Applied field epidemiology, surveillance research, and AI-enabled health screening – built in partnership with the universities, ministries, and workforce institutions where the prevention question actually lives. CIHR-funded silicosis-and-TB programme with UBC, UCT, and SAMA.
Occupational health research that does not reach the workforce it studied has, by an exacting standard, failed. The research literature on silicosis, TB co-morbidity, and occupational lung disease is large and well-developed; the disease itself is concentrated in the populations the literature has consistently failed to reach.
Our research practice exists to close that translation gap. We co-design research with the workforce institutions, ministries, and university partners who hold the implementation levers – CIHR co-applicant status with the University of British Columbia and the University of Cape Town, in partnership with the Southern Africa Miners Association, drawing on a cohort representing three million workers.
The work is applied, not academic. The deliverable is a tool, a model, a protocol, or an evidence brief that functions inside an existing prevention system – not a paper read by other researchers in adjacent specialties.
Workforce institutions, ministries, and universities each hold a piece of the question. We design the study with all of them at the table from the beginning.
The deliverable has to fit inside an existing prevention system on day one. If a regulator, an inspectorate, or a workforce body cannot use it, it is the wrong deliverable.
Machine-learning models for radiograph reading are useful when they are governed, audited, and embedded in human workflow. We work on the governance layer at least as carefully as we work on the model.
Question framing with workforce, ministry, and university partners. The implementation use-case is set here – not at the publication stage.
Study protocol, ethics, field data collection, and quality assurance – conducted to peer-review standard with the implementation partner inside the workflow.
Analysis, peer review, and translation into the artefact the implementation partner can actually use – model, protocol, brief, or guideline.
Adoption support, deployment audit, and post-deployment evaluation. Evidence that does not change practice is filed; we measure adoption.
Co-applicant on a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) grant building an AI-assisted radiograph reading pipeline for silicosis-and-TB detection in southern African mining cohorts. Partners – University of British Columbia, University of Cape Town, SAMA. The largest applied-research grant in the practice's history.
Forthcoming single-author book: National Occupational Safety & Health Information Systems in the Caribbean – Institutional Framework and Implementation Guide. Built on a decade of regional advisory work under CARICOM expert roster status. Publisher confirmation in progress.
Co-Convenor of the Developing Countries Coordination Group on ISO 45001 – the standards-research and evidence-synthesis work that backs the policy positions of more than eighty developing nations inside ISO/TC 283. Evidence briefs, comparative analyses, and standards-development input.
Research that does not reach the workforce it studied has, by an exacting standard, failed. We measure ourselves by adoption.
Every research collaboration begins with a 45-minute consultation. We discuss the question, the implementation partner, the funding pathway, and what a publishable and adoptable deliverable would look like in the third year.
