Dr. Kanna Hayashi, PhD, is a Research Scientist with the BC Centre on Substance Use, the St. Paul’s Hospital Chair in Substance Use Research, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University. Her research interests and expertise include social and clinical epidemiology of substance use, community-based research, harm reduction, substance use care, and equity-promoting approaches to drug policy and programming. She leads the Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study, one of the largest and longest-running prospective cohort studies of community-recruited people who use drugs in the world. She has also been co-leading several community-based participatory action-oriented research projects with collaborators including the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, Pivot Legal Society and Mitsampan Harm Reduction Center/Thai AIDS Treatment Action Group (Thailand). She obtained a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia, and two Master’s degrees in Public Health and International Affairs from Columbia University.