On this page: Alayne Adams | Annmarie Adams | Daniel Béland | Howard Bergman | Lynn Butler-Kisber | Lisa M. Bornstein | Franco A. Carnevale| Jonathan Chevrier | Suparna Choudhury | Shelley Clark | Jaye Ellis | Pheobe Friesen | Ian Gold | Sam Harper | Matthew Hunt | Sébastien Jodoin | Jay Kaufman | Lara Khoury | Nick King | Laurence J. Kirmayer | Alana Klein | Lucyna Lach | Eric Latimer | Raphael Lencucha | Eric Lewis | Nik Luka | Kevin Manaugh | Claudia Mitchell | Gilles Paradis | Amélie Quesnel-Vallée | Mónica Ruiz-Casares | Jai Shah | Keiko Shikako-Thomas | Erin Strumpf | Eran Tal |Zoua Vang | Seungmi Yang
Dr. Alayne Adams joined McGill University in September 2019, following a three-year tenure in the Department of International Health at Georgetown University in Washington DC. From 2010 to 2016 she lived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she held the position of Senior Social Scientist at the icddr,b, a reputed international population health research center. Dr. Adams was also involved in the founding of the BRAC James P. Grant School of Public Health, and its Center for Urban Equity and Health. Her relationship with both institutions continues to the present, with appointments as Adjunct Scientist and Professor, respectively. Prior to Bangladesh, Dr. Adams served as Executive Director of the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS, a global research-to-policy collaboration involving international and bilateral agencies, NGOs, foundations and northern and southern academic partners. She began her academic career at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health following post-doc work as a MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies. A recipient of the Commonwealth Scholarship, she completed her PhD in Public Health and an MSc in Human Nutrition at the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was also a James McGill scholar, earning her BA honors in political science and international development at McGill University. She is currently leading Population Health activities within the Department of Family Medicine, and acts as liason with McGill’s new School of Population and Global Health.
For more information about Alayne Adams, visit her profile page on the Family Medicine website.
Dr. Annmarie Adams is an architectural historian and William C. Macdonald Professor at the School of Architecture, McGill University. She is the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 (McGill-Queens University Press, 1996), Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and co-author of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (University of Toronto Press, 2000). Her research on healthcare design and gendered space has garnered numerous awards, including the Jason Hannah Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, a CIHR Health Career Award, and a YWCA Woman of Distinction prize.
At McGill University, Adams served as Director of the School of Architecture from 2011-15 and as Director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies in 2010-11. From 2012-15 she chaired the Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture, a committee of the heads of accredited architecture schools in Canada. In 2015, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Her current research explores the architecture of surgery; the design of long-term care institutions; the architectural history of medical museums, complementing her ongoing interest in the history of hospitals.
For more information about Annmarie Adams, visit her profile page with Social Studies of Medicine.
Daniel Béland is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. A student of politics and public policy, he is currently working on research projects focusing on issues ranging from universal social policy and health care reform to the role of ideas in policy development and the relationship between fiscal policy and welfare state development. Professor Béland has published more than 15 books and 130 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Recent books include How Ideas and Institutions Shape the Politics of Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Universality and Social Policy in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2019. He has held visiting positions at Harvard University, the University of Bremen, the University of Southern Denmark, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Professor Béland currently serves as Editor (French) of the Canadian Journal of Sociology, Co-Editor of the journal Global Social Policy, and President of Research Committee 19 (Poverty, Social Welfare and Social Policy) of the International Sociological Association. In addition to his academic work, Professor Béland has participated in numerous training sessions for civil servants, and provided policy advice to federal and provincial officials. He is regularly asked to comment on key policy and political issues by Canadian and international media outlets.
Please visit this site for more information on Prof. Béland’s research.
Howard Bergman MD, FCFP, FRCPC is Chair of the Department of Family Medicine, Professor of Family Medicine, Medicine (geriatrics), and Oncology. He was the first Dr. Joseph Kaufmann Professor of Geriatric Medicine from 2001-2015.
