The HEAL Lab is an interdisciplinary health sciences lab at Simon Fraser University studying the social, ecological, and behavioural determinants of health, happiness, and wellbeing.
HEAL is a health sciences lab focused on the upstream social-ecological determinants of health, happiness, and wellbeing. Rather than treating health as the product of individual choices alone, we study how the social and natural environments people live in - their relationships, communities, neighbourhoods, and the broader ecological and political conditions around them - produce and reproduce unequal health.
Our work spans original epidemiological research, community-based engagement, and knowledge translation. We build evidence, then mobilize it into curricula, digital tools, and policy so that what we learn reaches the people, practitioners, and systems who can act on it. That through-line - from discovery to mobilization to translation - is set out in Dr. Card's theoretical framework.
The lab's research is organized around three programs, each a case study in how the social and ecological conditions of people's lives shape health, and in how those conditions can be changed to distribute health more fairly.
Human beings are social animals. Understanding and strengthening our social lives is central to good health, and to closing the gaps in who gets to be healthy.
Explore the programWe are deeply enmeshed in our environments, depending on them for food, shelter, and the basic conditions of a stable life. As those environments are destabilized, the resulting distress falls first and hardest on the communities least able to absorb it.
Explore the programEpidemics rarely arrive alone. HIV, substance use, overdose, and infectious disease cluster together and fall hardest on people already pushed to the margins. Studying how these crises feed one another points to where action can make health more fairly shared.
Explore the programHEAL brings together a principal investigator, data analysts, doctoral and masters students, research assistants, and volunteers working across the lab's programs.
The lab develops openly available training materials and courses that bring health-research methods into reach for students, professionals, and the public.
A hands-on module teaching statistical analysis of survey data in R Studio, with accompanying datasets, a questionnaire, and a data dictionary.
Open the moduleMethods in health research and evaluation - a practical guide to designing and assessing public-health research and programs.
Read the guide (PDF)An open, interactive course building core competencies in epidemiologic and biostatistical reasoning across five undergraduate and graduate units.
Open the courseFor collaboration enquiries, trainee applications, or speaking invitations, please reach out to Dr. Card directly.
