Graduate Writing Fellows 2026-27
Who are the Writing Fellows?
Faculty of Arts
Harry Ainscough
Harry Ainscough is a PhD candidate in Philosophy with an Option in Gender and Women's Studies. He works on trans philosophical methodology, particularly the ways that trans community structures can offer distinctive philosophical methods and foundations. His work examines insights from trans emotional experience and expression, as well as the ways trans emotions are often pathologized or unjustly dismissed in more mainstream environments.
Project
His Writing Fellows project aims to bring together graduate students working in gender studies, trans studies, and related fields to build peer writing support, review, and community across different departments and disciplines.
Hannah Sparwasser Soroka
Hannah Sparwasser Soroka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and Classical Studies. Her dissertation, “Delivering the Universal Reformation: Letters, Networks, and Intellectual Exchange in the Hartlib Circle” examines bodily experiences of decline in a seventeenth-century letter network. Hannah’s research interests include early modern print and manuscript culture, the history of science and medicine, and intellectual history.
Project
As a McGill Writing Centre Fellow, Hannah is organizing a day-long workshop on funding application for doctoral students in History and Classical Studies. Using collaborative teaching and mentorship frameworks, participants will exchange their own insights into the funding process and co-produce resources they can refer to and share going forward. She hopes this event will improve funding application outcomes and reduce graduate student stress around obtaining support for their research.
Faculty of Engineering
Asia Vighi
Asia is a PhD candidate in the Department of Bioengineering, specializing in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. Her research focuses on engineering yeast as a more sustainable production platform for plant natural compounds. As a graduate writing fellow, Asia hopes to help other graduate students find their writing voice and learn how to better communicate their scientific work to a range of audiences.
Project
For her graduate writing fellows project, Asia is facilitating scientific proposal writing workshops for thesis and non-thesis students in the interfaculty BBME program. The focus of the sessions will be to create a space for students to outline their proposals, assisted by supporting worksheets and guiding questions. Her workshops will also include a brief peer-feedback session between participants.
Faculty of Law
Ali Ekber Cinar
Ali Ekber Cinar is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law at McGill University and a Writing Fellow at the McGill Writing Centre.
Project
While universities are increasingly engaging with generative AI in research contexts, focused discussion on its use in legal writing remains limited. Ali's project proposes an event series for graduate law students on the responsible, ethical, and transparent use of AI in academic and legal writing. Through guest speakers and moderated discussions, the initiative aims to raise awareness of AI-related issues, encourage critical reflection on appropriate use, and strengthen students' confidence in making informed decisions about incorporating AI into their work.
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences
Samin Moradi
Samin is a PhD student in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (SCSD) at McGill University. Supported by an Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture doctoral award, her research investigates the neural correlates of speech perception in adults and infants. As a clinical audiologist, she is passionate about bridging research and clinical practice. She also has several years of teaching experience, having instructed MSc students in her department.
Project
As a Writing Fellow in SCSD, Samin's vision is to facilitate graduate students' writing experience through their degree milestones. Her project involves organizing a writing retreat to help students with funding applications, familiarizing clinical students with research writing, and improving the department's resource bank for writing milestones in collaboration with the McGill Writing Centre.
Faculty of Science
Abbie Jones
Abbie Jones is a PhD candidate in the Quantitative Biodiversity Lab within the Biology Department at McGill. Their work focuses on predicting the spatial distributions of species using species distribution models (SDMs) and on highlighting potential geographic area for conservation protection according to the distribution of ecosystem services and biodiversity on a landscape.
Project
Grant-writing season, especially for new and otherwise junior graduate students, is highly stressful and can be isolating. Not everyone knows how to write a research proposal when they first enter graduate school, and not everyone has access to a supervisor or mentor who is willing to help. Abbie’s project aims at helping first-year Masters and Doctoral students starting out within the Biology Department with help in writing their Tri-Council and FRQNT scholarship applications. They will organise workshops during which starting students will receive overall guidance, individual tutoring sessions, and access to peer-review if they please.
Graduate Writing Fellows 2025-26
Who are the Writing Fellows?
Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Science
Alice Assmar
Alice Assmar is a PhD candidate in the program of Entomology at McGill University, working on understanding the mechanisms behind life-strategy transitions in freshwater insects, as well as the macroevolutionary processes leading to their diversification and distribution on Earth through time. She received her M.S. degree in animal diversity from Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, where she reviewed the taxonomy of a freshwater insect group and estimated its phylogenetic history. Her general research interests and experience include museum curation, phylogenetics, evolution, taxonomy and biogeography of insects, particularly those in freshwater habitats.