From 2009 to 2011, Dr. Bergman served as Vice-President, Scientific Affairs of the Fonds de la recherche en Santé du Québec (FRSQ), Quebec’s health research funding agency. From 1993-2009, he was Director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine at McGill University and of the Jewish General Hospital. In 2001-2002, he was interim Physician-in-Chief and Chief of the Department of Medicine of the Jewish General Hospital. He is an investigator at Solidage: the McGill University/Université de Montréal Research Group on Frailty and Aging as well as at the Bloomfield Centre for Research on Aging at the Lady Davis Institute, Jewish General Hospital. He is Adjunct Professor in the Université de Montréal School of Public Health, Invited Professor, Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine at the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland (until 2012). He is also adjunct full Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel where he was appointed to the International Academic Review Committee.
Dr. Bergman is a fellow of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS). He is a past President of the Canadian Geriatrics Society which awarded him the Ronald Cape Distinguished Service Award, a past Scientific Director of the FRSQ Quebec Network for Research in Aging, a Past President of the Consortium of Canadian Centers for Clinical Cognitive Research (C5R) and a past Chair of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Ageing of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). He is a fellow of the American Geriatrics Society. He is internationally recognized for his research on integrated care, frailty and chronic disease with over 170 publications as well as numerous reports and book chapters. The main thrust of Dr. Bergman’s work in health services research and policy has been on aging, chronic disease and frailty and on the promotion of primary care in general and primary medical care in particular.
In 2000-2001, Dr. Bergman was a member of the “Clair Commission”, an independent Commission set up by the Quebec government to propose reforms to the health care system. His work in that Commission was instrumental in the recommendation on primary care reform. He is recognized as the «author» of the recommendation on the creation of Family Medicine Groups (GMF).
In 2009, at the request of the Quebec ministry of health, he tabled Quebec Alzheimer Plan. Now working with the Ministry of Health in the implementation of the plan, Dr. Bergman with Professor Isabelle Vedel has also set up The Canadian Team for healthcare services/system improvement in dementia care, a multidisciplinary team involving stakeholders dedicated to the evaluation and implementation of initiatives to improve the capacity of primary care to diagnose and treat older persons with Alzheimer’s disease, and their caregivers.
In 2010, Dr. Bergman also chaired the Initiative for the Development of a Personalized Health Care Strategy for Quebec, bringing together university researchers, industry, health system managers, and government which led to an initial Quebec government commitment of $10 million to be matched by industry.
Dr. Bergman is a member of the Board of Directors of the Quebec Institut national d'excellence en santé et en services sociaux (INESSS-the equivalent of NICE in England. He is co-Chair of the National Guidance and Implementation Committee of the pan-Canadian public health program on family violence. Until recently, a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). In 2102, he advised the Ontario Ministry of Health in setting up Health System Research Fund Research competition (a $65 million Program) and chaired the inaugural scientific review panel. He advised and chaired the review panel for the Ontario SPOR $11 million competition. He serves as consultant to Regional Health Boards and ministries of health in Canada and other countries as well as to industry.
Lisa Bornstein is a Professor of the School of Urban Planning at McGill University. Her published research focuses on the politics of planning, with work on collaborative planning, public participation, institutional reform and public deliberations around large-scale urban projects, international development programs, and policy reform. Prior to joining McGill, she spent 7 years teaching at the University of Natal, Durban (South Africa). She directed the SSHRC-funded Community-Universities Research Alliance, Making Megaprojects Work for Communities, between 2006 and 2014.
Lynn Butler-Kisber (B.Ed., M.Ed., McGill; Ed.D. Harvard) is a Professor of Education in the Department of Integrated Studies at McGill University. Her teaching and research focus on qualitative research methodologies; leadership, multiliteracies; and professional development. She is particularly interested in arts-based methodologies, more specifically in visual inquiry (collage, photo/film and visual narratives) and in poetic inquiry on which she has written and presented extensively. She focuses on issues of marginalization, equity and social justice. Some recent publications include Poetic inquiries of reflection and renewal: Poetry as research (2017), with Guiney Yallop, Stewart & Wiebe; the second edition of her book, Qualitative Inquiry: Thematic, narrative and arts-based perspectives (Sage, April 2018) and Collage-making, in the 2019 Sage research methods foundations (edited by Atkinson, Delacourt et al.). She is founding (2007) and current Editor of the LEARNing Landscapes, an online, open access, peer-reviewed journal that integrates theory and practice, encourages multi-modal submissions and the inclusion of a variety of voices. Current projects include: The NEXTschool Initiative; and the Human Displacement and Narrative Inquiry Project; She has done a range of international research and development projects in Dominican Republic, China, Indonesia, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, and in the UK and USA.
