Significant growth in Faculty of Health leads to 35 new faculty members

This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part one. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Watch for part two on Sept. 27.

The Faculty of Health at York University is pleased to announce 35 new faculty members and appointments this fall. New additions are represented in programs across the Faculty, in Global Health, the School of Health Policy & Management, Kinesiology & Health Science, Psychology, and Nursing.

Dean Paul McDonald said it’s an exciting time to be in the Faculty of Health.

“We are welcoming 35 outstanding new faculty members this year, the largest single increase in our 13-year history,” he said. “Our new and existing faculty, staff and students are enabling us to think of innovative ways of fulfilling our mission to improve health and health care through world-class education, creative research and strategic partnerships.”

Irfan Aslam

Irfan Aslam continues with the School of Nursing in the new role of an assistant professor at his alma mater. Aslam’s journey in health care has included work in home care, as a registered nurse and in areas including general internal medicine, general surgery, orthopedics, oncology, transplant and others. He has gained valuable experience in three distinct areas of health care: acute medical/surgical nursing, mental health and rehabilitation.

His academic involvement began in 2011 as a sessional lecturer, including two years at Centennial College and six years at George Brown College. At both institutions, Aslam taught in the Practical Nursing and Collaborative Nursing programs. He also taught at Nipissing University for seven years in the blended RPN to BScN program. Since 2015, he has been a lecturer at York University and has had the opportunity to work with students in all three undergraduate nursing programs. His current research interests include creating capacity among students to help each other with undergraduate studies and finding ways to promote caring and empathy among nursing students.

Maxwell Barranti

Maxwell Barranti, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, is interested in understanding the ways in which people see themselves and their social world. Specifically, Barranti explores if and when self and others’ perceptions converge, why perceptions fail to converge and whether shared reality has consequences for the self or other people. For example, do people know what they are like? Are some people better judges of character than others? Is self-knowledge adaptive?

Barranti earned a BA in psychology from the University of California, followed by an MA in experimental psychology from Wake Forest University and PhD in psychology from the University of Toronto.

Mavoy Bertram

Mavoy Bertram has been a registered nurse for approximately 15 years. During those years, she has acquired nursing expertise at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in the general pediatrics and critical care units, including being a member of the Critical Care Response Team, which provides an urgent response service to assess, advise and stabilize ward inpatients. She has recent expertise as a pediatric nurse practitioner in the Sleep Medicine Program at SickKids, a diagnostic service that assesses and manages pediatric patients with upper airway obstruction during sleep (obstructive sleep apnea), central sleep apnea and narcolepsy. She volunteers as a nurse practitioner with the Canadian Centre for Refugee & Immigrant Health Care, delivering health-care services (well-child visits, newborn followup care and management of non-acute conditions) to children who are underinsured or uninsured.

Bertram has been teaching in the School of Nursing at York University since 2014, where she assists in developing and delivering course material in pediatric nursing. She has been engaged in various initiatives to support eLearning and experiential education to enhance students’ acquisition of nursing competencies and improve their learning experiences.

Stephanie Bowerman

Stephanie Bowerman joins York University and the School of Kinesiology & Health Sciences as an assistant professor. Her areas of expertise are adapted physical activity, sport and inclusion. After the completion of her PhD in 2010, Bowerman began teaching part-time at Seneca College in health and fitness promotion as well as within the Department of Kinesiology at York University since 2011. She has focused on integrating experiential education opportunities into her course curriculum to enhance the student learning environment. She teaches both academic and activity-based courses.

Bowerman is particularly interested in promoting lifelong physical activity and sport for all individuals, including individuals with a disability. In 2010, her dissertation focused on working with goalball athletes and individuals with a visual impairment; however, she is also interested in creating accessible and inclusive environments to increase participation in and enjoyment of physical activity for people with physical and intellectual disabilities.

Joey Cheng

Joey Cheng joins the Department of Psychology, where she directs the Leadership, Competition & Collaboration Laboratory. Cheng’s work focuses on how natural selection has shaped human competition and how this in turn influences people’s psychology, behaviour and biology in competitive situations, and their ability to co-ordinate within groups and teams. She explores questions such as: How do people rise to influence in groups? What vocal signals do people use to communicate status? What causes people to become overconfident? What are the social costs and benefits to being competitive? Methodologically, she places an emphasis on studying social phenomena “in the wild,” among naturalistic teams, communities and organizations (e.g. sports teams, marching bands, military squads).