Project
Alice developed and implemented grant-writing meetings for peer-review for students in the Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Science. She also developed handbooks for students in various programs in the Faculty and hosted pomodoro working sessions for community-building.
Faculty of Arts
Ella Jando-Saul
Ella Jando-Saul is a first year PhD student in English. Her research explores the development of English cultural identity in the Middle Ages and its expression across literary and historical genres of writing. She is also beginning to experiment with scholarly podcasting.
Project
Peer-Review Project: Ella set up a form to pair students who wanted to have their writing reviewed by a peer. Graduate students with similar pieces and deadlines could then give each other feedback on their work. She provided guidance over the course of the process.
Writing Support Group: Ella organized biweekly in-person meetings every other week that provided an opportunity for students to keep each other accountable and on track for their writing goals. This was also a space for students to help each other through obstacles and familiarize themselves with each other's research.
Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences
Harsimran Singh Kapoor
Harsimran is a third-year PhD student in the Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences at McGill University. He is an internationally trained dentist from India, and his research focuses on understanding biological aging patterns in the oral cavity. He serves as the student representative for both the International and Canadian Associations of Dental Research. He is also the President of the McGill Sikh Students’ Association. As a McGill Writing Fellow, Harsimran is committed to understanding students’ writing needs, advocating for their interests, and supporting both academic and general communication.
Project
As a Writing Fellow, Harsimran developed initiatives to strengthen academic writing and communication skills among graduate and undergraduate students. He organized workshops on fellowship applications, academic writing, and academic and professional CVs, and led peer review sessions to support abstract writing and oral presentations for Annual Research Day and other conferences. These initiatives involved active collaboration with MDGSS, CaPS, and RiSBOd, and addressed students’ needs at key points in their academic work.
Faculty of Education
Farah Roxanne Stonebanks
Farah Roxanne Stonebanks is a PhD student in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, with a background in both psychology and education. Her doctoral research focuses on academic mobbing, a form of collective harassment in higher education that targets individuals through systemic exclusion and professional sabotage. Farah is committed to challenging the normalization, denial and secrecy of mobbing in academia and advocating for policy reforms that protect employees and foster inclusive, accountable institutions.
Faculty of Engineering
Chinmay Satbhai
Chinmay Satbhai is a PhD student in Architecture at McGill University, with research interest in habitat planning and design, urbanism, and sustainability. His current scholarship explores circular economy strategies in affordable housing, bridging the realms of design, policy, and equity. As a writer, he seeks to craft a voice that moves fluidly between disciplines, bringing architectural knowledge into public conversations with clarity, curiosity, and imagination.
Shirley Yang
Shirley is a PhD student in mechanical engineering. Her research focuses on understanding nitric oxide pollutant formation in alternative fuels such as hydrogen and ammonia. She is experienced in laser diagnostics in the field of combustion. As a writing fellow, she aims to support students with laboratory documentation, fellowship writing and to facilitate peer-led focused working groups.
Project
The goal of my McGill writing fellow project was to design, plan and deliver targeted writing/communication support to graduate students in the mechanical engineering department. Mechanical engineering graduate students have many high-stakes writing/communication tasks, such as literature review, project proposals, PhD qualifying exam, conference presentation, journal papers, etc. I organized and implemented a “Designing Graphical Abstracts” workshop on Nov 25, 2025 in collaboration with the McGill Writing Centre, including room booking and participant guidance.
Faculty of Law
Ajey Sangai
I am Ajey Sangai, a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law. I did my undergrad in law and humanities in India and then pursued my master’s in law in the US. I was teaching in a law school in India before coming here. While I enjoy reading and writing for my projects, I am always excited to engage with people, develop ideas and arguments. For the writing project, I want to explore the ways in which targeted multi-stage writing support can be provided to the doctoral students through workshops and collective writing.
Project
Ajey developed and implemented a Graduate Scholarship Support Syste, at the School of Architecture to support CGRS-D, FRG and CGRS-M applicants through peer workshops, feedback sessions, and resource sharing. The initiative strengthened proposal quality, encouraged collaborative writing practices, and created a supportive environment for graduate students navigating competitive funding processes.
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences
Yi Wen (Jenny) Wang
Yi Wen (Jenny) Wang (RN, BScN, M.Ed.) is a trained nurse and doctoral candidate in the Ingram School of Nursing at McGill University. Jenny is interested in developing educational health resources for chronically ill children through co-design and participatory methods. Her work integrates childhood ethics, arts-based methods, and play to foster children's voices and understand their experiences, ensuring that health resources are created with children for children. She is a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Scholar (2024-2027) and recipient of the CIHR Fellowship. In her free time, you can find her snowboarding, swimming, making art, or chatting with friends over a cup of coffee (or two)!
