Corinne Ong

I joined the School of Occupational and Public Health in July 2008 and teach courses in communicable diseases and environmental health.

Prior to this, I was a senior scientist in the provincial public health laboratory at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control for 15 years and worked closely with the Environmental Microbiology section. I also held a faculty appointment at the University of British Columbia as an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. I have been actively involved in training students in the bachelor of Medical Laboratory Sciences program and was a week chair in the Foundations of Medicine course for first-year medical students.

I have carried out research on the molecular epidemiology of cryptosporidiosis and cyclosporiasis, both of which are emerging water and foodborne parasitic diseases. Within the past five years, I have received funding from several agencies, including the Canadian Institute of Health Research (for a collaborative global health pilot project on emerging food and waterborne parasites in Vietnam) and the National Science and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant (for a program on novel genotypes of Cryptosporidium). Aside from participating in the investigation of various waterborne outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis in British Columbia, I was invited by Health Canada to assist in the investigation of the 2001 cryptosporidiosis outbreak in North Battleford, Saskatchewan and by the United States Environmental Protection Agency National Center for Environmental Research to serve on two grant review panels.

I earned my BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Birmingham in the United Kindgom and trained as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Medical Microbiology in the London Hospital Medical College, University of London. I then joined the Department of Medical Parasitology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London as a research fellow. Over these seven years, my postdoctoral research focused on the research and development of novel tuberculosis and malaria vaccines. I also participated in the teaching of several postgraduate medical programs during this time including master's level courses in clinical microbiology and medical parasitology.