Sarah Henderson is a Senior Scientist in Environmental Health Services at BCCDC. She is also an Associate Professor in the UBC School of Population & Public Health.
Dr. Henderson, as the senior environmental health scientist at BCCDC, leads a program of applied research and surveillance to support evidence-based policy for the province. This role requires her to be a generalist rather than a specialist, and her work spans a wide range of topics, including
air pollution from all provincially relevant sources (wildfire smoke, residential woodsmoke, industry, road dust, shipping and vehicles), extreme weather events, radon gas, food safety, water quality and exposures managed by the
Drug and Poison Information Centre (DPIC).
Most of her work requires the collection, processing, integration, analysis and visualization of large health and environmental datasets. Her team works exclusively with the computing environment R, and takes a leadership role in R training across BCCDC and UBC.
Sarah Henderson started her career as an environmental engineer (BASc, UBC, 2000), working on pollution abatement and control. She switched her focus to environmental epidemiology (PhD, UBC, 2009) when she first became interested in the public health consequences of engineering decisions.
Sarah joined the BCCDC in 2010. She enjoys the challenge and diversity of work in environmental public health, and is constantly inspired by the dedication of her colleagues.
