Nineteen scholars will advance York University’s growing global health research community as recipients of the 2024-25 Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholarships.
This scholarship program was created to attract exceptional incoming and continuing domestic and international graduate research students to the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. Each year the scholarship is granted to those who demonstrate outstanding academic achievement in global health research and supports research and related scholarly and creative activities in line with the three themes of the Institute – planetary health, global health and humanitarianism, and global health foresighting.
“We are proud and elated to support 19 exceptional graduate scholars whose research will advance impactful scholarly and real-world contributions to global health across a diverse range of Faculties and programs at York University,” said Professor Mary Wiktorowicz, associate director of the Dahdaleh Institute. “Their inspiring research pursuits build momentum for the vision of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research to enhance effectiveness, equity and excellence in global health research through a critical problem-solving approach to 21st-century challenges.”
This year’s master's-level recipients are:
Jesse Sam – Examining Socioeconomic Factors and Health System Challenges as Obstacles to Accessing Perinatal Care Services in High-Risk Areas
Sam is pursuing research in health policy and equity in the graduate health program under the mentorship of Associate Professor Farah Ahmed. His research examines the connection between socioeconomic determinants and health system factors. Specifically, he will explore how these factors hinder access to perinatal care services in high-risk areas. Driven by his commitment to addressing health-care disparities, his research aims to provide valuable insights aimed at improving access and equity in maternal and child health services.
Valerie Lawson – Healthcare Access: An Analysis of the National Health Insurance Scheme in Accra, Ghana
Lawson is an international student from Ghana who holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and French from the University of Ghana. Currently pursuing a master's degree in development studies at York University, she seeks to examine health-care access in Africa through the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), using Ghana as a case study. Through this research, she focuses on the perceptions, experiences and coping mechanisms of NHIS subscribers in response to out-of-pocket expenditure on health-care services covered by the scheme, and examines the relationship between this phenomenon and the health-care seeking behaviour and financial well-being of subscribers.
This year’s doctoral-level recipients are:
Alexandra Frankel – Imagining Water Health: Industrial Pasts and Promises of Clean Water Futures
Frankel is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology. Her research examines the social and material life of the term “water health” in the Milwaukee estuary. By tracing this term across efforts to remove lead laterals and legacy industrial contaminants from Milwaukee’s waterways and to brand Milwaukee as a water-centric city, this research asks how imaginaries of health are being re-fashioned to include more-than-human entities, like water, in the context of reckonings with industrial pasts and contentious desired futures.
Alexandra Scott – Autonomous Weapon Systems, International Humanitarian Law, and the Myth of “Good Enough”
Scott is a graduate scholar in global health and humanitarianism with a focus on international humanitarian law (IHL) and autonomous weapon systems (AWS). In her graduate research project, she will argue that the lack of direct human responsibility for critical actions taken by AWS is fundamentally incompatible with customary IHL, in which the exercise of moral judgment is a core requirement for an attack to be lawful. Scott will place her intervention to this debate within two historical contexts: that of the historical development of IHL and that of the historical pursuit for the ultimate “super weapon,” of which AWS is but the latest iteration.
Ana Carolina de Almeida Cardoso – (de)Colonizing the Future: Climate Struggles and Resistance in the Era of the Anthropocene
De Almeida Cardoso is pursuing a PhD in environmental studies in the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change (EUC) at York University, having moved from Nheterõîa (Niterói), Pindorama, Brazil, where she grew up. She holds a master’s degree in international relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and a bachelor’s degree in law from Fundação Getulio Vargas. Her research interests lie at the intersections between coloniality, modernity and “nature,” with particular focus on climate governance and politics, the Anthropocene and decolonial futures. Her PhD research explores the concept of “colonization of the future” and its onto-epistemic implications, framing the climate crisis as a site of struggles for future(s).
Babatunde Odugbemi – The AMR GAP: A comparative analysis of the implementation of national antimicrobial resistance (AMR) Action Plans in High Income and Low to Middle Income Countries
Odugbemi is a member of the pioneer cohort of students in York University's PhD program in Global Health. He holds an MB;BS degree from the University of Lagos, a master's in public health from the University of Sheffield and a master of science in aging and health from Queen’s University. He has a good understanding of contextual issues affecting the health of populations in low- and middle-income countries. Having worked as a physician and public health professional in Nigeria, he has also been part of teams conducting research on infectious diseases and improving the capacity of health systems. He seeks to conduct research aimed at improving global response to antimicrobial resistance with the guidance of Professor Mary Wiktorowicz.
Brian Waters – Seasonal Variation of Water Security within the Informal Settlements of Freetown, Sierra Leone
Waters is a PhD candidate in the Geography Department at York University and a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellow. He holds two master’s degrees from the University of Illinois – one in agricultural economics and another in urban planning. For the past four years, he has been working in Freetown, Sierra Leone on decentralized water infrastructure, specializing in community-engaged and mixed-methods research. His research explores how seasonality is a core component of water security. He aims to demonstrate how measurements and engagements at different points of the year yield varying results. In addition, by following households and individuals throughout the year, he aims to understand directly how the changing “waterscape” of a community affects accessibility for water gatherers and water managers.
Caroline Duncan – Optimizing Drinking Water Safety in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut using Participatory System Dynamics
Duncan is a PhD candidate in civil engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering with a focus on optimizing drinking water in the Arctic using participatory approaches to system dynamics modelling. Under the guidance of Professor Stephanie Gora, her research seeks to understand the complex factors that affect the quality and accessibility of drinking water in the Arctic using an interdisciplinary approach. Through her research, she has been working closely with the Municipality of Cambridge Bay, and collaborating with community members, government and non-governmental organization stakeholders involved with drinking water from source to tap. Through this collaboration, a model will be developed to test treatment and policy interventions to optimize drinking water safety.
Haniehalsadat Aboutorabifard – Upholding Foreign Investors Responsible for Protecting the Human Rights of Living in a Healthy Environment
Aboutorabifard’s academic journey has been marked by extensive research on environmental issues, providing valuable insights into the practical implementation and challenges associated with environmental policies, particularly within the financial sector. Her law and environmental studies degrees have deepened her understanding of the world. Motivated by this synergy, she is currently pursuing a PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School and becoming a graduate research fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute, where she aims to explore a pivotal question: how can environmental regulations compel foreign investors to be environmentally accountable at the international level?
Hillary Birch – More than Access: Global Health and the Urban Governance of Water Quality in Lusaka
Birch is a PhD candidate in environmental studies in the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change, supervised by Professor Roger Keil. She holds a master’s degree in urban governance from Sciences Po in Paris, where she studied the urban governance of Ebola in Monrovia, Liberia. She also holds a master’s degree in political science from McGill University. Birch has worked in various roles in global health related to sexual and reproductive health and early child development. Her research explores how projects of global health intersect with processes of urbanization, shaping flows of water in a city and changing its quality. Her doctoral project focuses on the complexities and contradictions of efforts by global health actors to improve water quality in Lusaka, Zambia, where rapid urbanization and climate change leave many urban residents facing serious health consequences associated with poor sanitary conditions. Her research aims to inform how global health projects in water and sanitation can contribute to more sustainable urban futures by better supporting disease outbreak preparedness and the delivery of good quality drinking water for all.
Joanne Ong – Trust and Rural Health
Ong is a PhD student at York University in the Department of Global Health. She holds a bachelor of arts and master of arts, both in sociology, from York University. She is passionate about how the social determinants of health, the political determinants of health, and the commercial determinants of health shape health and health inequalities across scales. Following her work with Professor Cary Wu, she investigates how trust is a critical determinant of health in rural and remote contexts. Her research targets a need to investigate trust in rural and remote contexts and a need to develop measures of trust in rural and remote Canada in the interest of health equity. Against this backdrop, she is also interested in investigating the opportunity to integrate Indigenous ways of living, being and knowing into the One Health approach. Likewise, she is interested in the implications of One Health interventions for rural and remote peoples.
Kathirvel Soundappan – Influence of and Practical Approaches Related to Interdisciplinary Areas in the Prevention and Control of AMR (with special focus anti-fungal resistance)
Soundappan is an associate professor in the Department of Community Medicine and the School of Public Health in the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research in Chandigarh, India. He is an alumnus of the WHO Structured Operational Research Training Initiative and the Summer School of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. He provides clinical services to vulnerable and marginalized populations in Northern India in addition to teaching. His area of research is primary/rural health care, implementation/operational research, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), NCDs (diabetes, hypertension, chronic respiratory diseases and cancer) and the Internet of Things in health care. With Professor Mary Wiktorowicz as his graduate supervisor, he seeks to explore the following research questions beyond the burden of AMR, namely: what is the role of interdisciplinary areas in the prevention and control of AMR (with special focus on anti-fungal resistance); what are the practical political and regulatory approaches available in the control and prevention of AMR in a low- and middle-income country (LMIC) context; and how will developing an international treaty and/or monitoring framework improve political commitment and integration within a national action plan to control AMR in an LMIC context?
