Dr. Ian Dohoo, the Director of CVER has recently been appointed to the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on Risk Assessment in Animal Health. The Council of Canadian Academies (http://www.scienceadvice.ca/) is an independent not-for-profit corporation encompassing the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Canada (RSC: The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada) and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS). The Council's primary mission is to conduct assessments of the state of science in areas of critical importance to the public. The Expert Panel on Risk Assessment has been formed in response to a request from the Canadian Minister of Agriculture and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). Its mandate is to determine “What are the state and comprehensiveness of risk assessment techniques in animal health science specifically pertaining to risks that may impact on human health”. The Panel is to complete its report by the end of 2010. Ian was one of the four veterinarians in Canada elected as a Fellow of CAHS (http://www.cahs-acss.ca/e/home/) in its inaugural year 2005. He is also the lead investigator on the recently established Canadian Regulatory Veterinary Epidemiology Network (CRVE-Net), a partnership with the CFIA aimed at building capacity in the areas of risk analysis, surveillance and disease modelling.