Dr. Geoff Bardwell Bardwell
is a Research Scientist at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU). He is a community-based qualitative health researcher who focuses primarily on opioid use, overdose prevention, and the implementation of public health interventions targeted toward people who use drugs. His research uses qualitative and ethnographic methods to examines the ways in which social (e.g., gender norms, stigma), structural (e.g., drug policies, criminalization), and physical (e.g., building layouts, geographic locations) contexts affect drug use and shape the implementation and effectiveness of targeted substance use-related interventions. He has examined a variety of interventions across Canada in various environments such as community health centres, housing environments, inner-city drug scenes, and rural settings. Dr. Bardwell is currently the Principal Investigator for the national evaluation of MySafe: a low-barrier safer supply program across three provinces. He is also the Principal Investigator for a longitudinal qualitative evaluation of tablet injectable opioid agonist therapy (TiOAT) programs in rural BC (Duncan and Kamloops). Additionally, he is leading a community-based qualitative study on harm reduction and overdose prevention in Powell River, BC.
Dr. Bardwell completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and at the BCCSU, and during this time he published 33 peer-reviewed articles. He has held numerous awards, including postdoctoral fellowships from Mitacs and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Prior to moving to BC, Dr. Bardwell completed his PhD in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at the University of Western Ontario. He also has many years of direct service experience working with people who use drugs. He has worked as a housing stability worker for a Housing First organization, at a needle and syringe program, and as a harm reduction street outreach worker. Dr. Bardwell’s direct service experience provided him valuable insights into the daily lives of people who use drugs and inspired him to pursue a career in drug policy research.