Cheng completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia. In 2016, the Association for Psychological Science awarded her its Rising Star Award. She received the American Psychological Association Achievement Award for Early Career Psychologists in 2018 and the Foundation for Personality & Social Psychology SAGE Young Scholars Award in 2020.

Ji Yeh Choi

Ji Yeh Choi joins the Quantitative Method program in the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. She received her PhD in quantitative psychology from McGill University. Prior to starting her position at York, she was an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore.

She is interested in addressing diverse issues and topics in psychology and other social sciences by developing and applying statistical and computational methods. Her particular research interests lie in areas of structural equation modelling, functional data analysis, multivariate statistics, high-dimensional data analysis, machine learning, cluster analysis and Bayesian statistics. Her current focuses are on developing a statistical method that combines the component-based structural equation modelling with Bayesian statistics and integrating latent variable models from machine learning with traditional multivariate analysis techniques.

Taylor Cleworth

Taylor Cleworth joins the School of Kinesiology & Health Science as an assistant professor. He obtained an MSc and PhD in kinesiology from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), where he examined how a threat, such as standing near the edge of an elevated surface, influences the way humans stand.

As part of a postdoctoral fellowship in the Safety Flooring Lab at the Research Institute for Aging and the Injury Biomechanics & Aging Lab at the University of Waterloo, Cleworth developed novel technological advancements in fall and injury prevention for older adults living in residential and long-term care facilities. His current research continues to use a multidisciplinary approach to understand the mechanisms leading to mobility deficits, including age-related physiological and psychological processes. Cleworth has a specific interest in understanding visuomotor integration during movement and applying this knowledge to develop intervention-based approaches for reducing the risk of falling in older adults.

Amrita Daftary

Amrita Daftary joins York University as an assistant professor in the School Health Policy & Management. She is an expert in qualitative methods, global implementation science and health services research. For more than a decade, she has studied health and social policy, health-care behaviours, and caregiving practices for tuberculosis (TB) and HIV. Her research contributes to the human-centred design and evaluation of multilevel interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly South Africa, and India.

Daftary is well cited for her work on TB stigma, particularly related to drug-resistant TB and TB-HIV coinfection. She is focused on improving quality of care for TB and TB-HIV. In 2018, she was nominated as a Canadian Woman Leader in Global Health. She holds adjunct positions at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Ashley Day

Ashley Day joins York University as a lecturer in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science. She is a third-year Dene/English PhD candidate in the Policy Studies program at Ryerson University. Her ancestral ties are located in the SAHTU region of the Northwest Territories, where she is a member of the Norman Wells Métis. She holds an advanced diploma in sport management as well as a BEd (Honours), a BA and an MA in kinesiology and health science from York University.

Her SSHRC-funded dissertation research examines how Indigenous worldviews of health and well-being may offer a more holistic approach to colonial physical education policy in Ontario. As a physical educator, Day understands how health and physical education is a powerful and often overlooked site where education might be strengthened by Indigenous knowledges and worldviews. She is committed to creating opportunities for Indigenous Peoples and communities to inform and cultivate curricula that supports holistic health grounded within cultural knowledges. Day’s work is concerned with building relationships that nurture Indigenous knowledges, reinforce positive notions of Indigenous identities, and recognize the diversity of Indigenous Peoples and their worldviews.

Danielle Dunwoody

Danielle Dunwoody joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor. She earned her BScN from Lakehead University, her MS from D’Youville College and her PhD from the University of Buffalo. Dunwoody has an extensive clinical background in areas such as critical care, the post-anesthesia care unit, acute pain service and sedation services.

The objective of her research program is to develop multidisciplinary tools and interventions that will contribute to the field of pain management, as well as providing improvement in quality and safety for patients with pain. Specifically, her scholarship focuses on the relationships between pain, sedation and opioid medications. Dunwoody’s work postulates that there are various components of sedation beyond that of arousability, cognition being one of those.

Her work as a clinical nurse specialist for acute pain for the past nine years has driven her to focus on quality pain management in the acute care setting. Dunwoody is passionate about quality pain management, safe opioid use and extending the knowledge within expert clinical practice down towards the novice health-care practitioner.

Oghenowede Eyawo

Oghenowede Eyawo joins the School of Kinesiology & Health Science as an assistant professor of global health epidemiology in the Global Health program. Born and raised in Nigeria, he received a BSc from the University of Benin, Nigeria; an MSc from Karl-Franzens University, Austria; an MPH and a PhD from Simon Fraser University, Canada; and postgraduate and postdoctoral training at Yale University and the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

His primary research interest is precision-based global health and the application of epidemiological methods to examine patterns of morbidity, mortality and their potential effects among vulnerable populations of children, women and men. Much of Eyawo’s work has focused on examining the health journey and patterns of health outcomes among HIV-positive individuals in North America and globally, as they age with other comorbidities in the era of antiretroviral therapy. More recently, his research interest has evolved to focus on underserved diseases, particularly in child health and communicable and non-communicable diseases in Africa. Eyawo is an expert adviser to the Global Burden of Disease, the largest accumulation of health data in history.

Skye Fitzpatrick

Skye Fitzpatrick is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at York University. She completed her PhD at Ryerson University, her internship at the University of Washington Medical Center and her postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University.

Fitzpatrick’s research involves identifying and refining ways to treat borderline personality disorder (BPD) and suicidality, with and without comorbid post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She has two streams of research that work towards this goal. First, she uses experimental, ecological momentary assessment and other translational science paradigms to identify which specific strategies work in the treatment of BPD and how. Second, she directly studies BPD and PTSD treatments themselves, with a particular focus on dialectical behaviour therapy. She has recently become particularly focused on harnessing the power of relationships to treat BPD and/or PTSD through conjoint and dyadic interventions.

Kathleen Fortune

Kathleen Fortune joins the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. Fortune completed her SSHRC-funded PhD in social psychology at the University of Manitoba in 2015. Her research has explored a range of topics, including body-image discrepancies, gender-role double standards, lay beliefs about the etiology of sexual orientation, and the physical, psychological, cognitive and emotional costs of concealing a stigmatized social identity.

Prior to joining the Department of Psychology at York, Fortune taught at the University of Manitoba (2010-11) and served as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University (2015-19). Her extensive teaching background includes the development and instruction of more than a dozen courses, with an emphasis on Introduction to Psychology; Psychology of Gender, Death, Dying and Bereavement; and Social Psychology.

In her new role at York, Fortune hopes to explore innovative approaches to the instruction of Introduction to Psychology, as well as exploring concrete ways to help students as they navigate the difficult transition from high school through the first year of university.

Valini Geer

Valini Geer joins the Faculty of Health as an assistant professor in the School of Nursing. Geer brings with her teaching and clinical experience in public health and community health as well as experiences mapping out innovative educational partnerships. Her experience includes the development of curriculum using non-traditional pedagogies and, more specifically, narrative inquiry as pedagogy in nursing education.

Geer has taught extensively in the areas of health promotion, community health simulation, organizational narratives, cultural safety and diversity, and therapeutic relationships. She holds undergraduate degrees in psychology and nursing, as well as postgraduate education in nursing with a focus on community health promotion.

Kristina Gicas

Kristina Gicas joins York University as an assistant professor. She obtained a PhD in clinical neuropsychology from Simon Fraser University and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. Throughout her academic training, she has worked on a large, 10-year longitudinal study of homeless and precariously housed persons living in the downtown east side of Vancouver (the Hotel Study) to help identify barriers to better health and wellness. Her program of research will continue to centre on understanding the impact of mental illness and addiction on brain-behaviour relationships in vulnerable and socially marginalized groups, with specific interest in substance use and psychosis.

She is also a registered psychologist with practice in clinical neuropsychology and is actively involved in the Canadian Psychological Association as Chair-elect of the Clinical Neuropsychology section.

Monica Gola

Monica Gola joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor. Her areas of expertise are mental health and psychiatric nursing, with a focus on mental health promotion.

Gola has 18 years of clinical experience in public health, working primarily with immigrant perinatal women in promoting maternal mental health and caring for patients in mental health inpatient care. Over the past seven years, she has focused her career on preparing undergraduate nursing students in community/public health and mental health nursing practice. Her pedagogy is focused on simulation in the classroom and she has collaborated on research surrounding preparing students with therapeutic communication and patient safety. Gola’s focus at York is to further develop students’ clinical practice in mental health promotion with innovative community partnerships.

Leeat Granek

Leeat Granek (PhD), a critical health psychologist, joins the Faculty of Health as an associate professor in the School of Health Policy & Management. During the 2018-19 academic year, Granek was a visiting professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto in the Social & Behavioural Sciences Division. Her research expertise is in the areas of psycho-oncology, health-care professional well-being, and grief and loss.

Recent awards she has received include the Sigmund Koch Award for Early Contribution to the Field of Psychology and the Distinguished Early Career Contributions in Qualitative Inquiry Award, both awarded by the American Psychological Association. Granek has published more than 70 articles on her research in leading journals, including Cancer, JAMA Archives and Psycho-Oncology. She frequently writes about her research for the mainstream media in outlets such as the New York Times, Slate Magazine and the Huffington Post. In 2017, she was named one of the top 40 under 40 researchers by The Marker.

Jaclyn Hurley

Jaclyn Hurley joins the School of Kinesiology & Health Science as an assistant professor. Her area of expertise is musculoskeletal biomechanics, exploring fundamental injury mechanics with both clinical and ergonomic applications. Hurley obtained her PhD in kinesiology from the University of Waterloo, where she studied anatomical and fatigue-related risk factors for an exceedingly prevalent shoulder pathology. She then completed postdoctoral studies at McMaster University in the School of Rehabilitation Science, where her research focused on investigating different forms of exercise for older adults with chronic knee pain.

Her current research interests include using experimental and computational modelling-based methods to investigate mechanisms of musculoskeletal injury and develop effective exercise rehabilitation strategies for chronic musculoskeletal conditions that accompany age. Within these research themes, she focuses on quantifying and predicting inter- and intra-personal biomechanical variability to advance the understanding of musculoskeletal function across a diverse population.

Matt Keough

Matt Keough joins the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. He earned a BSc from the University of Toronto, and an MA and PhD from Concordia University. He also completed a CIHR-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health. He is a clinical psychology researcher and Chair of the Addiction Psychology section of the Canadian Psychological Association.

Keough’s research focuses on improving our understanding of the etiology and treatment of addictive behaviour, including both substance use and behavioural addiction (e.g. problem gambling). His work is mechanism-focused and is rooted in motivational models of personality and cognitive theory. He uses laboratory-based experiments, correlational studies and prospective designs to identify who is at risk for addiction and the mechanisms underlying this risk. One specific aim of his work is to elucidate coping or self-medication pathways to substance use among young adults. Moreover, he is currently conducting a series of randomized clinical controlled trials to examine new treatments for addiction and co-occurring mental health issues (e.g. depression and anxiety).

Peter Kohler

Peter Kohler is originally from Denmark, but has lived and worked in North America since 2007. He received his PhD in cognitive neuroscience in 2013 from Dartmouth College before becoming a postdoctoral scholar and research associate at Stanford University. He joins the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor.

Kohler’s interest lies in the domain of mid-level visual processing, which begins in the primary visual cortex approximately 100 milliseconds after stimulus onset and then unfolds over the next several hundred milliseconds. In this deceptively short time span, the visual system must infer information about the shape, texture, location and movement of the elements in the visual scene to build a sophisticated model of the scene that provides the foundation for our vivid visual experience of the world.

To understand how the brain accomplishes this task, Kohler probes a complex network of functionally distinct brain areas using functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalogram and visual psychophysics. Kohler is especially interested in combining these methods to gain unique experimental access to the ways in which brain dynamics drive visual perception. To elucidate how the mechanisms of visual perception are shaped by typical and atypical development, Kohler also uses brain imaging methods to study infants and patient populations.

Alistair Mapp

Alistair Mapp is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Prior to this appointment, he held a long-service teaching appointment, during which time he taught a wide range of courses at both the Keele and Glendon campuses. He recently developed a new capstone course, which is now a degree requirement for all non-thesis, honours stream psychology students.

Mapp has also co-developed an online tool for technology-enhanced learning and assessment, which has been successfully used as an experiential education tool in a variety of psychology courses around the globe. At the June 2019 York University Convocation, he was awarded a President’s University-Wide Teaching Award.

Jodi Martin

Jodi Martin joins the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor, where she will focus on undergraduate instruction of statistics and research methods. Martin completed her PhD at the University of Ottawa in 2014 and has since completed externally funded postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development and in York University’s Department of Psychology.

