Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Prof Brand's primary research interest sits on the interface between evidence and policy in the realm of population health. He has helped develop innovative methods for characterizing the uncertainty in human health risk assessments, and for integrating those uncertainty assessments within the decision process. His interest in the decision process, extends to health risk management (teaching a course in Risk Management in Health Care) and to health valuation (teaching a course in Health Economics). Prof Brand has also developed novel approximations and heuristics for predicting the health impact of interventions; methods which help identify the quantitative link between health expectancy and health gap (such as DALYs) measures.
Led a study that quantified the population health impact of residential radon exposure in Canada. Study employed two dimensional uncertainty analysis, and revealed/developed some heuristics for sensitivity analysis. Work drew upon BEIR-VI work benefiting from experience of coauthors, Zielinski and Krewski. Developed a set of approximations for computing time-integrated measures of health impact. The approximations, which are derived from life-table methods, provide more general insight, enabling quantitative links across different summary measures of population health impact. Contributed to a Risk Perception study conducted on a large random sample of Canadians.
Developed a model (under the direction of Tom Mckone) for assessing the fate and transport, and consequent human health risks, of Tritium releases. Worked on the question of homegrown food related exposure pathway for human health risk assessment. Contributed to efforts to help calibrate, and groundtruth CalTOX and related fugacity-based compartmental models. Studied the behavior of subsurface contaminant transport models.