Dr. Philip Awadalla, the Ontario Health Study’s Principal Investigator, is part of a University of Toronto team that was awarded a $4 million grant in 2016 from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) for the Canadian Environmental Urban Health Research Consortium project.
The consortium will play a key role in supporting the research needed to address challenges such as urban sprawl, traffic congestion, car-dependency, social equity and sustainability. More than 80% of Canadians live in cities so it’s important that cities are designed in a way that support the health of those who live there.
The group is tasked with pulling together existing data and information from a wide variety of sources related to urban issues to create one resource. The data relates to aspects of urban living such air quality, green space, and noise and will then be linked to health data platforms such as the Ontario Health Study.
As well, Dr. Awadalla is the team leader for a Pan-Canadian initiative to understand how these environmental exposures interact with an individual’s genome to impact the development of chronic diseases and cancer. This study is supported by the CIHR programmatic initiative in Environments, Genes and Chronic disease.
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