The pace of societal change is accelerating. Pandemics, artificial intelligence, space exploration, climate change, political upheavals, anomalous sightings, and even the new ways in which we communicate with each other are all contributing to an ever more confusing and frantic world. As a global health epidemiologist and science communicator, Professor Deonandan sees his role as bringing measurement and critical appraisal to whatever evidence exists to help us navigate this thickening soup of competing influences.
Much of his scholastic output involves the epidemiology of reproductive technologies and the ethics of global health interventions, as well digital technologies in health care and the creative use of administrative data to answer questions surrounding population health. A significant portion of Professor Deonandan’s global health work has been conducted in the interior of Guyana, where he has worked to both measure and mitigate the health challenges experienced by remote Indigenous peoples.
But during the COVID pandemic, Professor Deonandan focused solely on communicating infection risk and vaccine science to the general public, assessing the potency of mitigation strategies, charting the trajectory of the epidemic, and weighing the changing evidence to advise on pandemic response policies. His expertise in these areas continues to be expressed as expert testimony in multiple legal cases, and in the advice he provides to government and corporate clients.
A widely published and award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction, in 2009 Professor Deonandan founded the Interdisciplinary Journal of Health Sciences, a bilingual, peer-reviewed science journal managed entirely by students, though he serves as the journal’s executive editor. Professor Deonandan believes that encouraging writing and general communication skills among scientists is both important and pressing.
To that end, as the holder of the University of Ottawa Research Chair in University Teaching for 2023, Professor Deonandan is examining how artificial intelligence can improve pedagogy, with specific focus on using large language models to improve writing skills among health science students. His larger vision is to reimagine the wider role of the university in society in the face of rapid technological change.