World-renowned vaccine expert to work at Dalhousie

Dr. Katherine O’brien envisions a world where no child will die from a vaccine-preventable disease.

“Every one of us is alive today because of vaccines,” said O’brien, who was recently awarded the Canada 150 Research Chair in Vaccinology and Global Health at Dalhousie University.

“There are diseases like smallpox that have been eradicated so no children get vaccinated against smallpox anymore because it doesn’t exist anymore. We all have survived and thrived because of the power of vaccines.”

As a world-renowned pediatric infectious disease expert and vaccinologist, O’brien has worked to help governments in developing countries put as much vaccine into children’s arms as possible.

“Vaccines are such a powerful tool and for me there is a compelling moral imperative that those vaccines are used where they’re most needed,” she said in an interview Thursday from Ottawa, where the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council announced the latest Canada 150 positions.

“And so my focus has been on bringing life-saving vaccines to the families and communities where children still die of vaccine preventable diseases.”

Seven of the 24 one-time Canada 150 grants announced Thursday were worth $7 million, including O’brien’s chair at Dalhousie.

Currently a professor of international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, O’brien will begin her tenure at Dalhousie on Dec. 1.

“I wasn’t actually looking to leave (Johns Hopkins) but this opportunity came along and when a fantastic opportunity like this comes, a one-time opportunity, it’s very hard to say no,” said O’brien, who was educated in Ontario and Quebec but whose family has deep roots in Halifax and the Annapolis Valley.

“I’m Canadian. I’ve been away for 30 years and we’re very open to coming back and being able to make my contributions back in Canada.”

She will continue her international work in collaboration with her new colleagues at the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie, as well as the researchers at Johns Hopkins and other institutions she’s worked with for decades.