Liam Michaud – A Multi-sited Ethnography of Ontario Drug Law in the Context of Overdose
Michaud is a PhD candidate in socio-legal studies at York University. Informed by critical legal studies and policy studies, and drawing on ethnographic and community-based participatory methods, his research examines the tensions and convergences between medico-therapeutic and criminal-legal approaches in global and local health governance. His work has been supported by an SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship and by the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime & Security at York. He has published work on the barriers to health and health care faced by people who use drugs as a result of legal and policy environments in Social & Legal Studies, the International Journal of Drug Policy, Policing & Society, among others. He has conducted research and written on health inequalities in the context of prison-based needle exchange, surveillance practices in health-care settings, experiences of police discretion and drug law enforcement at overdose events, and is currently focusing on a project on overdose-related manslaughter prosecutions. He brings 15 years of experience working in community-based health-care settings with people in conflict with law.
Michael De Santi – Optimizing Water Safety in Humanitarian Response Settings using Machine Learning and Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment
De Santi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering. He works as a researcher on the Safe Water Optimization Tool (SWOT) project at the Dahdaleh Institute, where he is developing new modelling tools to predict water quality and waterborne illness risk in refugee and internally displaced person settlements. Prior to joining the SWOT team, he obtained a bachelor of applied science in civil engineering from the University of Toronto and worked for several years as a water design specialist. His current research focuses on developing holistic tools for assessing water safety risk in humanitarian response settings.
Nawang Yanga – TB in Tibetan Refugee Settlements: A Critical, Social Science Gaze
Yanga is a PhD candidate in health policy and equity. Her proposed dissertation will focus on the experience of Tibetan refugees with tuberculosis in India through a critical ethnographic lens. She is interested in refugee health, intersectionality and health, equity in academia and much more.
Nilanjana Ganguli – Modelling Health Impacts of Climate Change
Ganguli, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change at York University, brings a unique blend of skills in biotechnology and environmental studies to her doctoral research. Her research takes an intersectional system thinking approach to modelling the gendered health impacts of climate change in Malawi’s capture fisheries. She worked in the mining sector for six years in West Africa, where she was involved in multiple facets of the business, including human resources, communications and corporate social responsibility. While working in the mining industry, she recognized a need for better integration of health into corporate social responsibility plans, which inspired her to return to academia to learn about the intricate relationships between the environment and human health.
Romeo Joe Quintero – Building Liveable Futures in Camps: Everyday Placemaking Practices of Internally Displaced Women in the Southern Philippines
Quintero is a PhD candidate and SSHRC Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change. He is a research associate at the Centre for Refugee Studies and York Centre for Asian Research. He holds a master of arts in women’s and gender studies from Carleton University and an bachelor of social science (honours) in international development and globalization from the University of Ottawa. His doctoral project will examine the experiences of those living in resettlement and transitory sites for internally displaced persons in areas of the Southern Philippines affected by armed conflicts.
Rupsha Mutsuddi – Enhancing Systems of Assistive Interventions for Community Dwelling Older Adults Living with Dementia: A Global Health Approach through Human-Centered Design Methodologies
Mutsuddi is a PhD student in the Global Health program. Her research focus is at the intersection of design, everyday health management and accessibility. Her master of design thesis work was focused around community-dwelling older adults living with dementia and understanding daily rituals embedded in technologies. Supported by an SSHRC grant, Mutsuddi worked with community-dwelling older adults living with dementia and their care partners to identify these rituals, and the insights were used to create prototypes using augmented reality to support these rituals in everyday life. Her PhD takes an intersectional approach, with disciplines of human-centred design, gerontology and global health, and will culminate with novel ways of understanding the experience of people with dementia in different cultural contexts.
Yuliya Chorna – Moral, conceptual and practical considerations of funding and financing of the global Tuberculosis response
Chorna is a doctoral student in York’s Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, with PhD project supervision from Professor Margaret MacDonald. Chorna has an academic background in social work, with a master of social work degree from Syracuse University. She has extensive work experience in the field of global health policy and practice, including senior leadership positions for non-profit, non-governmental organizations focused on social equity and rights in the fields of tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS. Chorna has been a member of the Social Science & Health Innovations Network for Tuberculosis at the Dahdaleh Institute since its inception in 2020. During Her research problematizes how TB is being addressed on a global level, using critical methods and lenses of social anthropology. She is particularly interested in the anthropology of global health policymaking, funding and financing.
Based on the availability of funds and the excellence and needs of applicants, annual scholarships for individual students will range from $5,000 to $25,000. Scholarship recipients will:
- be designated as Dahdaleh Graduate Global Health Scholars at the Dahdaleh Institute;
- attend and participate in the Dahdaleh Institute’s weekly global health graduate seminars;
- present their work once in the Fall term and once in the Winter term as part of the Dahdaleh Institute’s Current Global Health Research at the Dahdaleh Institute Seminar Series;
- receive occasional invitations to participate in workshops and special events at the Dahdaleh Institute; and
- have access to the Dahdaleh Institute open workspace.
To learn more about the research projects these graduate students are undertaking, visit the Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholarship Program web page.