Board Of Directors

Michael Kruse

Chair

Michael is an advanced-care paramedic in York Region, just north of Toronto, Ontario. A theatrical lighting designer as well, he re-trained in 2005 as an EMT-Paramedic Specialist at the University of Iowa and as an advanced care paramedic at Durham College. Michael is currently enrolled at the University of Toronto working towards an undergraduate degree in physiology. Michael has been active in the science advocacy community for 3 years and blogs at Huffingtonpost.ca and Skepticnorth.com. He is committed to a compassionate defense of science for the betterment of all Canadians.

Jamie Williams

Executive Director

Jamie is a Software Developer in Vancouver, BC. Since he moved to Canada in 2007 he has been heavily involved in a number of science advocacy organizations and is an experienced organizer and volunteer manager. Jamie's work for Bad Science Watch is motivated by a desire to improve the lives of his family, friends, and community through better policy and regulation in the areas of health and the environment. He aims to see Bad Science Watch set new standards of professionalism and effectiveness for activism countering bad science.

 

Carol Parlow, MD

Secretary

Carol is a medical doctor with a specialist practice in psychiatry. Throughout her career she has pursued her interest in the promotion of evidence-based medical practice and the identification and repudiation of pseudoscience in medicine and more broadly in the health science arena. Carol has joined the Board Directors of Bad Science Watch in order to be involved in taking action against unsupported health claims. She believes that people are often disadvantaged in their health decisions by a bewildering array of both good and bad information and that public policy should clearly address this confusion. She hopes Bad Science Watch will inspire members of the public to learn more about the accurate evaluation of health claims and to join in educating our policy makers.

Shannon Sheilds

Shannon is an administrator and financial manager. After completing post-graduate studies in Adult Education at York University, she has provided governance, finance, and administrative consulting to many non-profit organizations for over 20 years. A member of the Toronto Association for Science and Reason, she joined Bad Science Watch due to the concern that too many public policy and personal health decisions are being made on the basis of unsupported claims and misinformation. She believes critical thinking and education is the best way to ensure that policy and personal decisions are, first and foremost, founded on evidence-based science.

Robert Tarzwell, MD, FRCPC

Robert is a Vancouver-based medical specialist who practices both psychiatry and nuclear medicine, with scholarly interests in psychotherapy outcomes research and functional brain-imaging in psychiatric disorders. He is also on the Clinical Faculty of the UBC School of Medicine. He has written and lectured publicly on the importance of vaccination and to counter the distortions of science made by anti-vaccine activists. He has also produced a number of articles with the intent of calming public anxiety about Fukushima radiation by directly tackling the gross misinformation that was spread by those hoping to profit from fear mongering. Robert's motivation stems from his time in medical school when, for the first time in almost two generations, parents were bringing very sick children to hospital with Whooping Cough, a disease which had been stamped out by vaccination in the 1960's. Vaccination refusal rates had been climbing due to local misinformation campaigns. This left a stark impression on him: bad science kills and maims. Prior to medical school, Robert was an air navigator in the Canadian Forces, with an operational tour on an anti-submarine warfare squadron and a staff tour at Air Command Headquarters.