Helen Leask PhD CPF is a retired medical journalist. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the Birmingham Post, Medscape, Quartz, the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and in a solo photographic exhibition, Faces of Paradise.
Helen was a 2017–2018 Fellow in Global Journalism at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.
She has won awards for journalism and copywriting. She retired from medical communications in 2025 but continues to create as a writer and photographer.
After completing a PhD in zoology from the University of Bristol, UK, Helen worked as a science journalist. In Canada she founded three healthcare-related companies, including a book publisher, a research company, and a medical communications agency on Yonge Street in Toronto that she ran for almost 20 years before selling up in 2017 and returning to journalism. Her book-publishing list included The Canadian Guide to Prostate Cancer, 2nd Edition. After she turned 40, Helen qualified as a private pilot, writing about the experience for The Globe and Mail. She crossed two oceans as the sole passenger on a freighter, a photojournalism project published by Quartz. Following lockdown, she travelled to the most remote islands on Earth, the Marquesas in French Polynesia, resulting in a solo photographic exhibition, Faces of Paradise. For many years Helen was a visiting lecturer in science communications at the University of Toronto and Laurentian University, and an adjunct professor at the San Diego Biomedical Institute.
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