IWH welcomes new board member
Dr. Michael Wolfson joined the Institute for Work and Health (IWH) Board of Directors in June 2013 for a three-year term. Dr. Wolfson recently retired as assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada, where he specialized in program review and evaluation, tax, pension and income distribution policies, as well as health information systems design and analysis of determinants of health. Dr. Wolfson holds the Canada Research Chair in Population Health Modelling, in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa.
IWH senior scientist appointed department chair
Dr. Ben Amick, IWH associate scientific director and senior scientist, has been appointed chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work at Florida International University. He’ll be resigning his current appointment in the School of Public Health at the University of Texas in Houston, and assuming his new role in September. Dr. Amick’s work as a senior scientist at IWH will continue.
Honourable mention for IWH/NIOSH research
A joint systematic review from IWH and the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) won an honourable mention for the 2013 NIOSH Alice Hamilton Award, under the education and guidance category. The study on the effectiveness of health and safety training was led by IWH Associate Scientist Dr. Lynda Robson, with Dr. Ben Amick, Emma Irvin, Amber Bielecky and Kim Cullen also on the team. The award is named for pioneer researcher and occupational physician Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869 - 1970). From all the papers published with a NIOSH author, one winner and one honourable mention is awarded every year in each of five areas. These are: education and guidance; engineering and controls; epidemiology and surveillance; exposure and risk assessment; and methods and laboratory science.
A homecoming for new IWH associate scientist
Thirteen years ago, Dr. Chris McLeod was a master’s student in economics hired by IWH for a three-year term as a research associate. Today, McLeod is back at IWH as an associate scientist. He brings with him an impressive body of work as co-research lead of the Partnership for Work, Health and Safety at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and content data expert for Population Data BC. McLeod was also recently named the recipient of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) New Investigator Award. The IWH’s support back then, he says, “played a key role in my decision to pursue a career as a researcher in work and health.”