For more information about Lynn Butler-Kisber, visit her profile on the Integrated Studies in Education website.
Franco Carnevale, RN, PhD is a nurse, psychologist and clinical ethicist. He completed his undergraduate nursing degree, and master's degrees in nursing, education, and bioethics, and a doctorate in counseling psychology at McGill University, as well a master’s degree in philosophy at Université de Sherbrooke and a second doctorate in moral philosophy at Université Laval. He has also completed graduate studies in health law, anthropology, and cultural psychiatry. Dr Carnevale's primary research interests include a wide range of concerns in pediatric ethics. He is the principal investigator for VOICE (Views On Interdisciplinary Childhood Ethics); a McGill-based international initiative to advance knowledge and practices relating to ethical concerns in childhood. His current academic appointments include (all at McGill University): Full Professor, School of Nursing; Associate Member, Faculty of Medicine (Pediatrics); Adjunct Professor, Counselling Psychology; Affiliate Member, Biomedical Ethics Unit. His clinical appointments include: Co-Chair of the Pediatric Ethics Committee, Nursing Consultant, and Associate Member of Pediatric Critical Care, all at the Montreal Children's Hospital-McGill University Health Centre; as well as Clinical Ethics Consultant at Le Phare, Enfants et Familles (pediatric hospice and respite care).
Dr. Chevrier investigates the impact of exposure to common environmental contaminants on child health and development. His work focuses on emerging and legacy contaminants such as pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane (DDT), bisphenol A (BPA), polybrominated diphenylether (PBDE) flame retardants, and dioxins. He studies the effect of these chemicals on the endocrine system, perinatal outcomes, child growth and neurodevelopment. He also applies and develops causal inference methods to address methodological issues in environmental and occupational epidemiology. He is the Project Director of the Venda Health Examination of Mothers, Babies and their Environment (VHEMBE), a birth cohort study of 751 mother-child pairs investigating the effect of public health insecticides on child development in South Africa.
Please visit this site for more information on Prof. Chevrier’s research.
Suparna Choudhury is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Culture, Mind & Brain Program at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. Trained originally as a neuroscientist, Suparna has worked as a researcher in London, Paris, Berlin and Montreal developing interdisciplinary approaches to examine the implications of the new brain sciences for health and society. She is a founder of the research program of Critical Neuroscience, which brings to bear perspectives of science studies and medical anthropology to examine how neuroscientists construct their objects of inquiry, and how research findings are transformed into popular knowledge and public policy. Her current research is focused on social cognitive development and the adolescent brain taking a critical neuroscience approach to study the model of 'the adolescent brain' and situate it in its social, cultural and historical contexts. Her research looks at impacts of social inequality on trajectories of neurocognitive development; legal, educational and mental health policy implications of knowledge on adolescent brain; dignity and mental wellbeing among adolescents.
Please visit this site for more information on Prof. Choudhury’s research.
Shelley Clark is a demographer whose research focuses on gender, health, and life course transitions in sub-Saharan Africa. After receiving her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1999, Dr. Clark served as program associate at the Population Council in New York (1999 to 2002) and as an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago (2002 to 2006). In the summer of 2006, she joined the Department of Sociology at McGill as an Associate Professor. Prof. Clark is the founding Director of the Centre on Population Dynamics and also directs the CFI-funded Life History, Health, and HIV/AIDS data laboratory.
