Dr. Charles Helm

Scientific Advisor on Health

Biography

Charles Helm has been a family physician in Tumbler Ridge since 1992. He received his medical degree in South Africa at the University of Cape Town in 1981. He is a Fellow of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. He serves on the teaching faculty of the University of British Columbia. In 2013 he received the Rural Long Service Award from the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada. In 2016 he received the Rural Family Physician of the Year Award from the British Columbia College of Family Physicians. He is an organizer of medical conferences, with interests in polypharmacy, evolutionary biology, and health promotion through healthy lifestyle choices.

He is the author of nine books, on the Tumbler Ridge area and is history and dinosaurs, and on the history of the northern Rockies. He has been an explorer in the Wolverine Nordic and Mountain Society since 1993, designing, building and maintaining hiking trails. He is the co-founder of the Emperor’s Challenge Mountain Run and has served on the event’s organizing committee since its inception in 1999. He was a founder of the Tumbler Ridge Museum Foundation in 2002. He was instrumental in the proposal that led to the creation of the Tumbler Ridge UNESCO Global Geopark in 2014, and was its first President.

His palaeontological research interest is in Pleistocene vertebrate trackways of the Cape south coast of South Africa. He has authored nine peer-reviewed publications in this field. He is currently enrolled for his Ph. D. in the Department of Geoscience, Faculty of Science, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa.