso is a member of the IWH research team examining why the number of long-duration (or persistent) workers’ compensation claims are on the rise. He is also teaching a course at the University of Toronto, along with a number of other IWH scientists, on advanced quantitative methods in epidemiology.