Much of her research examines how adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa make key transitions to adulthood in the midst of an on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic. In particular, her work has focused on how the transition into marriage shapes the risks of HIV/AIDS among young women in sub-Saharan Africa. She finds that for adolescent girls in many African countries, marriage does not provide a safe haven, showing instead that married adolescent girls are acutely vulnerable with respect to HIV. Additional research demonstrates how the process of searching for and finding a suitable spouse places both adolescent boys and girls at considerable risk. Through her current collaborative project with colleagues in Kenya, Burkina Faso, and South Africa, she is exploring the implications of single motherhood on women’s poverty and children’s health over the life course. Her findings have been published in over 20 articles in leading journals, such as Demography, Social Forces, and Journal of Marriage and Family, and presented to policy makers at influential international organizations, including the World Bank, WHO, UNFPA/UNICEF, and the Population Council.
Jaye Ellis is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law and School of Environment, McGill University. She teaches public international law, international environmental law, civil and common law liability, and environmental epistemology and ethics. She is co-lead on the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative Transitions initiative, studying interactions between metrics such as indicators and other types of norms in the context of sustainability governance. Current research projects focus on authority and legitimacy in transnational regimes, notably the Forest and Marine Stewardship Councils; and risk and uncertainty in public and private law, with an emphasis on response to environmental degradation. Ongoing collaborative research projects include governance of endocrine disrupting substances in food contact materials, with a focus on innovations in testing approaches and methodology and impacts on regulatory regimes; and innovations in the production of industrial and consumer materials for sustainability.
Phoebe Friesen is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Ethics Unit and the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University and an Associate member in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychiatry. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center and an M.A. in philosophy from Western University. From 2018 – 2019 she worked as a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford.
Dr. Friesen’s interests span several questions that arise at the intersections of medical ethics, psychiatry, philosophy of science, and research ethics. Among other topics, she has written about the harms of failing to acknowledge the impact of the placebo effect in both research and clinical contexts, the issue of inconsistency within and across research ethics boards, the role of responsibility in the allocation of health care resources, the promises and challenges related to participatory research, and the importance of requiring consent for educational pelvic examinations on women under anesthetic.
For more information about Pheobe Friesen, visit her profile on the Social Studies of Medicine website.
Ian Gold is Associate Professor of Philosophy & Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal. He completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton University and did postdoctoral training at the Australian National University in Canberra. From 2000 to 2006 he was on the faculty of the School of Philosophy & Bioethics at Monash University in Melbourne and came to McGill in 2006. His research focuses on the study of delusions, social neuroscience, and on reductionism in psychiatry and neuroscience. He is the author of research articles in the such journals as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Mind and Language, Consciousness and Cognition, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, World Psychiatry, Transcultural Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Suspicious Minds (Free Press), a book on the theory of delusions co-written with his brother Joel, appeared in July.
Dr. Harper is an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics & Occupational Health at McGill University. He is also a member of the McGill University Centre on Population Dynamics and the Montreal Health Equity Research Consortium.
His research focuses on understanding population health and its social distribution, with specific interests in measuring health inequalities, global health, demography, cancer epidemiology, causal inference, and ethical issues in public health.
Matthew Hunt is an Assistant Professor at the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy and a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation. He also chairs the clinical ethics committee of the Shriners Hospital for Children. Dr. Hunt trained as a physiotherapist, and subsequently completed a Master’s degree in bioethics and PhD in Experimental Medicine at McGill. He then undertook post-doctoral fellowships at the Centre for Research on Ethics of the University of Montreal (CREUM) and the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University before returning to McGill in 2011.
Dr. Hunt conducts research related to ethics of global health practices and research, and on equity of rehabilitation services. Current research projects include inquiries into the ethics of research and innovation in disaster relief, wait list management and equity of access to physiotherapy in Canada, and ethics of humanitarian health policy and practice. He also leads a capacity building project focused on rehabilitation providers in Haiti.
Assistant Professor Sébastien Jodoin holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment. He is also a member of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism and an Associate Member of the Bieler School of Environment, the McGill Institute of Health and Social Policy, and the Max Bell School of Public Policy. His research focuses on three broad themes: the relationship between human rights and the climate crisis; transnational and comparative climate law and policy; and the role of disability rights in addressing complex environmental and health issues and challenges. He is the founding director of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program, a pioneering initiative to generate, co-produce, and translate knowledge at the intersections of disability and climate justice.
