John Colbourne

Birmingham, U.K.
Professor of Environmental Genomics

John Colbourne is a biologist who pursues research into the human and environmental health problems caused by pollution - one of the most important public health crisis of our time. He holds the inaugural Chair of Environmental Genomics at the University of Birmingham (U.K.) with adjunct positions at research institutions in China and the United States. 

Colbourne founded the international Environmental Care Consortium, whose stated mission is to “offer leadership at making the environment safe from toxic chemicals that poison the water, soil, and air”. The Consortium now numbers over 100 science, legal and public health experts. 

Colbourne also co-founded Michabo Health Science Limited, to give evidence of the health effects of chemical pollution, so that better decisions are made by industry and regulatory agencies. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Closer to home, Colbourne is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Muskoka Watershed Environmental Lecture Series in October 2020. 

Memories of… Northern Wilderness

Growing up in North Bay gives you access to wilderness and an early respect for local cultural values for nature. 

Although I left North Bay and Mattawa after high school in pursuit of environmental science, it is in the lakes of Northern Ontario that I found a tiny creature called Daphnia (a crustacean the size of a grain of rice, better known as the waterflea) that seemed capable of raising the alarm about serious environmental health problems, before they occur, such as a canary in a coal mine.

It required learning from an exceptional science teacher at École Secondary Algonquin (Jean-Marc Filion), then doctoral training at the University of Guelph and eleven years of research in the United States to finally give Daphnia its power to predict the effects of pollution, by having obtained knowledge of its genome (all its 31,000 genes)!