Built by a cancer epidemiologist who works with this data every day.

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 obtained my MSc in Epidemiology from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and my PhD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where I studied 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, and very little of it reaches the people it was meant to protect. Most of it stays in journals. I built this site to change that.