Director:

Janice E. Graham

Standards Group:

Regna Darnell

Christina Holmes

Mavis Jones

Fiona McDonald

Jack Bend

Leanne Bekeris

Darren Dokis

Vaccines Group:

PhD Students:

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Dr. Graham is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioethics in the Department of Pediatrics, in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Graham draws upon anthropology, technology assessment and bioethics to approach cultural, technical and moral issues in health. Challenges of safety, effectiveness, standardization, risk and trust figure prominently into Graham's mapping of biotechnological innovation to health inequalities. Graham's work with people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias led to an interest in the moral basis of profit when disease is seen as a market opportunity. She studies regulatory practices, diagnostic imaginaries and databases as cultural texts. Her more recent ethnographic research examines safety and efficacy in the regulation of emerging biotherapeutics and vaccines at Health Canada and internationally.

Dr. Graham graduated in Anthropology from the University of Waterloo (BA, 1980), University of Victoria (MA, 1982), and the Université de Montréal (1997). Dr. Graham held a postdoctoral fellowship in geriatric medicine and neuroepidemiology at Dalhousie University (1996-1998), an endowed Research Chair in Medical Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (1998-2002), and received a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award (1999-2002). She has been a visiting senior fellow, BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economic and Political Science, observer to Scientific and Technical meetings of the World Health Organization, and chairs the Health Canada Expert Advisory Panel on the Special Access Program. She is the Scientific Director of the Technoscience and Regulation Research Unit (TRRU) and the Qualitative Research Commons and Studio (QuRCs) at Dalhousie. Forthcoming research explores 21st century vaccines, including the development and introduction of a new conjugate vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa, and vaccines for pandemic influenza. Dr. Graham is also the outgoing President of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d'anthropologie (CASCA).  

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Sharon is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD program at Dalhousie University. Prior to returning to university she had appointments to the Nancy's Chair in Women's Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, and the Elizabeth May Chair in Women's Health and the Environment at Dalhousie. She is on the steering committee of Women and Health Protection and is the author of Patient No More: the Politics of Breast Cancer.

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Leanne completed a combined honours B.A. in Political Science and Sociocultural Anthropology (UWO 2009), and is currently an MA student of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. Her general research interests relate to Aboriginal health, healthcare and healing. More specifically, she is examining federal and provincial policy application and regulation of Aboriginal communities and making connections between stress, anxiety, and deterioration of health among Aboriginal people through structural violence. She uses the theory of cultural safety to look not at Aboriginal culture but to instead focus on the “culture of health care”.

Leanne’s current work addresses the issue of methyl-mercury accumulation in water and traditional foods in relation to the symbiotic connection traditional food consumption maintains with health and healthcare concerns within the Walpole Island First Nation (WIFN) in South Western Ontario. Her work is contributing to Dr. Janice Graham’s CIHR funded project ‘Articulating Standards: Translating the practices of standardizing health technologies’.

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Jack Bend is a Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Pathology; Physiology & Pharmacology; and Paediatrics at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Western Ontario (UWO) in London, Canada. He was a scientist at the US National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS/NIH) from 1970-86 and served as Chief of the Laboratory of Pharmacology at NIEHS from 1980-86. He was appointed Chair of the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology in the Faculty of Medicine at UWO in 1986 and served in this role until 2000. Jack served as the Associate Dean, Research at Schulich from 1999-2007. Professor Bend is the co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed articles describing original research findings in the areas of molecular and environmental pharmacology and toxicology. His current research includes mechanisms by which drugs, endogenous chemicals and environmental contaminants cause toxicity and contribute to the disease burden by oxidative and nitrosative stress. Through the Ecosystem Health Program in the Department of Pathology, Schulich Medicine & Dentistry, he is actively involved in multi-disciplinary community-based collaborative ecosystem health projects with the Walpole Island, Chippewa of the Thanes, and Oneida First Nations in Canada and Egerton University at Lake Naivasha in Kenya. He is a member of the FAO/WHO Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA); of the Ontario Pesticide Advisory Committee; and of the Chemicals Management Plan Challenge Advisory Panel, which advises Health Canada and Environment Canada with regard to the toxicity of industrial chemicals. He previously served as the President of the Society of the Toxicology of Canada and as the Chair of the Canadian Council on Animal Care.        

