About Epidetective
Welcome to EpiDetective — a space for translating epidemiological research into clear, practical knowledge for cancer prevention and public health.
Created by Wenxin Wan, a cancer epidemiologist and postdoctoral scientist at the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), this website focuses on how evidence from population studies can be interpreted, communicated, and applied to better understand cancer causes, identify preventable risk factors, and support evidence-informed decisions.
EpiDetective brings together perspectives from cancer epidemiology, environmental and occupational health, causal inference, biostatistics, and artificial intelligence. The site explores how large-scale data, modern analytical methods, and AI tools can be used to detect risk patterns, strengthen causal evidence, evaluate public-health relevance, and make complex findings more understandable to researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and the wider public.
Its goal is simple: to help bridge the gap between scientific evidence and real-world cancer prevention.
About me
I’m Wenxin Wan, a cancer epidemiologist and postdoctoral scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the specialized cancer research agency of the World Health Organization, based in Lyon, France.
My work sits at the intersection of cancer epidemiology, biostatistics, machine learning, and causal inference. I completed my PhD at Utrecht University’s Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, where I investigated occupational and environmental exposures and cancer risk. This research contributed important evidence supporting the previously underrecognized causal role of benzene in lung cancer development.
I work with large international cohort datasets and apply methods from epidemiology, causal inference, pharmacoepidemiology, and explainable machine learning. My goal is to generate robust scientific evidence that informs public health policy and contributes to cancer prevention.
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