The Duke Department of Population Health Sciences will present "Sex, Drugs, and Universal Health: Diabetes and Heart Disease in Canada" on Thursday, October 22, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. on Zoom. Padma Kaul, professor in the Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, will be the featured speaker and will discuss gathering population-level real-world evidence on health outcomes from womb to tomb. Lesley Curtis, professor and chair of Department of Population Health Sciences, will be the discussant.

Kaul's research examines issues involving access and delivery of cardiovascular care at a population level, international differences in cardiovascular practice patterns and outcomes, and health economics. She is the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Sex and Gender Chair in Diabetes, and one of her primary interests is looking at the burden of heart disease in women relative to men. She has expanded her interest in women's health by developing a longitudinal pregnancy and birth cohort to study the downstream effects of gestational diabetes mellitus and other pregnancy-related complications on the development of chronic disease in both mother and child.

Kaul has extensive experience working with population-level administrative data, clinical registries, as well as large, multinational clinical trials using an integrated database that links inpatient, outpatient, and vital statistic databases to examine cardiovascular care in Canada.  

Kaul received her PhD from the University of Alberta and did a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University.