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Regna Darnell is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and First Nations Studies at the University of Western Ontario with a cross-appointment to the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry program in Ecosystem Health.  Her research with First Nations peoples, primarily Cree and Ojibwe,  has ranged across linguistics, cross-cultural mis-communication, ethnohistory, history of anthropology,  medical anthropology, qualitative ethnographic methods, and collaborative community research models.   She has been engaged with the Walpole Island First Nation located in the chemical valley below Sarnia ON for two decades and has worked on a variety of ecosystem health projects there since 2003.  Current research focuses on community responses to externally imposed environmental and health standards as well as how the community attains consensus in balancing preservation of traditional knowledge with deploying science evidence toward community goals.

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Marylène is a medical anthropologist (PhD Université de Montréal, 2007). She addresses the relationship between global health, disease and society. Her research explores the transfer and acquisition of medical knowledge relating to the management of infectious diseases by communities in a West African context. She also has an interest in bioethical issues of transfer of knowledge necessary to obtain the informed consent in clinical research on the African community. Her projects are located at the junction of critical anthropology and health sciences, combining basic research and empirical research, and testing models that incorporate approaches of medical anthropology in the field of global health. Her approach will allow the type of medical and cultural anthropology she does to make a valuable contribution to the understanding of the problems associated with the introduction of biotechnology, including new vaccines, in the African context and wider international context.

Marylène Dugas est anthropologue médical (PhD Université de Montréal 2007). Elle s’intéresse aux rapports entre santé mondiale, maladie et société par la recherche d’une pratique clinique sensible aux caractéristiques des communautés touchées. Ses recherches explorent le transfert et l’acquisition de connaissances et compétences médicales relatives à la gestion des maladies infectieuses par les communautés en contexte ouest-africain. Elle s'intéresse aussi à la problématique bioéthique du transfert des connaissances nécessaires aux communautés africaines pour l'obtention du consentement éclairé requis en recherche clinique. Ses projets se situent à la jonction de l’anthropologie critique et des sciences de la santé, alliant recherche fondamentale et recherche empirique, et expérimente des modèles qui intègrent davantage des approches inspirées de l’anthropologie médicale dans le champ de la santé mondiale. Son approche permettra, par le type d’anthropologie médicale et culturelle qu’elle pratique, d’apporter une riche contribution à la compréhension des problématiques liées à l’implantation des biotechnologies, dont les nouveaux vaccins, en contexte africain et plus largement en contexte international.

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Shawn Harmon, a barrister and widely published researcher, is Lecturer in Regulation & Risk in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is associated with the J Kenyon Mason Institute in Medicine, Life Sciences and the Law, the ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (Innogen), and the AHRC Research Centre in Intellectual Property and Technology Law (SCRIPT).

Dr. Harmon's research encompasses issues related to the governance and regulation of health and emerging technologies. He is concerned with a variety of ethico-legal issues in medical practice, medical research and biotechnology innovation (consent, privacy, access, etc.), and the interaction of the research and governance setting with commercial interests (particularly intellectual property). Past work has examined the role of bioethical values, human rights, and science and medical regulatory instruments, domestic and international, in the biobank, stem cell research, and public health settings. Dr. Harmon graduated from Saint Mary's University (BA, 1993), University of New Brunswick (LLB, 1996), and University of Edinburgh (LLM, 2004; PhD, 2011).

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Christina did her PhD with the TRRU group at Dalhousie University on how genetically modified plants (a.k.a. GMOs) are seen by the scientists who create them; how the design of and work on GMOs differs, depending on the goals and funding of the researchers; and the connections that genetic engineering research has to globalization. She used multisited ethnography in fieldsites in Canada and in Colombia, South America. This research was supported by an International Development Research Council, Canadian Window on Development Award, as well as a Canadian Institute of Health Research, Institute of Genetics, Short Term Research Grant, and a Social Science and Humanities Doctoral Fellowship.