For more about Sébastien Jodoin, visit his profile on the Faculty of Law website.
Jay S. Kaufman holds a doctorate in epidemiologic science from the University of Michigan (1995). After a post-doctoral position at Loyola Stritch School of Medicine (Chicago, IL) from 1995-1997, he was Medical Epidemiologist at Carolinas Medical Center (Charlotte, NC) from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 through 2008 he held positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health at Chapel Hill before leaving for his current position as Professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Disparities in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University (Montreal, QC). He is also currently appointed as Visiting Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Chile, Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, University of Michigan School of Public Health (Ann Arbor, MI), and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC). Dr. Kaufman's work focuses on social epidemiology, analytic methodology, causal inference and on a variety of health outcomes including reproductive, cardiovascular, psychiatric and infectious diseases. He is an editor at the journal “Epidemiology” and an associate editor at “American Journal of Epidemiology”. With J. Michael Oakes he is the co-editor of the textbook “Methods in Social Epidemiology”. Dr. Kaufman has taught epidemiologic methods in doctoral level courses at UNC and McGill, and in international short-courses in Germany, France, and Chile. He has over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Lara Khoury, Ad. E., is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of law, an associate member of the Institute for Health & Social Policy and an elected associate member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. She was the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Law from 2015 to 2017. She is also a member of McGill’s Institute of Comparative Law and a Research Scholar at the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law. She convenes, with Professor Alana Klein, the McGill Research Group on Health and Law. She teaches and conducts research in the fields of comparative Medical, Public Health and Environmental Law, with a particular focus on liability issues. She is the author of "Uncertain Causation in Medical Liability" (Hart Publishing, Oxford and Yvon Blais, Cowansville) which received the 2004 Prix Minerve and the 2008 Quebec Bar Foundation Prize. This monograph deals with the impact of scientific uncertainties on the proof of causation in medical liability in English and Canadian common law, as well as in French and Québec civil law. Lara Khoury has completed a doctoral (D.Phil) degree at the University of Oxford, from where she also holds a master’s degree (B.C.L.). Professor Khoury was elected a titular member of the International Academy of Comparative Law in July 2019. She received the Barreau du Québec's Advocatus Emeritus (Ad. E.) designation in October 2019.
Please visit this site for more information on Prof. Khoury’s research.
Nick King is is an Associate Professor in the Biomedical Ethics Unit, and holds appointments in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, and the Max Bell School of Public Policy. His primary research areas are public health policy, ethics, and epistemology. He studies the ways that 'black boxes' of all sorts - from seemingly objective measures of health and health inequalities, to complex algorithms - are shaped by human interests and hidden value judgments, which in turn shape individual decisions, collective behaviors, and public policies.
Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, and Director of the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where he conducts research on cultural responsive mental health services for immigrants and refugees, the mental health of Indigenous peoples, and the anthropology of psychiatry. He founded and directs the annual Summer Program and Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry at McGill. He also founded and directs the Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research. His past research includes studies on cultural consultation, pathways and barriers to mental health care for immigrants and refugees, somatization in primary care, cultural concepts of mental health and illness in Inuit communities, risk and protective factors for suicide among Inuit youth, and resilience among Indigenous peoples. Current projects include: mental health promotion for Indigenous youth; the integration of ethnography and neuroscience in global mental health; and models of mental health services for multicultural societies. His co-edited the volumes: Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge University Press), and Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada (University of British Columbia Press); Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care (Springer); the DSM-5 Handbook for the Cultural Formulation Interview (APPI): and Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience and Global Mental Health (Cambridge) . He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
Associate Professor Alana Klein teaches and researches in health law, criminal law, and human rights. She convenes, with Professor Lara Khoury, the McGill Research Group on Health and Law. The position of marginalized groups and individuals in decentralized and privatized systems and the role of accountability requirements in governance and decision-making are primary preoccupations in her research. Prior to joining the Faculty, she was a senior policy analyst with the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, where she worked on HIV/AIDS and immigration, legal and other barriers to harm-reduction programs for people
who use illegal drugs, and law reform to promote the rights of women and girls in the context of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. She has taught at Columbia Law School and Columbia University and has interned with the International Refugee Program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First) and with the Palestinian Ministry of Economy and Trade. In 2002-2003, she was a law clerk to former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour and she was appointed to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 2006.
