Canada's Premier Young Researcher – 2010

Dr. David Hammond
PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Studies
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario

The winner of this year's Canada's Premier Young Researcher Award studies cigarette labelling and how it can be used to influence behaviour.

A graphic warning label on a discarded cigarette pack got Dr. David Hammond hooked.

"I saw a cigarette pack lying on the ground, and I saw one of the picture warnings staring back at me, and I thought 'Wouldn't it be neat to be working on interventions that affected so many people and were so prominent?'"

He was a psychology student at the time, and he was thinking about going into clinical psychology. But he was persuaded by mentors to pursue impact-oriented research. It became clear to him that tobacco control offered a unique opportunity to influence population-level health.

Under the guidance of two important mentors, Drs. Geoff Fong at the University of Waterloo and Roy Cameron at the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact, Dr. Hammond went on to work on the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC). The Framework was the first global health treaty negotiated under the WHO, and it has helped countries all around the world shape their tobacco control policies.

His work on the treaty is mainly concerned with packaging and labelling policies – for example, the effectiveness of graphic picture warnings, and how the tobacco industry designs the packs to appeal to people.

"Why do we care about packaging? It is the most prominent form of (tobacco) marketing remaining in Canada," explains Dr. Hammond. "You can learn a lot about the tobacco companies, how they communicate and try to recruit new users through the packaging."

His other research focus is product testing and regulation – how cigarettes are designed, their chemical composition, and how much nicotine they contain. According to Dr. Hammond, there are virtually no rules about what goes into or what comes out of a tobacco product and few public health researchers who examine tobacco product science.

As part of his research, he sits on FCTC Treaty working groups and helps advise the 171 signatories on the treaty on effective regulatory measures.

"It's a unique opportunity – it's policy making at the highest level," says Dr. Hammond. "If new regulatory guidelines are introduced into the treaty, it has the potential to affect literally billions of people. From a research perspective, it is incredibly rewarding to be bringing evidence forward in this unique policy environment and have it translated into policies and regulations that go around the world."

There are still 5 million people that smoke in Canada, and over 1 billion around the world, so there is still a lot of work to do on the tobacco front. But Dr. Hammond also hopes to apply some of his findings in the field of nutrition.

"If we are serious about reducing obesity in Canada, we need to make healthy eating easier for consumers and to provide nutrition information that is more accessible and easier to understand. I am currently studying the impact of nutrition information on menus and menu boards, sodium labelling on pre-packaged foods, and ways in which food manufacturers communicate nutrient quality through symbols and packaging," says Dr. Hammond. "I see parallels with my research in tobacco: these are leading threats to public health and we're trying to find big policy solutions that are very cost effective."

He says that as a young researcher, he felt very lucky to have received support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Cancer Society, both of which provided him with salary support for extra research time.

If he could pass one piece of advice on to other young researchers, it would be a lesson he learned from his mentor, Dr. Cameron: "He taught me that if we want to prevent cancer and other chronic diseases, we have to change the environments in which people live, work and play. His mantra was, 'Figure out what the big problems are and then you work backwards to the solution.'"

Canada's Premier Young Researcher Award is a career development prize given to Canada's brightest young researchers at the beginning of their careers. This five-year award represents an incentive for young researchers to pursue their work in Canada. Through this award, CIHR helps ensure that talented, emerging researchers have the support they need to achieve their goals.

Dr. Pierre Chartrand, presenter (left), and awardee, Dr. David Hammond (right).

Dr. David Hammond, winner of Canada's Premier Young Researcher Award, with Dr. Alain Beaudet, CIHR President (left), and His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada (right).