Robert C. Brunham

Robert Conrad Brunham is a Canadian infectious disease specialist. He is the former Director of the UBC Centre for Disease Control and executive director and Scientific Director of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.

Early life and education Brunham was born and raised in Creston, British Columbia, Canada where he completed his undergraduate and medical degree at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Following this, he trained under King Holmes at the University of Washington before becoming a physician scientist at the University of Manitoba.

Career While working at the University of Manitoba, Brunham led their adult infectious disease program and became their Chair of Microbiology in 1987. In these roles, he focused his laboratory on addressing basic issues in chlamydial pathogenesis and host response. He also was one of the first researchers to report on the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia. As a result of this discovery, he established a chlamydia laboratory and focused on becoming an independent chlamydial biologist.

Brunham returned to his home province in 1999 to become the Academic Director of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). In recognition of his co-leadership in the SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative, Brunham was also the co-recipient of the 2005 Canadian Institutes of Health Research Partnership Award.

Following the SARS outbreak, Brunham was amongst the first adopters of genomics technologies in public health which he demonstrated during a local tuberculosis outbreak. He also led an effort to sequence several hundred pandemic H1N1 genomes to explore viral evolutionary dynamics in the context of a pandemic at the 2010 Winter Olympics. As a result of his efforts, Brunham was elected a Member of the Order of British Columbia. The following year, he was also named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Brunham was appointed to sit on the Government of Canada's COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force to ensure the purchase, distribution and delivery of a safe and effective vaccine. He also collaborated with Natalie Strynadka on a project aimed at predicting changes to SARS-CoV-2.