Daniel Krewski

Dr. Daniel Krewski is a Fellow of the Society of Risk Analysis and the American Statistical Association, and a lifetime National Affiliate of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2013, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Risk Analysis, for excellent performance in the practice of risk analysis. He has contributed to over 900 scientific and technical publications in the field of risk science during the course of his career to date.

Dr. Krewski’s first major research project upon joining the University of Ottawa in 1998 was a major re-analysis of data from the Harvard Six Cities Study, which was one of the first large scale studies to demonstrate an association between long-term exposure to particulate air pollution and mortality in the general population. This two-year Congressionally mandated study was funded through the US Health Effects Institute, with oversight by an eight-member expert advisory group and an eight-person stakeholder liaison group. The goal of this work was to replicate the original findings of the six city study, which had become the basis for air quality standards for fine particulate matter in the United States, and to test the robustness of alternative analytic approaches. To accomplish this, Dr. Krewski assembled a team of 33 investigators from 11 North American research institutions to complete the project on time and within budget ($1.3 million), producing both a major project report and 17 peer reviewed publications along the way.

Since 2002, Dr. Krewski has held a Natural Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Chair in Risk Science, focusing on risk assessment and management of a wide range of risk issues of national and international importance. The research program of the Chair has been highly productive, generating an average of over 25 peer-reviewed publications annually since its inception. The program has four overarching research objectives: 1) developing innovative risk assessment methods to important risk issues; 2) applying those methods to better understand important risk issues such as ambient air pollution (Burnett et al., 2018), transmissible diseases (Leiss et al., 2010), and technological development (Larkin et al., 2019a); 3) identifying strategies to manage important risk issues such as pandemic flu (Saunders-Hastings et al., 2017) and radon present in Canadian homes (Gaskin et al, 2018); and 4) knowledge mobilization activities to promote the use of state of the art principles and methods in risk science in risk decision making. This unique research program is conducted with technical input from industrial partners, but with research outputs remaining the sole responsibility of the Chair.

Dr. Krewski coordinated the conduct of the first large scale study of public perception of risk in Canada, working with Dr. Paul Slovic, an internationally recognized leader in this field (Krewski et al., 1995ab). An important aspect of this work was a comparison of perceptions of risk between the public and experts, showing consistently higher perceived risk by the public as compared to experts (Slovic et al., 1995). This collaboration laid the groundwork for subsequent studies of how the Canadian public forms attitudes and opinions about risk a wide range of health and environmental risk issues (Krewski et al., 2009, 2012).

In an effort to support risk decision making in the presence of uncertainty, Dr. Krewski has made use of structured expert elicitation to gauge expert opinion on important risk issues where there remains high uncertainty with respect both scientific estimates of risk and the effectiveness of alternative risk management interventions. Working on collaboration with Dr. Willy Aspinall from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, Dr. Krewski has coordinated structured international expert elicitations on a number of risk issues, including mad cow disease (Tyshenko et al., 2011), chronic wasting disease affecting deer and elk (Oraby et al., 2016), carbon capture and storage (Larkin et al., 2019b), and pharmaceutical products (Cashman et al., 2019).

Evidence integration, linking evidence on a specific risk issue from multiple evidence streams, has been an important component of Dr. Krewski’s research program. Under the National Population Health Study of Neurological Conditions, Dr. Krewski led a team of 35 investigators from five Canadian centres that conducted a systematic review of factors affecting the onset and progression of 14 neurological diseases (Krewski et al., 2017), in support of the Agency’s interests in identifying strategies to reduce the burden on neurological diseases in Canada.

In an effort to further refine evidence integration practices in support of human health risk assessment, the McLaughlin Centre has, in collaboration with the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University, organized a series of three international workshops on this topic. The final workshop, in December 2020, involves a series of case studies to examine the use of the evidence integration framework developed as part of this initiative in practice.

From 2006 to 2009, the McLaughlin Centre headed by Dr. Krewski at the University of Ottawa was a designated World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in Population Health Risk Assessment. In 2011, the McLaughlin Centre has selected by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to host a meeting with the heads of all 30 WHO collaborating centres in Canada to facilitate exchange and collaboration among these centres of excellence in diverse areas of public and population health.

From 2007 to 2012, he served as Associate Scientific Director of PrioNet Canada, a $35 million Network of Centres of Excellence established to address the risks associated with transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. Dr. Krewski served on both the Research Management Committee and Board of Directors for the network during this period. As part of this initiative, he worked on the development of risk projection models to help understand the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or ‘mad cow disease’, in Canada, and the effectiveness of interventions to bring the outbreak under control (Al-Zoughool et al., 2015). Dr. Krewski led the development of an integrated risk management framework for prion diseases, which included twenty cases studies of how the outbreak was handled in different countries and regions around the world (Darshan et al., 2010). An important component of PrioNet was an international outreach initiative, which involved information exchange meetings with scientists and regulators in North America: this initiative involved a series of seven international meetings organized by PrioNet Canada in North America, Europe and Asia, including a tri-partite policy workshop involving senior government officials from Canada, the United States and Mexico (Cashman et al., 2009).

