Dr. Hawken completed his Master of Science in Applied Statistics at the University of Guelph in early 2001 and then spent five years as a biostatistician with the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) at McMaster University/Hamilton Health Sciences under the leadership of Dr. Salim Yusuf. He then spent two years at the Canadian Institute for Health Information from 2005-2007 as a senior analyst and program lead for Research and Data Mining.
He subsequently joined the University of Ottawa to work with Dr. Julian Little as biostatistician and research manager for Dr. Little's Human Genome Epidemiology Research program from 2007-2009. From 2009 to 2015 Dr. Hawken served as the founding lead analyst for ICES uOttawa, the Ottawa satellite unit of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, under the leadership of Dr. Carl van Walraven. Dr. Hawken completed his PhD in Epidemiology in 2014 at the University of Ottawa.
Career highlights:
- While at the PHRI, Dr. Hawken served as the study statistician for the INTERHEART study, a global case-control study of risk factors for acute myocardial infarction. This landmark study led to several high impact publications in The Lancet, co-authored with Dr. Salim Yusuf, which have collectively been cited more than 12,000 times.
- Working with Dr. Julian Little at uOttawa, Dr. Hawken helped to evaluate the utility of germline genomic profiling as an adjunct screening tool in colorectal cancer screening. The results of this research were published in Human Genetics and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute as well as a book chapter in Human Genome Epidemiology.
- Upon joining the OHRI, Dr. Hawken contributed to the successful launch of the ICES uOttawa satellite unit, which opened in the spring of 2010. He served as the lead analyst for ICES uOttawa since its inception, where he has had primary responsibility for the recruitment, training and day-to-day management of a team of ten skilled and high-functioning statistical analysts/SAS programmers.
- At ICES uOttawa, working with Dr. Kumanan Wilson, Dr. Hawken has helped build a successful research program in vaccine safety and newborn screening metabolomics using ICES health administrative data linked to screening metabolite and perinatal data from Newborn Screening Ontario (NSO) and the Better Outcomes Registry and Network (BORN). This research has led to numerous publications in high impact journals including Vaccine, Pediatrics and The American Journal of Epidemiology, as well as forming the core of his PhD thesis work, which he completed in 2014.
Dr. Hawken is currently continuing to pursue his research interests as an ICES adjunct scientist, as a scientist with the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and as an assistant professor with the School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine.