51社区黑料

by Sharon Mah

51社区黑料鈥檚 (SFU) Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation (VPRI) has recognized the outstanding research accomplishments of Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) Professor Dr. Kelley Lee with an 51社区黑料Legacy Award.

The Legacy Award, one of the highest Research Excellence Awards that can be conferred on a senior researcher at the university, recognizes exceptional investigators and leaders who have set a standard of excellence and inspired change 鈥� beyond their specific work or domain 鈥� in how research is created, conducted and/or conveyed.

鈥淚 am honoured and grateful to be recognized for this award,鈥� says Lee, who is Scientific Co-Director of the . Lee is also the Lead for the Pandemics and Borders Project, and currently holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Global Health Governance.

Building a new field of scholarship

Lee is a scholar whose vision, interdisciplinary approaches, and innovation enabled her to shape how global health research is conceptualized, conducted and communicated. 鈥淢y focus is on the institutional arrangements and power dynamics that shape health cooperation across borders,鈥� she explains. Lee was the first investigator to undertake theorizing and analysis on the impacts of globalization on health, building a new field in the process. She not only trained several generations of global health governance scholars, but influenced how governments, international organizations, and the general public understand and respond to shared population health threats such as pandemics or the commercial determinants of health.

Lee was among the first researchers to observe that the rapid spread of economic globalization was creating new health threats, many of which transcended national borders. This work initially focused on transnational corporations manufacturing and selling their products to growing markets worldwide, many containing health-harming ingredients such as tobacco and high fructose corn syrup.  The public health research and policy communities struggled to address these crossborder challenges, often driven by powerful economic and geopolitical interests.  Lee drew on interdisciplinary approaches to strengthen collective action for protecting and promoting population health in a globalizing world.  From 1999 to 2003, she chaired the World Health Organization鈥檚 (WHO) Scientific Resource Group on Globalisation, Trade and Health, which provided some of the earliest systems thinking on how the expansion of international trade and investment, and overall global economic integration, were impacting the health of populations across the world. Many of Lee鈥檚 early publications from this period provided the first rigorous conceptual scaffolding for the field of global health governance to flourish. Her published texts 鈥� several translated into Chinese and Arabic 鈥� remain foundational for graduate studies programs across the world.

While shifting attention from international to global health research, Lee was also pioneering new methods for understanding how transnational corporations influence public health policy worldwide using the internal documents of the companies themselves. Prompted by the WHO Tobacco Free Initiative, she led the Guildford Archiving Project, securing funding from The Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK, Health Canada and others to secure, digitize, and make freely accessible on-line the contents of the Guildford Depository, an archive of internal British American Tobacco (BAT) documents.  She recounts: 鈥淥ur team鈥檚 analysis of [BAT鈥檚] documents, enabled by this enormous effort, revealed the global strategies that tobacco companies used to expand its markets in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America; to circumvent regulatory environments; to facilitate cigarette smuggling; to influence trade policy; and to fund scientific research as a form of corporate influence.鈥� Revelations from industry documents fundamentally changed tobacco control:  the industry was no longer seen to be 鈥榮imply doing business as usual.鈥�  Evidence produced by researchers using industry documents directly informed negotiations on the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

An expert voice in uncertain times

Lee was a well-established and sought-after media expert when the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread across borders in March 2020.  Her decades of scholarly work on global health governance 鈥� which includes more than 300 peer-reviewed publications, 15 books, and 70 book chapters 鈥� provided governments, international organizations, and the general public with an understanding of the institutions that swung into action led by WHO. 鈥淸I was asked] to communicate evidence about travel measures, international health regulations, WHO and pandemic preparedness to public audiences around the world when expert guidance was critically needed,鈥� she explains of the hundreds of interviews she completed during this time. Additionally, Lee also published more than a dozen public-facing op-eds to reach and inform general audiences and policy makers with evidence-based advice to counter the speculation, mis- and disinformation running rampant in media and online spaces.

Parallel to the media outreach work she was undertaking, Lee also initiated the Pandemics and Borders Project when it was clear that governments were struggling with border management in a globally hypermobile world. 鈥淎t a time when governments worldwide were being forced to make difficult choices about who could and could not travel, and under what conditions, our Pandemics and Borders Project generated much needed evidence and insights in real-time.  We are now working with the Public Health Agency of Canadaand WHO on what we can learn for [the] next [health emergency].鈥�

Five years later, Lee continues to shape the standard by which Canadian pandemic preparedness research is conducted and communicated. Through her latest project, the Bridge Research Consortium, she and Universit茅 Laval professor Eve Dub茅 co-lead efforts to address the societal and behavioural factors that may impact efforts to strengthen Canada鈥檚 biomanufacturing capacity. Their team is working to ensure that the scientific innovations needed during possible future pandemics, notably new vaccines and therapeutics, will be accessible and trusted by the Canadian public. 鈥淏oth are essential to sustain collective action during any major public health emergency.鈥