Karen Yeates
- Clinician scientist, KGHRI
- Professor, Department of Medicine, and co-Director of Research, Office of Global Health, Queen’s University
- Global health
- Pragmatic clinical trials
- Maternal health
- Non-communicable diseases
- Mobile health (mHealth) technology
Dr. Karen Yeates:
Karen Yeates is a graduate of Medicine from Queen’s University and received Internal Medicine training in Toronto. She then completed a fellowship in Nephrology at Queen’s, combined with a Master in Public Health from Harvard University. She is co-founder and co-director of the Department of Medicine’s Office of Global Health and is a clinician-researcher with a global health research focus in mobile health (mHealth) and how it can improve access to prevention, detection and treatment for non-communicable disease (hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and cancer). For 10 years, Dr. Yeates has been actively involved with the International Society of Nephrology in various capacities in advancing kidney disease care globally
- Bachelor of Science, McGill University
- MD, Queen’s University
- Recipient of the John Maher Award in 2015 from the International Society of Peritoneal Dialysis. This award is given every two years to a young nephrology researcher who has advanced dialysis through their research.
Dr. Yeates’s research focuses on improving access to care for underserviced populations in Canada and sub-Saharan Africa. She is country coordinator for the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology Study (PURE) Tanzania, which will follow a global cohort of 2000 participants for more than 10 years to measure the impact of lifestyle and environment on development of chronic disease.
Dr. Yeates is a principal investigator on a CIHR-Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases grant ‘DREAM-GLOBAL,’ focused on the use of mobile phones to reduce hypertension in rural Aboriginal communities in Canada and in Northern Tanzania. She was recently awarded the Rising Stars in Global Health award from Grand Challenges Canada for an initiative that uses smartphones to screen for cervical cancer. This program is now in transition to scale in Tanzania and other countries through additional funding from Grand Challenges Canada. She is co-found of WEMA Inc. (Women’s health Equity through Mobile Approaches), a not-for-profit company based in Canada that has the goal of improving health access for women in low income countries using innovation and mobile technology.
Most recently, Dr. Yeates was awarded $1 million in federal funding to develop a mobile platform to record and monitor the health of pregnant women in Tanzania. This five-year project will implement and test ways of improving the monitoring of pregnant women in for preeclampsia-eclampsia and other important health issues.
