Member Insight – Jennifer Dykxhoorn
What sparked your decision to become an epidemiologist? After my undergraduate degree, I worked in a local public health department as a health promoter. While I enjoyed interacting with members of the community, I found that there was never time between falls prevention seminars, active transportation meetings, and flu shot campaigns to consider the evidence. Particularly in small regions, I saw that public health practitioners often lacked access to the resources and time to implement evidence-based practice. I decided to do my MSc in epidemiology to gain skills in understanding the science underlying public health. It wasn’t a huge leap from public health practice to epidemiology, and I quickly fell in love with psychiatric epidemiology. I have been enormously privileged to study and work alongside inspirational researchers in Canada, the UK, Sweden, and more. I am thrilled that I have found a career where I get to ask questions, read widely, and make beautiful charts and graphs. What could be better? What do you see as the biggest obstacle facing epidemiologists in the next five years? Epidemiologists will undoubtedly face interesting and challenging questions in the coming years. I expect that epidemiologists will need to grapple with the complex ways […]