Dr. Daniel Krewski subsequently developed an integrated risk management framework for carbon capture and storage (CCS) as part of a $50 million Network of Centres of Excellence, Carbon Management Canada, operating between 2010 and 2015 (Darshan et al., 2019). CCS technology can is increasingly being deployed worldwide to capturing CO2 emissions from industrial sources and sequestering them underground, thereby helping to limit GHG emissions responsible for climate change into the atmosphere. Shell Quest [1], the first large-scale Canadian commercial carbon sequestration project, was commissioned in 2018. The knowledge gained with CCS was subsequently used to examine potential risks associated with hydraulic fracturing (Larkin et al., 2018), with the overall objective of ensuring safe and effective deployment of technological innovation.

Prior to joining the University of Ottawa in 1998, Dr. Daniel Krewski held a number of research and management positions in Health Canada, including serving as Director of Risk Management and Senior Branch Advisor for Health Risk Assessment in the former Health Protection Branch of the Department. While with Health Canada, Dr. Krewski laid the groundwork for the Departmental Decision-Making Framework for Identifying, Assessing, and Managing Health Risks [2]. More recently, Dr. Krewski was closely involved in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s NexGen project [3], which, building on the NRC vision for the future of toxicity testing, proposed a new framework for the next generation of risk science in 2014 (Krewski et al., 2014). The development and refinement of structured, yet flexible, frameworks to guide risk decision making has been a longstanding fundamental component of Dr. Krewski’s professional activities.

Dr. Krewski spent the first ten years of his career working on food safety in Health Canada’s Food and Drug Directorate. During this period, he worked on analyses of data from Nutrition Canada, a study of dietary habits of over 22,000 Canadians, and on the design and analysis of national food monitoring surveys to ensure the safety of the food supply. While at Health Canada, Dr. Krewski worked with food research scientists on chemical hazards that may be present in foods, including a long-term bioassay of the artificial sweetener saccharin that was subjected to restrictions as a direct food additive based on this work. Dr. Krewski later served as Chief of the Biostatistics and Computer Applications Division in the Environmental Health Directorate of Health Canada, working with staff across the Directorate on a wide range of environmental health issues, including air pollution and environmental and occupational exposure to ionizing radiation.

From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Krewski was served both Senior Branch Advisor, Health Risk Assessment to the Assistant Deputy Minister of the former Health Protection Branch of Health Canada. From 1995 to 1997, was Acting Director of the Bureau of Chemical Hazards in the Branch’s Environmental Health Directorate, responsible for four divisions focused on toxicological

research, environmental chemistry, bioregional health effects, and administration of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. In his final year with Health Canada, Dr. Krewski served as Director, Risk Management, within the office of the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Health Protection Branch.

Throughout his career, Dr. Krewski has devoted a significant portion of this time to serving on expert panels convened to address important public and population health risk issues of national and international importance. From 1992 to 1996, Dr. Krewski represented Canada on the Scientific Council of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the operating agency of the World Health Organization charged with identifying causes of human cancer. Dr. Krewski served on the US National Research Council’s Committee on Toxicology (1996-2002), Board on Environmental Studies on Toxicology (1999-2004), and Board on Radiation Effects Research (2002-2007). From 1998 to 2004, Dr. Krewski served as Chair of the US NRC’s Subcommittee on Acute Exposure Guideline Levels, which, working in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency National Advisory Committee, oversaw the development of short term exposure guidelines for a large number of toxic substances [4]. An important methodological aspect of this work was the publication of standing operating procedures for developing these guidelines [5].

From 2004 to 2007, Dr. Krewski served as Chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Toxicity Testing and Assessment of Environmental Agents. The committee’s final report, Toxicity Testing in the 21^st Century: A Vision and a Strategy (NRC, 2007) laid out a bold vision for transforming toxicity testing, building on scientific advances such as high-throughput in vitro testing and computational toxicology. This vision received international support from the scientific and regulatory communities, and has led to a paradigm shift in the practice of toxicological risk assessment (Krewski et al., 2020).

From 2011 to 2016, he served on Scientific Advisory Committee of the Council of Canadian Academies [6], which provides science advice to the federal government on a wide range of issues of national and international importance. He was a member of the World Health Organization Scientific Advisory Committee on Health Risks of Air Pollution in Europe from 2011-2013 (Heroux et al., 2015). Dr. Krewski currently serves as a member of the Chief Science Advisor for Canada’s Expert Panel on COVID-19.

[1] https://www.shell.ca/en_ca/about-us/projects-and-sites/quest-carbon-capture-and-storage-project.html

[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/science-research/science-advice-decision-making/decision-making-framework-science-research.html

[3] https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/risk/recordisplay.cfm?deid=286690

[4] https://www.epa.gov/aegl

[5] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10122/standing-operating-procedures-for-developing-acute-exposure-guideline-levels-for-hazardous-chemicals

[6] https://cca-reports.ca/