She is currently expanding her research on plant breeding and biotechnology as a SSHRC funded, post-doctoral researcher (2010-2012) with Dr. Birgit Muller at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie des institutions et organisations sociales (LAIOS), within the L’École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) of the Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France.  She is continuing her ethnographic research in Canada and Colombia through an investigation of the tensions between continuity and innovation within scientific methods for plant breeding and agricultural biotechnology and the implications that this has for global food security.  Her general interests include the anthropology of science and technology, medical anthropology, and biotechnology, with particular interest in topics relating to agriculture and food.

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Farah Huzair received her PhD from The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom in 2008. Her doctoral work focused on agricultural biotechnology innovation in Central and Eastern Europe. Farah's wider interests include the evolution of science, technology and innovation systems particularly in the area of biotechnology and the impact of regulation.

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Mavis Jones is interested in the study of risk governance. Her work has explored how health and environmental risk, specifically in relation to evolving technological landscapes, are handled in policy and regulatory processes.    She holds a Ph.D. (2007) in Politics from the University of East Anglia, UK, where she combined theories of the policy process and the literature on public understanding of science to analyse trust in the open governance framework for biotechnology. 

At TRRU, she held a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007-2009) with Janice Graham to conduct ethnographic research at Health Canada. She is currently involved in projects with Edna Einsiedel (University of Calgary) and Jeremy Rayner (University of Saskatchewan) dealing with democratic engagement in two highly technical policy fields: xenotransplantation, and biofuels.

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Fiona is a Lecturer in the School of Law at the Queensland University of Technology(QUT),Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Dr McDonald’s research encompasses issues related to health governance and has four broad themes: the governance of health systems and organisations; the governance of health professionals; the governance of health research; and the governance of patient safety.   Her work draws from law, bioethics and regulatory theory and she generally adopts comparative and sociological approaches to governance issues. She graduated in Law and Politics from Victoria University of Wellington (LLB, BA, 1999), and in law from Dalhousie University (LLM 2003, JSD 2010).

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Amrita is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Technoscience and Regulation Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Canada.  Her current project 'The Administration of a Quadrivalent HPV Vaccine for Minors' is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and examines knowledge, attitudes and practices in HPV vaccination in Nova Scotia, Canada.  Amrita has received research fellowships from the Indian Council of Medical Research, the University Grants Commission of India, and the Austrian Academic Exchange Service. 

From March 2008 to February 2009, Amrita worked at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Science, Technology and Society, Graz, Austria.  she examined developments in the Bethesda System for Papanicolaou test reports.  This project grew from her PhD fieldwork.  Her PhD (Sociology, awarded February 2008, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India) examined the significance of authority in the work of an Indian laboratory investigating signaling in cervical cancer. 

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Robert is a scientist with over 10 years of experience working in biomedical research laboratories. For his PhD (Physiology, University of Western Ontario, 2000) he studied placenta function in relation to infertility, while for his post-doctoral training (University of East Anglia, Norwich UK; Dalhousie University, Halifax) he examined tissue loss associated with various cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. Rob’s belief that scientists have an obligation to ensure that research is done soundly, that regulation of medical therapies is done fairly, and that information is conveyed to the public accurately led him to pursue collaboration with the group at TRRU. 

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Elizabeth completed a combined honours degree in social anthropology and international development studies at Dalhousie University (2006) and a Master’s at Dalhousie in Social Anthropology (2008). Her work centers on the reframing of regulation as competitive advantage in the commercialization of food and drug products. She uses anthropology and science studies to explore industry preparations for and responses to new regulatory interventions at Health Canada: for example, the  implementation of the Natural Health Product Regulations in 2004.

Elizabeth’s general interests include the anthropology of science and technology, intellectual property law, and commercial advertising for functional foods, nutraceuticals, and natural health products (NHP). Her work on science and policy perspectives for the regulation of functional foods, nutraceuticals and NHPs contributes to Dr. Graham’s Canadian Institute of Health Research funded project ‘Risks and regulation of novel therapeutics.’ She has also worked in various directorates at Health Canada, including the Bureau of Food Policy Integration and the Bureau of Chemical Safety. Liz is currently working with Health Canada’s Policy, Planning and International Affairs Directorate.

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To Read About Emma's Work, Please Visit Her Home Page.

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