Current research

July 2025: Chris McLeod, PWHS Director, and Lindsey Richardson, Associate Professor in the UBC Department of Sociology, are co-principal investigators on a successful CIHR project grant focused on reducing substance-use related harm among people working in construction and trades in BC. In the context of the ongoing, intractable challenges linked to drug use and drug-related harm, people working in construction and trades bear a disproportionate burden of this harm, and there is a lack of published, action-oriented research in this area. The work funded by this grant will fill critical research and knowledge mobilization gaps.

Jun 2025: Congratulations to Chizitara Nkwopara, a recent MSc OEH graduate, and Harman Sandhu, a current MSc OEH student, who received the Best Student Oral Presentation Awards at this year’s conference.

June 2025: PWHS researchers will give five presentations at the Canadian Association for Research on Work and Health Conference, June 3-2, 2025 in Ottawa, ON.

May 2025: Immigrant workers are overly represented in high risk and precarious jobs that are not commensurate with their background, skills and experience. This study examined the association between use of government-funded employment-related (ER) settlement services and paid employment of immigrants arriving in Canada between 2015 and 2017. The cohort was restricted to immigrants with no paid employment in their year of landing to examine the direct impact of ER service on subsequent employment. Immigrants displayed a higher odds of paid employment the year following the ER service, compared to immigrants who did not access ER services. Read more in PLoS One.