Please visit this website for more information on Prof. Klein’s research.
Lucyna Lach is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work, McGill University and an Associate Member of the Departments of Pediatrics and Neurology/Neurosurgery in the Faculty of Medicine, McGill University. Her program of research focusses on the quality of life of children with neurodisabilities and their caregiver (i.e. caregiver health, and parenting). Dr. Lach's current projects address social determinants of health of children with neurodisabiltiies. She is co-leading a team of researchers and trainees who are using population-based as well as administrative and clinical databases to document determinants such as income, service use, and educational outcomes. She is part of a recently funded Strategic Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) Team entitiled CHILDBRIGHT, as co-lead of one of three themes that is evaluating five intervention/prevention approaches to supporting children with neurodisabilities and their families.
Dr. Lach is currently the Associate Dean (Student Affairs) in the Faculty of Arts. She has taught direct practice, theory and research courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She has reviewed grants for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Fond de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, and numerous peer-reviewed journals. Prior to joining the faculty at McGill University in 2001, she spent 17 years as a social worker at the Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario where she worked in the Division of Neurology.
For more information about Lucyna Lach, visit her profile on the Centre for Research on Children and Families website.
Dr Latimer is a Research Scientist at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. A health economist, his research interests focus on community-based supports for people with severe mental illness, particularly their economic aspects. He has also conducted research on the use of antipsychotic medications in Québec. He has been lead investigator for the Montreal site, and lead economist nationally, of the $110 million Chez Soi / At Home research and demonstration study on homelessness and mental illness, which tested the Housing First approach using nine concurrent trials in five Canadian cities. Currently he is also completing a CIHR-funded study that implemented and evaluated the strengths model of case management in several sites in Ontario, Québec and Newfoundland. He has served as consultant to the Québec government as well as research teams in Europe and North America. He was an associate editor of the Canadian journal, Healthcare Policy (2011 – 2019), and is a fellow of the Québec research group CIRANO. He teaches economic evaluation of health programs in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University.
For more information about Dr. Latimer, please visit his profile on the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry website.
Raphael Lencucha is an Assistant Professor in the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy at McGill University. His overarching research program focuses on health governance in complex policy environments. His research on health governance is conducted in two main domains: 1) tobacco and food policy and 2) mental health policy. His research has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the American Cancer Society and the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use. His research projects have been conducted in Brazil, the Philippines, Zambia, Kenya, Malawi and Canada. Dr. Lencucha received a PhD in Health Promotion at Western University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Population Health at the University of Ottawa.
Eric Lewis is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill. His present research focuses on the philosophy of improvised music. He is the McGill site coordinator for ICASP (Improvisation, Community and Social Research), a major international research project with primary funding from the SSHRC MCRI program. He is presently completing two book projects, the first on the ontology of improvised music, the second an edited collection on Improvisation and Social Aesthetics. He is also actively involved in the creation and curation of improvised art exhibits, and an active improvising musician. Broader research interests include the philosophy of music more generally, aesthetics, philosophy of copyright, and a host of interdisciplinary approaches to art, culture and society.
Nik Luka is an Associate Professor cross-appointed to McGill University’s Schools of Architecture and Urban Planning, as well as the Vice-President of the Board of Directors of the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre. He specialises in transdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban form and cultural landscapes with a particular interest in the everyday interfaces of nature and culture as experienced by individuals. Trained as an architect and planner, with a Ph.D. in urban and cultural geography, Luka works extensively on community-based design processes—including adaptive strategies for making infrastructure fit well into local contexts—as well as housing, residential mobility, and the dynamics of periurban spaces. At McGill University, he is also affiliated with the School of Environment, the Institute for Health and Social Policy, the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design, and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal.
