Darren Brenner is a cancer epidemiologist with over a decade of experience conducting observational and intervention research on chronic disease risk and survival. Darren currently leads a program of research at the University of Calgary focused on using big data and precision health analytics to examine cancer risk and outcomes. To date he has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals in the areas of oncology and epidemiology. He is sought out for his epidemiologic expertise in the areas of cancer epidemiology and cancer outcomes research. Darren has led several large multi-centered analyses of observational (real world) datasets as well as numerous systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses in the oncology space. His team is actively engaged in studying the impact of genetic and molecular markers on the prediction of risk and treatment response for several solid tumors. He was the co-lead of the Canadian Population Attributable Risk of Cancer (ComPARe) project that was a comprehensive set of analyses examining the current and future burden of cancer in Canada related to all known modifiable cancer risk factors. In 2019 he was selected as the co-recipient of the Canadian Cancer Society’s William E. Rawls Prize recognizing a young investigator whose outstanding contributions have the potential to lead to or have already led to important advances in cancer control in Canada.
He completed his PhD in epidemiology at the University of Toronto with a specialization in genetic epidemiology followed by a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization in Lyon France. He then continued his postdoctoral training at the Department of Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Research with Dr. Christine Friedenreich. After this additional training, he began his career as a Research Scientist in the Department of CEPR before transitioning to his current position at the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor.