I am Wenxin Wan, a postdoctoral researcher at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's cancer agency, based in Lyon, France.

I earned my PhD at Utrecht University's Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences in the Netherlands, studying how exposures at work and in the environment shape cancer risk at the population level. Part of that work provided new evidence on the causal relationship between benzene and lung cancer, and was covered by The New York Times.

My daily work at IARC revolves around large international cohorts: millions of people followed over many years so that the risk factors causally linked to disease can be identified. I lead the analysis and coordinate the project for OPICO, the international opioid cohort consortium, which brings ten cohorts from three continents together to ask what cancer risk long-term opioid use may carry; and I serve as scientific advisor to the Lung Cancer Cohort Consortium (LC3), helping carry the evidence built up by occupational-exposure research into lung cancer screening for populations worldwide.

I have spent years helping to produce this kind of evidence myself, yet far too little of it ever reaches ordinary people — the very people the research was meant to protect. That has frustrated me for a long time. A finding that stays inside the literature has done less than half its job. Closing that distance is worth every bit of effort we can give it, and that is why I created this site.