Public Health Summer Institute 2025:
Building Wellbeing Societies & Communities
ONLINE EVENT
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Scientific Program Committee
We are pleased to introduce Dr. Trevor Hancock and Dr. Lindsay McLaren as our Scientific Program Committee Co-Chairs for our 2025 Summer Institute.
Dr. Trevor Hancock – SPC Co-Chair
Retired Professor & Senior Scholar
School of Public Health & Social Policy
Associate Member of the Faculty of Graduate Studies
University of Victoria
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a public health physician and health promotion consultant. He ‘retired’ in 2018 from his role as Professor and Senior Scholar at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria.
He is one of the founders of the (now global) Healthy Cities and Communities movement and co-founded both the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care, and was the first leader of the Green Party of Canada in the 1980s.
His recent focus has been the combination of his two main areas: The relationship between human health and the natural environment – among other things he led a major CPHA report on the Ecological Determinants of Health, released in 2015 – and linking the healthy and sustainable community approaches through the concept of a ‘One Planet’ region.
In ‘retirement’ he has started a new NGO, Conversations for a One Planet Region, to explore and popularise these ideas locally; works with Doctors for Planetary Health in BC; is the interim Convenor of the emerging Canadian Coalition for Planetary Health and a Wellbeing Society, and is a member of the IUHPE’s Global Working Group on Waiora Planetary Health. In addition, since 2014 he has written a weekly column (monthly since the start of 2025) on these and other population and public health issues for the Times Colonist newspaper in Victoria – available at https://trevorhancock.org.
Dr. Lindsay McLaren – SPC Co-Chair
Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary
Research Associate, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Lindsay McLaren PhD is a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary where her scholarship and teaching focus on social determinants and political economy of health. She is also a Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (National Office).
For her research in dental public health, Lindsay held a CIHR/PHAC Applied Public Health Chair award (2014-19) and received the 2019 CIHR-IPPH Trailblazer Award (mid-career category) which is a career achievement award that recognizes exceptional contributions in population and public health research.
Lindsay is past-president (2014-18) of the Alberta Public Heath Association and currently serves as Senior Editor for the Canadian Journal of Public Health. She also serves as Co-Editor in Chief for the Journal of Critical Public Health, which is a community non-profit journal formed following a mass editorial board resignation from corporate publishers.
Scientific Program Committee Members
| Shannon Turner | Executive Director Public Health Association of BC |
| Allysha Ram | Policy Analyst Population and Public Health, Fraser Health Authority |
| Lara Frederick | Regional Manager Public Health Practice, Northern Health |
| Christina Lavoie | Operations Manager Public Health Association of BC |
| Selenna Ho | Communications Director Public Health Association of BC |
| Kelsey Pienaar | Senior Logistics Officer Public Health Association of BC |
| Cheryl Christopher | Administrative Coordinator Public Health Association of BC |
| Becky Meyer | Administrative Coordinator Public Health Association of BC |