Project
Yi Wen (Jenny) Wang developed and implemented structured writing workshops and unstructured, open drop-in writing sessions. These sessions focused on crafting the personal statement piece for funding applications, and helped link graduate student societies with program directors. She also developed written documents that will be distributed to incoming students next year to help them with the same applications.
Schulich School of Music
Maria Gajraj
Maria Gajraj is a Montréal-based organist and Doctoral Candidate at McGill University. Her research focuses on 20th-century Caribbean organ repertoire. She is the co-founder of Sapphonix Collective, which promotes women, queer, and racialized classical musicians, and has been featured on CBC Radio. Maria has performed internationally, at venues like Blackburn Cathedral (UK), Maison Symphonique (Montreal), and in series such as Cal Performances and Bergen Orgelsommer. A recipient of the Godfrey Hewitt Scholarship (2022) and other awards, her doctoral research is funded by the FRQ (Fonds de Recherche du Quebec). In her concert programs, Maria is passionate about highlighting women and composers of colour. As Deirdre Piper wrote in “Pipelines”, Maria’s “spirited, clean, and colourful performance lent real meaningful significance” to this music. By creating engaging concert programs, and by featuring the organ in innovative and multidisciplinary contexts, Maria strives to break stereotypes, and to make the organ more accessible to everyone.
Project
As a MWC Writing Fellow, I organized a group in which doctoral music students met every three weeks to have structured co-writing time and peer-review each other’s work at the end of the session. At the beginning of each session, we would set actionable goals for the co-writing period. These goals could look like finishing a thesis chapter, editing an artist biography, or writing a personal statement for a grant. We would write silently in 40-minute periods, with breaks in between to check in on each other’s progress. At the end of the session, we would break into small groups (of 2-3) for the peer-review period. Students were provided with some tips to assist with the reviewing process: they were encouraged to look for grammatical and spelling errors, format and citation concerns, and to see if they could easily identify the author’s argument
Faculty of Science
Niharika Dighe
Niharika is a PhD candidate in the Integrated Program in Neuroscience. She works with mouse models to research the circuit mechanisms underlying flexible decision making and how this behaviour is affected by orally consumed THC. She received her Honours BSc in Neuroscience and Behavioural Biology from Emory University. In addition to her research, she is passionate about outreach and mentorship for marginalized communities and works in leadership positions with various organizations supporting women and queer students in higher education.
Laura Lardinois
Laura Lardinois is a PhD Candidate in the Biology Department at McGill. Her research centers on the tiny but mighty world of microbes: how communities of bacteria, archaea, viruses, and fungi form partnerships with animal hosts to create dynamic microbiomes, and how these microbiomes respond to environmental change. She works with Panama’s coral reef fishes to better understand how microbes may help these delicate reef ecosystems survive under future climate change.
Project
Laura's Writing Fellows project focused on making updates to graduate student handbooks to include resources for writing support to help them in their writing-based milestones. Her project also included a focus on community-building through social and work gatherings at Thomson House.
Graduate Writing Fellows 2024-25
Who are the Writing Fellows?
Faculty of Arts
Negar Imani
Negar Imani is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Studies at McGill University. With a background in urban planning and design, her project focuses on participatory mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to collect people’s perceptions of their sound environment. It aims to understand the relationship between neighborhood walkability and resident’s soundscapes. Specifically, the research investigates how walkable access to green spaces -as the only restorative spaces in cities- can promote residents’ restorative soundscapes. Through participatory practices, she seeks to inform the policy-making processes for designing walkable spaces, green spaces, and better restorative soundscapes for citizens.
Project
Given the participatory nature of Negar’s research, communication has always been a central aspect of her research. She has been an active member of student-led associations during her master’s studies and served as the chief- editor of the association's journal, which earned several national awards. During her appointment as a McGill Writing Center Fellow, she organized workshops, peer review sessions, and a symposium, while also using tools to enhance graduate student communication through graduate associations.
Marie Trotter
Marie Trotter is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at McGill University, researching metatheatre and audience reception in the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. Through the lens of performance phenomenology, her dissertation explores the role of metatheatrical characters and scene types in shaping audience judgment, participation, and delight. Her work is published in the journals Theatre Research in Canada and Early Theatre, with creative writing and criticism appearing in the magazines Ekstasis, Broadview, Plough, and Intermission.
