Here are links to some organizations I support:
Medecins Sans Frontieres 
Canucks Autism Network
The War Amps
I was born and raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia. I went to Handsworth Secondary School, then got my B.Sc. from the Department of Biochemistry at UBC in 1991. My wife Karen Nordquist, whom I married in 1992, has a Master of Arts degree in Sociology from McGill; . Our first daughter, Lindsay Anne Nielsen, was born August 18, 2000, and we were soon thereafter blessed with a second daughter, Nicole Maya Nielsen, born June 30, 2003. We live in quite a
In 1997, after six years of work, I completed the MD/PhD program at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. My , "Human Origins of DNA Replication: identification, analysis and application," was completed at the McGill Cancer Centre, under the supervision of Gerald B. Price in the Division of Experimental Medicine. While at McGill, I also studied and published articles on the ethics of germline genetic manipulations and euthanasia. My residency training began in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, with a rotating internship year, where I spent many nights on call at the Victoria General and Royal Jubilee hospitals -- sometimes even running the cardiac arrest team!
During my residency in the Pathology program at UBC, I was able to undertake extra research training in London (laser capture microdissection in the laboratory of Dr. Nick Lemoine), Stanford (microarrays, with Matt van de Rijn) and Seattle (immunohistochemistry, with Allen Gown of PhenoPath laboratories). In late 2001, David Huntsman, Blake Gilks and I founded the Genetic Pathology Evaluation Centre and we have remained close collaborators ever since. In 2002, I passed my exam and obtained a fellowship in Anatomic Pathology from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and I obtained subspecialty training in soft tissue pathology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and in bone pathology at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, England. I started my full time faculty position at UBC in January 2003, and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2007 and to full Professor in 2012. I became director of the UBC MD/PhD program in July 2018.
Citations and abbreviated abstracts from my work in all these fields are available in my .
Overworked city-people with an environmental ethic often end up in Urban Cyclists!
I have an active interest in peace and environmental issues; in fact, that's how Karen & I met!
Escaping to nature was always easy, growing up in Vancouver, a city with many great places to go hiking.
Medecins Sans Frontieres Canucks Autism NetworkThe War Amps