Eric Dewailly
Scientific Director

Dr. Eric Dewailly received a degree in medicine from the University of Lille (France, 1982), then completed specialized studies in public health (CES, Amiens, 1983). He did his residency in community health (Laval University, 1983-85), and holds a Master's Degree in epidemiology (Laval University, 1987) and a Ph.D. in toxicology (Lille, 1990). His professional career includes a stint as a consulting physician in community health at CHUL's Community Health Department in Quebec City between 1987 and 1989, then as the coordinator of the Quebec City area environmental health team until 1998. Since 1998, he has headed up the CHUQ Public Health Research Unit (CHUL building), which includes 40 researchers. He has been a licensed physician in Quebec since 1987. He has also been a professor of environmental health at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Laval University since 1997, where he teaches environmental health to graduate students in the community health and epidemiology programs.

Dr. Dewailly's research focuses mainly on the impact of oceans on human health: the contamination of the marine food chain and the exposure of fishing communities to heavy metals and organochlorines; the effect of these contaminants on the reproductive, immune, and neurological systems; nutrition and fish in the diet; microbiological contamination; marine toxins, etc. Since 1989, he has made over 200 scientific presentations and published 100 scientific articles. Up to and including 1998, he had received some $28 million in grants.

Dr. Dewailly's international activities address the same areas of inquiry. He represents Canada on the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program/Health (AMAP-Health), is co-chair of the environmental group of the International Union for Circumpolar Health (IUCH), and heads up the medical section of the International Center for Ocean and Human Health at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. He is also active in developing countries, where he is involved in numerous projects, notably on DDT in Mexico, ciguatera in the Caribbean, and pesticides in Africa.
 
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