Project
Writing Wednesdays are regular writing workshops for PhD2 and PhD3 students in the Department of English who are writing their Comprehensive Research Projects, an important milestone in the English PhD. At biweekly meetings, PhD students share their writing in progress, set project goals, and learn about important components of the CRP, working together to build resilient writing habits and strengthen academic communication skills.
Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences
Anisha Rodrigues
Anisha Rodrigues is a PhD student in the Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences. She completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Dental Surgery, specializing in Prosthodontics, in India. Her interests include prosthodontic rehabilitation, clinical trials and teledentistry. Her current research focuses on patient-reported outcomes with immediately-loaded zygomatic implant fixed rehabilitation. In addition to being a PhD student, Anisha also serves as the student representative of the eOral Health Network of the International Association of Dental Research.
Project
Anisha’s project involved organizing workshops for graduate students (Masters and PhD) in the Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences on writing grant applications and manuscripts. To provide further support for students’ academic writing, she developed Discipline- and Assignment-Specific Tutoring Tools that focused on grant proposal writing, manuscript writing and comprehensive exam protocols.
Faculty of Education
Katherine Hardin
Kate Hardin is a PhD candidate in Educational Studies with a concentration in Language Acquisition. Her research focuses on adult newcomer language integration, language education policy, and teacher activism.
Samantha Traves
Samantha defended her PhD in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education in the Fall of 2024. Her research centers on the geography of socioeconomic advantage and the dynamics of socioeconomic stratification within educational systems. She integrates statistical modeling and geospatial analysis to examine how structural-demographic factors influence access to education and the broader implications of these patterns for the national economy, security, and civic health. She is deeply committed to advancing scholarship that fosters a more just society where every student has the opportunity to realize their full potential.
Project (Katherine Hardin & Samantha Traves)
Co-authors Katherine Hardin and Samantha Traves have written a comprehensive guide to graduate writing feedback tailored to the needs of supervisors and graduate studies in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education. Developed through the McGill Writing Fellows program, this guide is designed to support supervisors and students in navigating the feedback process for key academic writing milestones. Presented in a user-friendly desktop reference format, the book distills best practices and helps readers troubleshoot giving and receiving feedback at various stages of the writing process.
Faculty of Engineering
Carolyn Pethrick
Carolyn is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research develops robust and efficient computational methods for high-fidelity fluid dynamics simulations. In the aerospace industry, reliable flow simulation is a key ingredient for designing greener aircraft.
Project
As a McGill Writing Fellow, Carolyn planned and held a workshop series targeting graduate students applying for competitive grants and scholarships.
Katrin Zavgorodny-Freedman
Katrin Zavgorodny-Freedman is a PhD Candidate in Architecture. Her dissertation work examines the notion of collaboration in the offices of Erickson/Massey and Arthur Erickson Architects on various scales, considering how various professionals and workers contributed to the practice of architecture in the late twentieth-century. Zavgorodny-Freedman has undergraduate and master’s degrees in art history from the University of Toronto. Her work is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
Project
Her Writing Centre Fellow project consisted of assisting with grant workshops for Master’s students and facilitating a peer-feedback Working Group for PhD students in the School of Architecture.
Faculty of Law
Atagün Mert Kejanlıoğlu
Atagün Mert Kejanlıoğlu is currently a doctoral candidate in the DCL (Doctor of Civil Law) program at McGill University Faculty of Law. He is writing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Professor Johanne Poirier. His dissertation is focused on populist challenges to constitutionalism and responses that constitutional theory can develop against these challenges.
After graduating from Galatasaray University Faculty of Law (Istanbul) in 2013, he obtained master’s degrees in public law from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and Galatasaray University. He also worked as a research and teaching assistant in the constitutional law department at MEF University Faculty of Law (Istanbul). His research interests include comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, and European human rights law.
Project
Atagün’s Writing Fellowship project for the Faculty of Law aimed to cultivate a self-sufficient community of writers within graduate programs in law. Over the academic year, he helped graduate students to situate and create resources for academic legal writing by organizing grant writing workshops, collective writing and peer-review sessions, and by drafting documents for tutorial assistance.
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences
Meghana Munipalle
Meghana is a PhD candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Engineering (BBME) program. Her research uses computational modeling to investigate and design regenerative biomaterials for spinal disc repair. She received an Honours BSc in Physics from the University of Toronto and an MSc in Biophysics from the University of Guelph. In addition to her doctoral work, she is very passionate about science outreach, communication, and advocacy, and holds executive positions at the McGill Students Chapter for Scientista and the McGill initiative in Computational Medicine.
Project
Meghana's Writing Fellows project involved creating writing guides for BBME milestones, such as the study plan and thesis proposal, and developing resources for BBME students to improve skills in science communication and storytelling.
