Canada's Health Researcher of the Year – 2010

Dr. Clyde Hertzman
MD, MSc, FRCPC
Director, HELP
Canada Research Chair in Population Health and Human Development
Professor, UBC School of Population and Public Health
Vancouver, British Columbia

The winner of Canada's Health Researcher of the Year Award provides evidence that the early years do matter.

It's common sense, really: your earliest experiences can have an important impact on who you grow up to be. But when it comes to creating policies and designing educational programs, common sense isn't much to go on. Decision makers need evidence. That's where Dr. Clyde Hertzman at the University of British Columbia comes in.

The winner of the 2010 Canada's Health Researcher of the Year Award, Dr. Hertzman has dedicated his career to measuring the degree to which early childhood development can be used as an indicator of health – that is, to what extent do your early experiences determine how healthy you will be later in life?

"Starting in the late 1980s, I became interested in the fact that even in wealthy societies like Canada, you get increasing health status as you go from the bottom to the top of the socioeconomic spectrum," says Dr. Hertzman. "What fascinated me about that was that it wasn't just related to one or two kinds of disease processes, but that it cut across a wide range of disease processes and replicated itself on new diseases as they came into society. So that there was something going on that couldn't just be explained by access to medical care or lifestyle. There was something much deeper."

He thought the best way to explain it was to go back to the early years. But there are many factors that influence early child development, from family influences to school environments. So Dr. Hertzman had to take a very multidisciplinary approach, and look at the way the environment "gets under the skin" of a young child and affects brain and body development.

"For example, we have someone who is doing research to understand the impact of residential schools on aboriginal populations," says Dr. Hertzman. "So that's putting the people who are doing cellular research together with the people who are interested in social policies that lasted for nearly a century in Canada. In a way, bringing the society to the cell frames the questions, and bringing the cell to the society increases the credibility of the answers."

And the answers his team has generated are having a tremendous influence on national and international policy. He helped write the Canadian Children's Agenda, a federal/provincial agreement to start supporting early childhood development directly as part of a strategy to support children's development more broadly. His work has also helped influence policies such as Ontario's expansion to full-day kindergarten at age four and five. And the Human Early Learning Partnership at UBC has played the role of the global knowledge hub for the WHO Commission on the social determinants of health. As a result of that, their work is influencing global policy.

One of Dr. Hertzman's next projects will be to design a world-class developmental monitoring program for Canada, so that researchers can actually link together data on the state of children's development at different key times throughout their early and middle childhood, along with administrative data, and determine whether or not children across the country are really thriving.

"It is common sense to think that the early years matter, but we're in an era where there's lots of common sense floating around. We need a strong scientific basis for saying the early years are important, and some of that scientific basis comes from understanding how brain cells develop and how different periods of competency emerge. This gives the common sense notion some credibility and urgency it wouldn't otherwise have."

Canada's Health Researcher of the Year Award honours researchers who have demonstrated excellence in their field. This prestigious award recognizes innovation, creativity, leadership and dedication to health research, providing world-class researchers with funding to pursue critical research and to support and mentor trainees.