Dan Werb (he/him)

Dan Werb, PhD, is an epidemiologist and policy analyst with expertise in overdose, drug policy, and the continuum of care for people with substance use disorders and psychiatric comorbidities. Dr. Werb is the St. Michael’s Hospital/University of Toronto Chair in Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders. He is an Associate Professor with dual appointments at the Institute of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation at the University of Toronto and in the Division of Infectious Diseases & Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. He is Director of the Centre on Drug Policy Evaluation (CDPE; www.cdpe.org), which conducts high-impact implementation science and observational research to improve the measurement and execution of policies and interventions to respond to substance-related harms. Dr. Werb is an inaugural winner of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse Avenir Award (2015), awarded to creative new investigators proposing highly innovative research at the intersection of HIV and substance use, a recipient of a Traiblazer Award (2017) from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and is the winner of a Pandemic Preparedness and Health Emergencies: Early Career Investigator Prize (2022) from the Centre for Research on Pandemic Preparedness and Health Emergencies at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Dr. Werb conducts extensive knowledge translation on drug policy and public health, through print and radio journalism, and is the winner of a 2014 Canadian National Magazine Award for his popular science writing, with work published in The New York Times, TIME, Salon, The Globe & Mail, Buzzfeed, and other outlets. His first book, which tracks his investigation of Tijuana’s femicide, City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands, was published in June 2019, was selected by the New York Times Book Review as a 2019 Summer Read and was named one of five finalists for the 2019 Canadian Governor-General’s Award in Non-Fiction. Most recently, he is the author of The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure (2022), which chronicles the development of coronavirus science. Among other honours the book was selected as one of the Top 10 Science Books of the Season by Publishers Weekly, and is the winner of the 2022 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Book Award.