Nicola Phillips
Nicky is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program. Her research focuses on the language input experienced by infants being raised as bilinguals. Specifically, she studies how socially-embedded interactions change across families’ dominant and nondominant languages, as well as variability in the complexity of caregivers’ infant-directed speech. Nicky’s undergraduate degree was in the Humanities (Dutch and French) before she transitioned to Language Acquistion and Speech Science. Before graduate school, she worked as an Editorial Assistant proofreading, copyediting, and writing scientific training materials. This has given her a strong background in critical writing skills, editing, and knowledge translation.
Project
In the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Nicky (1) held a drop-in Writing Clinic, (2) worked with the Student Council to host a two-day Writing Retreat and mini-scholarship application workshop, and (3) held two Spring Break Workshops on Editing Skills and timeline planning for graduate students. She received excellent feedback from the Editing Workshops in particular was excellent, with students expressing that they wished that they had had opportunities to learn these skills earlier in their programs. The Faculty were also supportive of the program and pleased with the extra support her programs was able to provide for research students.
Indra Roy
A PhD candidate in the Integrated Program in Neuroscience, Indra has a long history of working with students in science and technology who want to communicate their findings to a variety of audiences. She has taught lab courses, given writing seminars, and worked as a peer writing tutor for many years.
Project
As a writing fellow in the IPN, she worked closely with the mandatory course Principles of Neuroscience I (NEUR630) and offered incoming graduate students the opportunity to improve their skills in critical thinking through small writing groups. In Winter 2025, she provided support to students writing their thesis proposals for the candidacy exam for the doctoral program through structured group writing and feedback sessions.
Schulich School of Music
Hannah Barnes
Hannah A. Barnes is a Montréal-based composer and conductor. In her compositions, she crafts structured yet dynamic and multi-faceted musical worlds that are characterized by mercurial, off-kilter, and seemingly incompatible materials. These works straddle tension and expression for both performers and listeners. Barnes's main concerns are (re)defining Modernism in the twenty-first century, investigating manifestations of complexity and polyphony, and addressing questions of syntax and semantics within a non-narrative musical language that encompasses both pitch- and noise-based materials. She is also the director of the rhythm is image new music initiative, in which she performs and conducts, emphasizing experimental performance practices and collaboration. Teaching is also important to Hannah; she has taught students ranging from grade school to undergraduate music majors in both Chicago and Montréal.
Project
As a Writing Fellow in the Schulich School of Music, Hannah initiated a program to support graduate students in achieving their written program and career milestones. This program includes a group for mutual support and feedback, as well as half-day writing retreats. These initiatives were created to help music students for whom written academic and career milestones are significant but not as institutionally supported as their musical endeavours. In the second semester, Hannah hosted two half-day writing retreats for students to learn about resources and strategies that would help them with their writing assignments. At the end of the semester, she and her fellow Writing Fellow, Schulich graduate student Hannah Benoit, hosted a writing retreat and lunch to create a supportive environment and space for students to learn from and share with each other about writing.
Hannah Benoit
Hannah Benoit is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory at McGill University, funded by the Fonds du Recherche du Quebec. Hannah’s primary research focuses on the application of critical pedagogy to the undergraduate music theory classroom. She has presented her research at the Society for Music Theory, Music Theory Midwest, and Pedagogy into Practice conferences. Outside of academia, Hannah enjoys spending time with her rabbit, baking sourdough, and rock climbing.
Project
Hannah’s Writing Fellow project sought to help bridge the gap in writing support between the Graphos Writing Centre and Schulich School of Music. Her workshop series focused on a variety of topics within the music discipline, including grant writing, creating and maintaining a healthy relationship with writing, and writing conference proposals and presentations. At the end of the semester, she and her fellow Writing Fellow, Schulich graduate student Hannah Barnes, hosted a writing retreat and lunch to create a supportive environment and space for students to learn from and share with each other about writing.
Faculty of Science
Jeffrey To
Jeffrey To is a third-year Psychology student in the Experimental Psychology program. He studies implicit biases: The automatic associations we hold toward certain groups. Jeffrey received his Bachelor of Science in Psychology in 2021 from the University of Toronto. After graduating, he spent a year working as an associate in a behavioural science consulting firm, consulting on education-related projects, smoking cessation, and mental health.
Project
Jeffrey's project involved integrating writing workshops into the psychology curriculum. He delivered two writing-centred workshops to first-year psychology students during their Psychological Theory course. Jeffrey also collaborated with other science fellows to deliver workshops, borrowing from the content used in his workshop, to maximize reach.