Christopher McLeod
Appointment
Junior Fellow Academy - Alumni
Institution
University of British Columbia
Country
Canada 
Christopher McLeod is a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Early Learning Partnership at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he completed his Junior Fellowship working with Successful Societies Fellow Clyde Hertzman in 2011. He is also an associate faculty member at the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research and the School of Environmental Health at UBC and an adjunct scientist at the Institute for Work and Health. Chris completed his PhD in Population and Public Health at UBC in 2009, with Dr. Hertzman as his thesis supervisor. He also holds a B.A. in Economics and Psychology from the University of Victoria (1998) and an M.A. in Economics from McMaster University (2000). In addition to his studies during the past decade, Chris has held positions as a policy analyst at Health Canada, a research associate at the Institute for Work and Health and the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis at McMaster University, and as a research manager at the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at UBC. Currently he is also associate faculty at the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research and the School of Environmental Health at UBC and an adjunct scientist at the Institute for Work and Health.
Chris’s research focuses on how institutional variation across societies affects health inequalities within those societies. His previous research, using longitudinal data from Canada, Germany and the United States, explored how differences in the characteristics and institutions across coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs) affected the relationship between unemployment and health. This research found that greater protections for the unemployed contributed to the flattening of health gradients by employment status and skill-level, with Germany, the archetypal CME country, having lower unemployment-related health inequalities than the United States, the archetypal LME. Canada represented an interesting middle case, performing better than the United States on almost all employment-related health outcomes, but performing better than Germany for some types of unemployment. Chris’s CIFAR-supported research will build on these findings and explore how institutional structures across varieties of capitalism create different lifecourse trajectories, with a focus on the nexus of education, skill-level and employment experience and their effect on health and health inequalities.
Chris’s research focuses on how institutional variation across societies affects health inequalities within those societies. His previous research, using longitudinal data from Canada, Germany and the United States, explored how differences in the characteristics and institutions across coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs) affected the relationship between unemployment and health. This research found that greater protections for the unemployed contributed to the flattening of health gradients by employment status and skill-level, with Germany, the archetypal CME country, having lower unemployment-related health inequalities than the United States, the archetypal LME. Canada represented an interesting middle case, performing better than the United States on almost all employment-related health outcomes, but performing better than Germany for some types of unemployment. Chris’s CIFAR-supported research will build on these findings and explore how institutional structures across varieties of capitalism create different lifecourse trajectories, with a focus on the nexus of education, skill-level and employment experience and their effect on health and health inequalities.