ANNOUNCEMENTS

Harriet MacMillan appointed Dan Offord Chair in Child Studies International expert focuses on “the importance of the child within the family”

Harriet MacMillan’s appointment will ensure that the spirit and intelligence of Dan Offord lives on.  I think McMaster and the Offord Centre have done themselves proud.”

Dr. Leon Eisenberg
Maude and Lillian Presley
Professor of Social Medicine Emeritus
Harvard Medical School

Harriet MacMillan wasted no time wondering if the David R. (Dan) Offord Chair in Child Studies, to which she had just been appointed, is unique in Canada.  “There may be other child health chairs in Canada, but there was only one Dan Offord,” said the child psychiatrist and pediatrician whose career was inspired by the founding director of the Offord Centre for Child Studies. 

In a recent ceremony celebrating her appointment, Dr. MacMillan said she is “deeply honoured” to have been chosen to carry on the legacy of one of the world’s leading experts in child development and child psychiatry.

“Dan’s commitment to excellence, the passion he brought to his work, and his devotion to improving the lives of children was truly unique.  It’s hard to come up with words to express how moved I am.”

The Dan Offord Chair in Child Studies was established by McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences to support research and education in child mental health.  More than half of the $2 million required to fund the endowed position has been raised through individual donations made directly to the Centre or through McMaster Children’s Hospital.

Peter Szatmari, Director of the Centre, praised the appointment as one that will set the standard for generations to come.

“Harriet has spent just about every day of the last 20 years thinking about ways to help children who have suffered from abuse and about how to prevent the terrible toll that abuse takes on the lives of children and youth.  She brings a passion to her scholarship that one rarely sees and that was inspired in her by Dan’s commitment to the same kinds of problems and solutions.”

Dr. Leon Eisenberg, an internationally renowned psychiatrist and professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, where Dr. MacMillan served a fellowship in the early 1990s, recalled a “dedicated, hardworking and gifted investigator who was a proponent of evidence-based medicine long before anyone coined the term.”

He noted that Dr. MacMillan took risks that other scientists would never take, designing a public health home visitation program “and not only evaluating it, something few scientists do, butpublishing the findings that showed it was not effective, thus sparing us all the cost of a useless treatment.  This is an enormous contribution when you consider that funds in the public domain are so hard to come by.”

At first glance, Dr. MacMillan may seem like an unlikely candidate to carry on the work of the larger-than-life Dan Offord, whose passing three years ago evoked an outpouring of emotion from around the globe.  An expert in child psychiatric epidemiology, Dr. Offord painted with the broadest of brush strokes – his canvas included all children who might be at risk of emotional, social, and behavioural problems. 

Dr. MacMillan’s expertise is more focused.  A leader in the field of child maltreatment and family violence, her career has centred on improving the lives of children and women who suffer from abuse.

Like Dr. Offord, Dr. MacMillan is both a clinician and a scientist.  As a member and founding director of the Child Advocacy and Assessment Program at McMaster Children’s Hospital, she works closely with child protection agencies to reduce the burden of suffering associated with family violence. 

Her academic credentials span the epidemiological, psychological and biological with cross-appointments as a professor both in Pediatrics and in Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, and well as associate memberships both in Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and in Psychology.

And while her research encompasses both women’s health and child health, she sees the two as intertwined.  She notes that children who witness violence in the home are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety, to do poorly in school, to run away from home and get in trouble with the law.

“Dan used to talk about the importance of the child within the family, and we know that the health and well-being of mothers has a major impact on their child’s development, so the work I do fits very well with the mandate of the Chair.”

Her research projects include finding ways to identify abused women earlier, an examination of the impact of childhood abuse on a woman’s later health, and a study to determine whether home visitation by public health nurses can prevent the recurrence of child physical abuse and neglect.