Affiliate Associate Professor, Division of Social Medicine
Dr. Kora DeBeck, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University and a Research Scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use at Providence Health Care. Kora is the Principal Investigator for the At-Risk Youth Study (ARYS) which is a longitudinal cohort study of >1,000 street-involved youth who use drugs in Vancouver. The cohort began in 2005 and is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the US National Institutes for Health Research. ARYS aims to explore the individual, social, economic, and environmental factors that influence the health and well-being of street-involved adolescents and young adults in Vancouver.
Kora specializes in longitudinal cohort methodologies, and innovative approaches to inform and evaluate health and policy interventions to reduce health and social harms among people who use drugs, with a particular focus on the prevention of high-risk substance use, infectious diseases, and other health-related harms. She has a strong track-record in knowledge translation and works to ensure that research from the ARYS cohort is relevant and accessible to community organizations, policy makers and other stakeholders with the goal of increasing the impact of research findings on policy and practice and improving the health of individuals and communities –both locally and globally.
Link to publications: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kora+deBeck