Past Projects

Built on collaborative research with 92 First Nations across the country, the FNFNES highlights that traditional foods remain foundational to First Nations’ health and well-being, and that the quality of traditional food is superior to store bought food. However, due to environmental degradation, socioeconomic, systemic and regulatory barriers, many First Nations face three to five times the rate of food insecurity than the Canadian population overall.

Through the collaboration with the Nereus Program, our lab further the developed an analytic socio-ecological framework to assess human health in relation to ocean changes. This partnership estimated global coastal and Indigenous people’s exposure to contaminants from consumption of marine-sourced foods through the development of a novel global environmental health database.

This project provided the first speciation analysis of arsenic in rice grown in Cambodia, and examined arsenic species in rice to characterize health risks with rice consumption. This project was conducted in affiliation with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

The NSERC-CREATE-REACT program was a multi-university/multidisciplinary program providing professional training and practical employer ready skills to students to meet the needs of the chemical, natural resources, laboratory service and consulting industries, and the regulatory agencies. The team of eleven principal investigators led this project, which involved the co-and cross supervision of several graduates students.