Kevin Manaugh is an Associate Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Geography and the Bieler School of Environment. Some of the central concern of his research are how urban regions are faced with a multitude of challenges, how decision-makers balance, prioritize and trade-off various—often-conflicting—environmental, economic, and social equity goals. He predominately examines this through transport systems and how various personal, institutional, and government decision-making processes affect growth and development of urban areas. Some of his current research projects include: understanding how the transportation needs of disadvantaged populations and issues of social equity can be integrated into land use and transportation policies; understanding how people and households of different socio-economic status respond to measures of local and regional accessibility; and understanding behavior change in the context of sustainable transportation and its effects on health and well-being.
For more information about Professor Manaugh's research, please visit his profile on the Department of Geography website.
Claudia Mitchell is a Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Department of Integrated studies with the Faculty of Education at McGill University, and an Honorary Professor in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, where she established the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change.
In September 2015 Dr. Mitchell was recognized as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is currently the Director of the Institute of Human Development and Well-Being in the Faculty of Education of McGill University. Her research interests span work in schools with teachers and young people, particularly in the context of gender, HIV and AIDS; studies in Higher Education of mainstreaming issues of gender, HIV and AIDS in South Africa and Ethiopia; girlhood studies, in particular work related to gender-based violence; and participatory visual methodologies and community-based research in health education, housing and agriculture.
For more about Claudia Mitchell, visit her profile on the Institute for Human Development and Well-being website.
Gilles Paradis, full professor and current Chair of the University’s Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, Strathcona Chair in Epidemiology at McGill, joins the Institute for Health and Social Policy as an Associate Member. Dr. Paradis also holds numerous high-level positions within the provincial health sphere, including Founding Scientific Director and now Governing Board Member of the Quebec Population Health Research Network, the Director of the Quebec Public and Population Health Research Training Program (4P), Consulting Physician to the Department of Public Health an Preventive Medicine at the CHUM, Member of the Outcomes Research Axis at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center, and Medical Consultant to the Public Health Institute of Quebec (INSPQ). Dr. Paradis completed his MD at Université de Montreal and a specialty in community medicine and an MSc in epidemiology at McGill University. After a fellowship at Stanford University he returned to Montreal and focused his research on community-based prevention and risk factor analysis for cardiovascular disease, especially in low-income and aboriginal communities, and among children and adolescents. He is also involved in studies of obesity in children and the development of nicotine addiction in novice smokers. Dr. Paradis also held a CIHR Chair in Applied Public Health Research (2008-2013).
Dr. Quesnel-Vallée is a medical sociologist and a social demographer with postdoctoral training in social epidemiology. Her research examines the contribution of social policies to the development of social inequalities in health over the lifecourse. With funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, she currently studies the impact of public coverage and private health insurance regulation on general and mental health in select OECD countries.
Mónica Ruiz-Casares, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and at the Centre for Research on Children and Families, McGill University. She received her PhD in Policy Analysis and Management/Human Services Studies from Cornell University and Postdoctoral training in Transcultural Child Psychiatry and at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University (FRSQ and Tomlinson Scholar). Her research program focuses on the wellbeing and protection of orphan, separated, and unsupervised children across cultures; children’s rights and participation; and social policy and program evaluation. Her past work includes, among others, the first study on child -headed households and child depression in Namibia; study of children home alone in Botswana, Mexico, and Vietnam with over 500-interviews from the Global Working Families project; and a Canada-wide, on-line survey on children home alone in collaboration with Kids Help Phone/Jeunesse J’écoute. Her current projects explore the determinants and consequences of failure to supervise in children in the Canadian Child Welfare System as well as of young children left home alone in low- and middle-income countries; a Child Protection Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices study in Liberia (Save the Children); and undocumented migrant and refugee children’s rights and access to services in Canada and other Western host countries (CIHR). She also has an award from the Mental Health Commission of Canada to develop a framework for supporting parents for the promotion of adolescent mental health, particularly among ethnoculturally diverse communities. Her research privileges the voices of children and youth, and is inspired by action research principles.
