2022 Highlights

This year our Department embraced changes, opened up to hybrid events and experienced many successes. We are excited to share the following highlights from the past year:

We welcomed the following new members of the EpiBio Faculty family: Dr. Joel Gagnier, Dr. Osvaldo Espin-Garcia, Dr. Nicole Redvers, and Dr. Ngianga-Bakwin Kandala. We have also welcomed many new cross appointees and adjunct members. We look forward to all the success you will have here at the EpiBio Department.

Many of our Graduate and Undergraduate students received awards:

  • Ronald Cheung, MSc was among the top prize winners at the Proteus Innovation Competition for his team's commercialization plan for the dynamic cardiovascular imaging for rapid patient treatment planning technology.
  • Jahin Khan, MSc Candidate, was a 2022 Women's Health Scholars Award recipient for research that is aiming to better understand the factors that impact mental health for migrant women, specifically on how language may play a role in psychosis.
  • Jaky Kueper, PhD received the prestigious 2022 Governor General's Gold Medal for academic excellence. Jaky is the first Dual-PhD recipient at Western University, receiving a dual-Doctorate degree from The Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Department of Computer Science.
  • Natalie Zitoun, MSc Candidate, received the SPS Jr Investigator Award at the Safety Pharmacology Society & Canadian Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics 2022 Annual Meeting for the poster “Pregnancy Outcomes after Prazosin Exposure in the First Trimester”


Notable achievements from our Faculty:

  • Dr. Vladimir Hachinski was honoured with the 2022 Potamkin Prize recognizing his achievements as a scientific researchers who does innovative work, find ground-breaking discoveries and push forward the field of study in Pick’s, Alzheimer’s, and related brain degenerative diseases.
  • Dr. Kathy N. Speechley was among the 71 individuals in the Canadian health sciences community to be selected to the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences
  • Dr. Shehzad Ali, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Public Health Economics provided evidence on "Global Vaccine Inequity and Intellectual Property Rights" at the House of Commons.


Dr. Guangyong Zou, professor at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Scientist at Robarts Research Institute and Director, Biostatistics at Alimentiv Inc. presented the 2022 Allan Donner Lecture “Risk ratios by Regression: A Statistical Method That Has Made Real Impact on Medical Research”

This summer, The Western Epidemiology and Biostatistics Graduate Student Council (WEBSC) successfully ran the 2022 Summer Workshop Series, as a webinar series during the month of August. The sessions were led by upper-year graduate students and faculty members from our Department and covered a broad range of topics, including methodological issues, statistical programming, and research in terms of EDIDI principles.

September Orientation events welcomed 30 new graduate students and 31 new undergraduate students to the Department.

We had the honour of hosting Visiting Professor Seminars this year; Prof Paolo Chiodini from the University of Campania (Italy) and Prof Angelo Brandelli Costa and Anna Martha Vaitses Fontanari from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil.

Professor Mark Speechley, PhD, presented the Annual Carol Buck Lecture “Epidemiology and Life Long Learning. The Carol Buck Graduate Scholarship was awarded to MSc Candidate Lux Li.