2008/2009 Academic Year Doctoral Fellowship

Andrea Smith, who is among the first students to enrol in McMaster University’s new Health Policy PhD program, has been awarded a CHEPA Doctoral Fellowship for 2008-09. She will be pursuing research into the importance of considering ethical, social and policy implications of population and public health research.
Smith plans to address the disjuncture between research and practice in the field of population and public health. Typically, such health research is conceived and framed without consideration of ethical, social and policy implications of potential findings. Smith plans to address this by conducting an ethical and philosophical analysis of the connections between research methods and interventions in public and population health.
She is being supervised by CHEPA member Mita Giacomini, professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Smith has a Bachelor’s degree from St. Thomas University in Fredericton, and is completing a Master’s degree in community health and epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She previously studied at McMaster in the Health Research Methodology graduate program.
A native of Burlington, Smith has lived in Halifax for the past five years, and has worked as a research assistant at Dalhousie University since 2005.