This fall, we welcomed the eighth cohort of Master of Public Policy candidates to the Max Bell School. This year's class brings together 39 students arriving from dozens of countries and almost as many lines of work. Some join us straight from their undergraduate degrees and others after years in the field, including newsrooms, electoral commissions, engineering firms, refugee organizations, think tanks, and government offices.
Six of them join with scholarships that reflect the strength of this year's class. Caitlin Arizala and Rebecca Seymour arrive as McCall MacBain Scholars, selected from a competitive global pool for their leadership and their record of public service. Abdirahman Mohamed, Ubah Mohamed Jama, Opira Bosco Okot, and Haile Meseret Yemane arrive as Mastercard Foundation Scholars, part of an initiative that supports emerging leaders from across Africa working to strengthen public policy and advance inclusive development.
This year's students come from varied backgrounds, but are connected by their shared pull towards tackling public issues. Influenced by their professional backgrounds and past experiences, many hope to investigate how policymaking touches areas like health equity and housing, energy, immigration, digital governance and economic development. However different their paths to the Max Bell School, our MPPs arrive ready to test their ideas against evidence and against one another, and to leave better equipped to shape policy that works.
Meet our MPPs
Caitlin Arizala is a first-generation Filipina-Canadian from Northwest Toronto and a recent graduate of the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she earned a BSc in Population Health with High Distinction. As a researcher she has led six studies on questions ranging from COVID-19 vaccine equity to the social determinants of health and equitable neighbourhood development. For more than seven years she has also led youth programming across Toronto focused on economic empowerment and poverty reduction, co-developing a creative studio as Community Manager at The Flaunt-It Movement and co-founding scholaRLY, an academic incubator that supports young people on their path to post-secondary education. In 2023 she served as an aide to the Mayor of Toronto, and she recently completed a term as a 2024-25 Ontario Legislature Internship Programme intern, staffing both government and opposition members. Now a McCall MacBain Scholar, Caitlin looks forward to delving further into evidence-based public health and Canadian intergovernmental policy.
Rebecca Seymour is from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, where she studies Political Science at Cape Breton University and serves as Executive Vice President of the Students’ Union. She chairs Students Nova Scotia, an advocacy group representing more than 20,000 students across the province, and sits on the board of the Glace Bay Food Bank, where she recently helped secure an Ocean Wise grant to host gardening workshops for clients. Rebecca previously led her university’s Honours Society as president for two years. After three years in academic advocacy, she is committed to advancing equitable access to higher education and to dismantling the systemic barriers that keep it out of reach for marginalized communities. She begins her Master of Public Policy at McGill as a McCall MacBain Scholar, ready to build the policy solutions that first drew her to this work.
Abdirahman Mohamed holds a degree in Economics from Somali National University and comes to the Max Bell School from Somalia. His training left him convinced that prosperity depends less on a country’s resources than on the strength of its institutions and the quality of its public policy, a conviction that has shaped his interest in institutional reform and evidence-based policymaking, especially in fragile contexts like his own. At the MPP, Abdirahman hopes to deepen his understanding of how effective policy can expand opportunity and strengthen resilience. Now a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, he looks ahead to a career where research and public policy meet economic development, helping governments and development partners use data and evidence to foster inclusive growth and build stronger institutions.
Haile Meseret Yemane holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Addis Ababa University and brings more than two years of experience in Ethiopia’s capital markets. As a Market Development Officer at the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority, he has supported transparent market practices and investor education, contributing to initiatives such as the Regulatory Sandbox and the IPO Clinic. He has also been active in community service and youth empowerment. Now a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, Haile joins the MPP passionate about addressing economic development challenges through evidence-based policy that promotes sustainable and inclusive growth.
Hadi Saifi’s path to public policy runs through displacement and resilience. He spent part of his childhood in rural Afghanistan and later years as a refugee in Thailand, where he came to understand exclusion not as an abstract condition but as something administered through policy and legal status, shaping who could reach public services and who could not. In Thailand he co-founded Bridge of Light and Hope, a refugee-led initiative that worked with partners such as APRRN and HOST International to support vulnerable communities and advocate for education and essential services. After resettling in Halifax, Hadi studied International Development Studies and Law, Justice and Society at Dalhousie University while supporting refugee students and newcomers through WUSC and RRANS. At the Max Bell School, he looks forward to deepening his knowledge of Canadian immigration and global affairs policy, and of how Canada’s development funding abroad is held to account.
Natalia Lebedin is an architect and community organizer moving into public policy, with a focus on Ukraine’s reconstruction and whole-of-society recovery spanning infrastructure and housing through to cultural memory. Born in Canada to Ukrainian refugees and holding dual Canadian and American citizenship, she comes to Max Bell from Columbus, Ohio, where she served as President of the Ukrainian Cultural Association of Ohio and led congressional advocacy delegations with the American Coalition for Ukraine. She has also advised on housing innovation policy through the Ohio Housing Innovation Partnership. Born into a diaspora shaped by one war, Natalia came to the Max Bell School to help design the systems that will let Ukraine rebuild on its own terms.
Soham Kulkarni has lived and worked across four continents, and he brings to the Max Bell School a career spanning mechanical engineering, solar development, electric-vehicle manufacturing, and energy policy research. Most recently he worked as a policy analyst on electricity-market regulation in Prince Edward Island, producing research that shaped legislative proposals on integrated resource planning and utility performance incentives. Soham comes to the MPP with a deep interest in energy democracy and the governance of just transitions, eager to apply rigorous analysis to questions of who owns and controls energy infrastructure, and who benefits from it.
Visit the online profiles of our eighth cohort to learn more about their work and educational experiences.