For more information about Mónica Ruiz-Casares, visit her profile page on the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry website.
Jai Shah is a psychiatrist and researcher interested in the early phases of psychotic illness (including at-risk populations), early intervention, and the design and delivery of mental health services for youth. He is an Assistant Professor in McGill’s Department of Psychiatry, a Full Researcher at the Douglas Hospital Research Center, and is supported by an FRQS Clinician-Scientist Award. Jai is Associate Director of the Prevention and Early Intervention Program for Psychoses (PEPP-Montréal), Canada’s leading clinical and research program for early psychosis. Based at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, PEPP-Montréal’s research involves help-seeking populations at risk for psychotic illness and those experiencing a first episode of psychosis. Jai’s current and emerging work includes projects on the neurobiology of stress in at-risk and first episode populations, the content of delusions in early psychosis, early signs and symptoms in the psychosis prodrome, and health services utilization in early psychosis. Jai is also a Principal Investigator with ACCESS Open Minds, a pan-Canadian network dedicated to developing, implementing and evaluating a transformation of youth mental health services for youth aged 11-25. Jai was trained as Fellow in Public Psychiatry at Yale University, following a Dupont-Warren Research Fellowship and psychiatry residency at Harvard Medical School, an MD at the University of Toronto, and graduate work in health and social policy at the London School of Economics where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. He has additional background in research policy (at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) and ethics (at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics).
Please visit this website for more information on Prof. Shah’s research.
Dr. Shikako-Thomas is an Assistant Professor in the Occupational Therapy program. Her research focuses on the promotion of healthy living and participation for children with disabilities. Her research program will adopt a participatory methodology to engage different stakeholders, including policymakers, children and their families, in finding solutions to change the environment, inform policymaking and promote participation of children with disabilities in different life roles and activities. She obtained her PhD in Rehabilitation Science at McGill University and and her BSc in Occupational Therapy at at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. She pursued post-doctoral training in Knowledge Translation in policymaking for children with disabilities at McMaster University and in Knowledge Translation in policymaking in Environmental Design and Accessibility at Université de Montréal.
Erin Strumpf is a health economist and health services researcher whose research interests include how characteristics of health care and health financing systems affect access to health care, quality of care, health care costs and health outcomes, particularly for vulnerable subpopulations. She holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Economics and Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University. She received her Ph.D. in Health Policy and Economics from Harvard University and her B.A. from Smith College. Dr. Strumpf was a pre-doctoral fellow in Health and Aging with the National Bureau for Economic Research and the U.S. National Institute on Aging.
Eran Tal is Canada Research Chair in Data Ethics. He joined the Philosophy Department at McGill in 2016, after holding fellowships at the University of Cambridge and Bielefeld University. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto (2012) and an MA in History and Philosophy of Science from Tel Aviv University (2006). Tal’s work deals with the epistemic and ethical dimensions of data collection, data analysis and data use in the sciences. He has contributed to the philosophy of measurement, an area within philosophy of science that deals with the concepts and problems involved in designing, operating and interpreting measurement procedures. He is especially interested in the conceptual and ethical foundations of health outcome measures, and in the assumptions underlying the use of machine learning algorithms for diagnosis and health risk prediction.
Please visit this website for more information on Prof. Tal’s research.
Zoua Vang is a sociologist, with post-doctoral training in social demography. She received her BA in Sociology and Psychology (1999) from the University of Pennsylvania, and MA (2004) and PhD (2008) in Sociology from Harvard University. Prof. Vang spent two years as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania where she acquired training in racial/ethnic health disparities and maternal child health. Prof. Vang’s research focuses on migration and health, Indigenous maternal child health, and the consequences of discrimination for health and well-being. Other areas of her research and substantive interests include: immigrant assimilation, neighborhood effects, and race/ethnic relations.
Please visit this website for more information on Prof. Vang’s research.
Dr. Yang's research focuses on prenatal and early life exposures and child growth and development; social disparities in pregnancy outcomes; life-course epidemiology, and social determinants of health.