ABOUT
Craig Stephen DVM PhD FCAHS
Dr. Craig Stephen is one of Canada’s leading One Health professionals. He has devoted his career to developing ideas, people, policies and evidence to concurrently promote the health of people and animals and their shared environments. He uses population health and health promotion concepts on a wide set of issues ranging from conservation, to global health, to emerging threat preparedness. This work has been recognized through his election as Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
As a One Health and EcoHealth consultant, Craig works globally with all levels of government, the non-profit sector, community groups, universities and industry to examine complex health issues at the nexus of people, animals and environments. His aim is to help develop sensible, practical and evidence-based policies and promote an inter-species and inter-generational approach to health.
Past Positions
Craig has held several One Health and Environmental Health leadership positions including being the CEO of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, the founder and director of the Centre for Coastal Health, the Scientific Director of the Animal Determinants of Emerging Diseases Research Unit and the founding director of the BC Environmental and Occupational Health Research Network. He held a Canada Research Chair in integrating human and animal health. Craig was a founding faculty member of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Calgary where he was charged with developing ecosystem health components of the program. He was also a faculty member at the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology in the School of Medicine (University of British Columbia) and a Professor at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (University of Saskatchewan).
He began his career as a rural veterinary practitioner, followed by doctoral research on emerging infectious diseases. This led to a position as an infectious disease epidemiologist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. From here his career as an inter-species health practitioner began by the creation of the Centre for Coastal Health, which was the first population health practice devoted to One Health, but preceding the birth of One Health by almost a decade. The Centre was born as emerging infectious began to arise more frequently and severely, leading to an international expansion of the Centre’s work. With an eye on preventing the next emerging environmental threat and creating resilient human-animal systems to cope with them, Craig became a leader in advocating and experimenting with health promotion and harm reduction concepts in a One Health setting. Today he works on building the evidence, expertise and policies to promote and protect the co-dependence of human, animal and environmental health to better prepare the world for the rapid and unprecedented changes of the Anthropocene.
Current Positions
Craig is the Director of the McEachran Institute, a think tank dedicated to future-readying animal health professionals. He is a Clinical Professor at the School of Population and Public Health (University of British Columbia) and an Adjunct Professor at the Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine.