Faculty

Faculty Based at the IHSP

Chris Barrington-Leigh is an Associate Professor jointly appointed at the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Bieler School of Environment. Originally trained in upper atmospheric and space plasma physics at M.I.T., Stanford, and Berkeley, Chris subsequently received a PhD in Economics at UBC. Chris' interests are focused on empirical and quantitative assessments of welfare, and their implications for economic, social, and environmental policy, including the pursuit of overall economic growth and material consumption expansion. In particular, his research makes use of subjective well-being reports to address the relative importance of social and community-oriented aspects of life as compared with material consumption. He uses large international as well as national surveys, experiments, and economic theoretical modeling to understand individual and aggregate consumption benefits. Chris was a Global Scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR),  affiliated with CIFAR's research programme on Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being.

Publications and Contact Information
Phone: 514-398-2794
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1146

Jill Baumgartner is an Associate Professor, jointly appointed in the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Department for Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health. Her research focuses on understanding the determinants of exposure to environmental pollutants, their impact on human health, and appropriate interventions to address them. Dr. Baumgartner completed a joint Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences and Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010 and a Masters in Population and International Health from Harvard University in 2006. She was a Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment from 2011-2013 and held a visiting appointment at Tsinghua University (Beijing) in 2012.

Dr. Baumgartner's Website
jill.baumgartner [at] mcgill.ca (Email) | Phone: 514-398-6688
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1278

Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry is an Associate Professor, jointly appointed in the McGill's Institute for Health and Social Policy and the McGill Faculty of Law. He has taught in the area of health and disability law, international and domestic human rights and jurisprudence. His recent research has focused on health policies, bioethics and theories of autonomy and equality rights. His recent book, The Disabled Contract, examines how mainstream moral and political theory has difficulty accommodating severe intellectual disability. He has founded McGill’s Disability Working Group. His research has been funded by FQRSC and SSHRC grants and the Fondation du Barreau du Québec. He has presented at academic series and conferences across North America and Europe. He has advised disability organizations since 2015 in various capacities, including with strategic litigation, and been consulted by the Quebec Bar, the federal Department of Justice and the Senate on health policy and equality issues. 

jonas-sebastien.beaudry [at] mcgill.ca (Email) | Phone: 514-398-6634
Office: 3690 Peel Street, Room 109

Frank Elgar is a Professor and cross-appointed to the Institute for Health and Social Policy and Department of Psychiatry. He is also an associate member of the Department of Psychology and Margaret A. Gilliam Institute for Global Food Security. Frank trained in developmental psychology at Memorial University and Dalhousie University and previously worked at the Cardiff Institute for Society, Health and Ethics (UK), University of Manitoba's Department of Family Social Sciences, and Carleton University's Department of Psychology before joining McGill in 2011. 

His research examines social patterns in child and adolescent health, in Canada and globally. Current projects explore ways to improve children’s chances to be healthy amid the social forces of poverty, food insecurity, violence, and economic inequality. Frank is also a co-investigator of the World Health Organization's Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study where he leads international collaborations on the impacts of school violence, social media use, and corporal punishment legislation on adolescent mental health and well-being.

Dr. Elgar's Website
frank.elgar [at] mcgill.ca (Email)| Phone: 514-398-1739
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1160 

Alissa Koski is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health. Her research examines the social determinants of women’s health and well being in low-income countries. Her recent work has focused on measuring the prevalence and consequences of child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. 

Dr. Koski's Website
alissa.koski [at] mcgill.ca (Email) | Phone: 514-398-1739
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1267

Antonia Maioni is a Professor at the Institute for Health and Social Policy in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University. She is also an Associate Member in the Department of Family Medicine, the Department of Political Science and the Desautels Faculty of Management.

antonia.maioni [at] mcgill.ca (Email)
Prof Maioni's Website
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1149

Arijit Nandi is an Associate Professor jointly appointed at the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health. He has established a program of research that examines macro-level determinants of population health and health inequality, including the effects of social interventions, in a global context. His primary interest are in using experimental and quasi-experimental designs to evaluate the impact of policies and programs on population health. He is the principal investigator of the PROSPERED project, which evaluates the health impact of public policies using quasi-experimental methods, and a founding member of the McGill Public Policy & Population Health Observatory (3PO). A former Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University, he received a PhD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

arijit.nandi [at] mcgill.ca (Email) | Phone: 514-398-7849
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1168

Natalie Stoljar came to McGill in 2006 after holding positions at the Australian National University, Monash University (Melbourne) and the University of Melbourne. Her research is in three areas: feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy (especially moral psychology), and the philosophy of law. In feminist philosophy, she has written on feminist metaphysics, especially the notions of essentialism, realism and nominalism. In social and political philosophy, her work focuses on autonomy and other aspects of moral psychology. She is co-editor (with Catriona Mackenzie) of the 2000 collection Relational Autonomy. Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (OUP). Her current research is funded by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant “Autonomy and Oppression. A Relational Analysis’ (2010-13). In the philosophy of law, she has published on the notions of legal interpretation, constitutional interpretation and judicial review, and the methodology of law. Prof. Stoljar regularly teaches the Department’s philosophy of law courses (PHIL 348 and PHIL 548). She was Chair of the Department from 2008-2012.

natalie.stoljar [at] mcgill.ca (Email) | Phone: 514-398-2436
Office: Leacock, Room 925

Kristin Voigt is an Associate Professor at McGill University, jointly appointed in the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Department of Philosophy. Her research focuses on egalitarian theories of justice and the links between political philosophy and social policy, especially public health policy. Her recent and ongoing projects address issues such as the relationship between distributive and relational theories of equality; conceptions of health (in)equality and the social determinants of health; global health measurement; and concerns about equality that arise in connection with specific health policies and interventions (especially in relation to smoking and obesity). 

She received her DPhil in Political Philosophy from Oxford in 2008. Before coming to McGill, she held positions at Harvard University, Lancaster University, and the European College of Liberal Arts (now Bard College Berlin).

Dr. Voigt's Website
kristin.voigt [at] mcgill.ca (Email) | Phone: 514-398-5754
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1166

Daniel Weinstock studied Political Science and Political Philosophy at McGill University, where he received a BA and an MA, between 1980 and 1986. He received a DPhil in Political Philosophy from Oxford University, where he studied between 1986 and 1991. From 1988 to 1989, he was a visiting doctoral student at Harvard University. He completed postdoctoral work in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, before joining the faculty of the Department of Philosophy of the Université de Montréal in 1993. From 2002 to 2011, he was the Founding Director of the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal. In 2012, he became a Professor in the Faculty of Law and in the Department of Philosophy of McGill University. In 2013, he was appointed as Director of McGill’s Institute for Health and Social Policy. His term as Director began on August 1, 2013 and ended August 31, 2020. He was appointed as the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy, in the Faculties of Arts and Law, effective June 1, 2020. He has held Visiting Appointments at Université Lyon III, at the Australian National University, at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto, Japan), and at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain.

His research interests have spanned widely across a wide range of topics in contemporary moral and political philosophy – from the just management of ethnocultural and religious diversity in modern liberal democracies, to state policy with respect to children, families, and educational institutions. His main research interests at present have to do with the problem of health equity, and with issues of justice and inclusion as they arise in the organization of modern cities. The guiding thread of his research has been to connect philosophical and ethical argument with institutional reasoning. It is marked by the firm conviction that moral and political philosophers have paid insufficient attention to the institutional parameters that both enable and constrain the realization of normative ideals. His attention to institutional specificity has led to his being called upon quite regularly to serve on public policy commissions in areas as diverse as public health (he was the Founding Director of Quebec’s Public Health Ethics Committee), education, end-of-life medical care, and "reasonable accommodation."

His work and teaching have been recognized by a number of major prizes. In 1997 he was awarded a teaching prize by the Faculté des arts et des sciences de l’Université de Montréal for his innovations in developing ethics and public policy courses for the health sciences, and in 1998 he received a teaching prize awarded by the Université de Montréal to its most distinguished teachers at the University-wide level. He has held both a Tier I and a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. In 1998, he was awarded a fellowship both to the Rockefeller Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and to the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He spent the 1998-1999 academic year as a Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton. In 2004, he was made a Prize Fellow of the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Foundation, and in 2008, he received the Prix André-Laurendeau from the Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences. A James McGill Professor from 2014 to 2020, he was awarded the 2017 Charles Taylor Prize for Excellence in Policy Research by the Broadbent Institute.

Email
Office: New Chancellor Day Hall, Room 505

David Wright is Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health Policy. He received his BA and MA in History from McGill University and his DPhil (in History) from the University of Oxford. As a Wellcome Trust post-doctoral research fellow at Oxford he specialized in the history of health and medicine before being appointed Wellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Nottingham (1996-99). David returned to Canada to take up the Jason Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at McMaster University, a cross-appointment between the medical school and the History department (1999-2011). He joined McGill in 2011 as a Full Professor, cross appointed to the Department of History and Classical Studies (Faculty of Arts). David has served in various administrative capacities, including Interim Director of IHSP (2013) and Chair of the Department of History and Classical Studies (2015-18). 

David has published widely on a number of inter-related areas within the social history of medicine of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including: the history of lunatic asylums, the history of disability, the history of hospitals, the history of suicide, and the history of Canadian Medicare. He is the author and co-editor of eleven books and a further 70 publications, including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, review essays and book reviews. In 2020 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 

Dr. Wright's Profile
david.j.wright [at] mcgill.ca (Email )| Phone: 514-398-1292
Office: 2001 McGill College, Room 1162