Speaker Bio:

Dr. Erin Tjam is a health scientist, adjunct professor, author, and former Special Advisor to the President of the University of Waterloo (who later became Canada’s 28th Governor General). She previously served as Director of Research at St. Mary’s General Hospital.

Known as the “Beauty-Obsessed Scientist,” Erin spent nearly 40 years pursuing skin health and beauty through products. This led her to discover the relationship between skin health, skin harm, and the development of allergies. Her work challenges conventional assumptions about skincare and examines how routine product use may affect the skin barrier, microbiome, immune function, and long-term health outcomes. She is the co-author of Skin Sobering, an Amazon #1 bestseller that investigates the consequences of modern skincare practices.

As a mother of six, Erin’s interest in this topic became deeply personal when several of her children developed eczema, asthma, and other allergic conditions. Combining scientific inquiry with lived experience, she began questioning why allergic diseases were becoming increasingly common and whether long-standing assumptions about their causes deserved re-examination.

Talk Title:

Deadly Allergies Begin with Babies’ Skin “Care”: The Unsuspected Progression

Talk Summary:

Deadly allergies are often thought to begin in the lungs or the gut. But what if their origins lie somewhere few have suspected—in the body’s largest organ: the skin?

In this talk, Dr. Erin Tjam explores the possibility that modern skin “care” practices beginning in infancy may be disrupting the skin barrier, microbiome, and immune regulation, with unsuspected consequences that extend far beyond the skin. She examines how these disruptions may set the stage for the atopic march—the progression from contact allergies (skin sensitivities and eczema), to inhalation allergies (hay fever and asthma), and ultimately to ingestion allergies (systemic food allergies). Drawing from collaborative research and her own experience as both a health scientist and mother of six, Erin challenges more than four generations of assumptions about cleansers, lotions, and moisturizers.

Rather than focusing solely on allergies, this talk asks a broader question: what role does the skin play in lifelong health, and what happens when we interfere with its natural functions from the very beginning? By rethinking how we care for babies’ skin—and our own—audiences will discover a surprising new perspective on one of the fastest-growing public health challenges of our time.