Sheila O'Brien
PhD
Associate Director, Epidemiology & Surveillance
Other Titles/Affiliations:
Adjunct professor, School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa
Research areas
- donor health
- donor criteria
- transfusion-transmissible diseases
- epidemiology
- public health
Brief biography
Dr. Sheila O’Brien completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia and post-doctoral studies at the University of Alberta. She has held the position of Associate Director, Epidemiology & Surveillance at Canadian Blood Services for over 20 years. She is currently a Section Editor for Vox Sanguinis, serves on the Editorial Board for Transfusion, as the Vice-Chair of the Transfusion Transmitted Infectious Diseases Working Party of the International Society of Blood Transfusion and a member of the Donor History Task Force and the Transfusion Transmitted Diseases Committee, AABB.
Research interests
Dr. Sheila O’Brien and her team maintain surveillance of blood-borne infections in donors, as well as risk factors of infections. Her research supports decisions to change donor selection criteria and donor testing policy as well as post-implementation evaluation. Dr. O’Brien is the principal investigator of the Canadian Blood Services SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence study which tested over one million blood samples over the pandemic to inform public health policy. An area of focus is the value of blood donor data to health system research.
Other appointments
- Section editor, Vox Sanguinis, 2023–current.
- Member and former Chair, The AABB Donor History Task Force, 2003–current.
- Coordinator, Surveillance, Risk Assessment and Policy Subgroup, and Vice-chair, 2022–current.
- Transfusion Transmitted Infectious Diseases Working Party, The International Society for Blood Transfusion, 2009–current.
- Member, Canadian Standards Association Technical Committee on Blood and Blood Components, 2003–current.