P.O.V.

Ideas at the intersection of evidence, policy and change.

I write about the questions that emerge when scientific evidence meets real-world decision-making — particularly in global health, substance use, mental health, emerging technologies and public policy.

What’s on my mind

Responsible AI requires more than principles
What implementation actually demands from health systems.

Why evidence-informed policy is harder than it sounds
The distance between knowing what works and making it happen.

Public health has a communication problem
Why accuracy is necessary, but not sufficient, for effective risk communication.

What international experience teaches us about policy transfer
Why good ideas do not automatically survive a change in context.

Making evidence useful means identifying what matters, understanding uncertainty and translating research into guidance, policy, priorities and action.

Explore selected projects I am leading and collaborating on:

Mental Health & Substance Use Health

Better evidence matters most when it changes conditions.

Substance use and mental health have been central threads throughout my career. My work has examined cannabis regulation, alcohol policy, substance-use treatment, risk communication, concurrent disorders, and population-level approaches to reducing harm.

A consistent thread through my work is looking beyond individual interventions to the systems, policies and environments that shape health at scale.

Selected project:
Measurement Based Care
Better care starts with knowing what works. MBC brings evidence into everyday practice; tracking progress, guiding adjustments, and improving outcomes over time.

Artificial Intelligence & Health-System Innovation

Responsible AI requires more than principles.

Emerging technologies are changing how health information, services and decisions are delivered.

My current projects at CCSA include helping advance national guidance for the responsible use of artificial intelligence in mental health and substance use health care in Canada.

The questions that interest me are larger than the technology itself: who benefits, who bears the risk, who is accountable, and what happens when AI moves from experimentation into health systems at scale?

These are fundamentally questions of governance, evidence and human judgement.

Global Health & Population Health

Good policy does not travel intact.

My perspective has been shaped by working across countries, institutions and health systems.

From national cannabis policy research in Canada, to developmental and behavioural research in Switzerland, mental health and substance-use surveillance in Nigeria among key populations, and technical contributions to WHO initiatives, my career has consistently involved connecting local realities with international evidence.

That experience has reinforced a principle that now underpins much of my work: good policy cannot simply be transferred from one context to another.

Evidence must be interpreted through institutions, culture, political realities, implementation capacity and the populations a policy is intended to serve.