Lois A. Haighton, B.Sc., DABT, ERT, Director, Food & Nutrition Group

Lois Haighton is a board certified toxicologist and Director within the Food & Nutrition Group and is responsible for overseeing the project workload of the group and ensuring that client commitments are achieved. She has over 20 years experience in product safety evaluations and is responsible for the toxicology/safety assessment of food and supplement ingredients, impurity and extractable evaluations for new drug applications, cosmetic ingredients, third party reviews, and conducting risk assessments of contaminated products.

Since joining Intertek Scientific & Regulatory Consultancy (formerly Cantox) in 1991, Ms. Haighton has been involved in all aspects of human health and environmental risk assessments including scientific evaluation, project management, and risk characterization. As a senior scientist and project manager for the Food and Nutrition Group, she is currently responsible for comprehensive ingredient/formulation evaluation programs for new products which involve the critical evaluation and interpretation of scientific literature on toxicology, carcinogenicity, genotoxicity and metabolism. She also conducts ingredient assessments, including Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) assessments and Novel Food evaluations for a wide variety of products including traditional foods and medical foods. She also completes toxicological evaluations of consumer product formulations to ensure compliance with the U.S. CPSC Regulations and the Canada Hazardous Products Regulations. Within the Pharmaceutical & Healthcare Group, she provides a senior advisory role in the toxicological evaluation of impurities, degradants and leachables/extractables and related issues in support of new drug applications.

Ms. Haighton graduated from Queen's University with an honours B.Sc. in Life Sciences. While at Queen’s and immediately following graduation, she assisted with mechanistic research of fetal alcohol syndrome. Ms. Haighton was board certified as a Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology (DABT) in 2002 (recertified 2007, 2012) and is a Eurotox Registered Toxicologist since 2007 (recertified 2012). She is also a member of the Society of Toxicology.