Early in her career, Martin developed a passion for, and talent in, undergraduate teaching. She has since taught a variety of methodological and developmental psychology courses at both the University of Ottawa and York University. She was awarded a prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2014 and received an Early Career Award in 2017, recognizing her significant contributions as a scholar, mentor and teacher. Martin is an active member of the teaching and learning research community at York and is deeply committed to a continued practice of scholarly teaching.

George Mochizuki

George Mochizuki is an assistant professor in human disorders of neurological motor control in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science. Mochizuki earned his PhD in neuroscience at Western University, completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and was a research scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto. He has authored more than 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals and was recognized for excellence in supervision and mentorship in the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute at the University of Toronto.

The Mochizuki Lab focuses on advancing understanding of the specific balance deficits that are observed following neurologic injuries such as concussion and stroke. In addition, the research program aims to advance techniques for assessing and remediating relationships between physiological biomarkers of injury and the balance control behaviours they govern. The lab employs neurophysiological recording techniques (electromyography, electroencephalography) with measures of behaviour and function (kinetics, kinematics) to characterize links between functional tasks and their underlying physiological processes.

Saeed Moradian

Saeed Moradian joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor. He worked in a variety of clinical settings before consolidating his nursing career within the areas of nursing research and cancer supportive care. He graduated from the University of Manchester’s nursing PhD program. He was engaged as a postdoctoral research Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial Oncology at the Ontario Cancer Institute of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto. He also worked as a scientific associate in the Department of Supportive Care at the University Health Network.

The overall focus of Moradian’s research program is reducing the burden of complex cancer symptoms (cancer treatment side effects) and improving the quality of self-management support in the cancer system. His research has explored novel methods and innovative techniques to find more effective ways to control and manage complex symptoms in cancer patients. Most of his recent studies and contributions focus on interventions using e-technology to empower patients to manage their symptoms and improve patient-professional interactions.

Brenda Orazietti

Brenda Orazietti is a registered nurse and an assistant professor in the Department of Health in the School of Nursing at York University. She completed a master’s degree in education at Nipissing University with a thesis studying the graduate nurse identifying gaps in their education then focusing on how to bridge the gaps through clinical experiences. She then completed her master’s degree in nursing science at Aspen University with a specialization in nursing education.

Orazietti has extensive experience as a bedside nurse, specializing in critical care for 31 years and teaching nursing in various roles for 19 years. She has worked as a critical care educator and clinical instructor, and is an accomplished simulationist with the Ontario Simulation Alliance Network.

Her areas of expertise focus on how students learn, emotional intelligence, moral imagination and learning with technology. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Registered Nurses Association of Ontario’s 2019 Leadership in Nursing Award, in the Academic category, for leadership and innovation.

Archana Paul

Archana Paul joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor. She has more than 17 years of experience as a registered nurse in Canada, as well as in India. Prior to coming to Canada, Paul was a registered nurse working in a mission hospital in remote parts of India. She also taught the undergraduate program as a lecturer. Her areas of expertise include acute mental health for both adults and children.

Paul’s commitment to high-quality and patient-centred care has led to the implementation of various quality initiatives at Humber River Hospital, such as the Suicide Screener Tool, risk assessment and flagging of patients with potential for violence and trauma-informed care.

Kristine Pedernal

Kristine Pedernal joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor. Her area of expertise is in common and complex acute care of adults. She has more than 12 years of clinical nursing experience in respiratory/general medicine, nephrology, oncology and cardiology, and has been teaching in clinical education for almost 10 years. Her recent teaching experience includes supporting students in the Nursing Simulation Centre and facilitating learning activities through the use of simulation.

During graduate studies, Pedernal developed an interest in narrative approaches to teaching, learning and research, and digital storytelling in particular as a teaching strategy to develop thinking, reflection and understanding of the human experience. She has also taught an interactive course with the Health, Leadership & Learning Network and filmed a vodcast for Communities in Motion, sharing the ways to create and use digital storytelling in practice. As a research associate with York Nursing Professor Pat Bradley, she worked with students in the Internationally Educated Nurses program to create digital stories of their experiences studying to be nurses in Canada.

Tarra Penney

Tarra Penney (PhD) joins the Global Health program at York University as an assistant professor of program and policy evaluation. Her research focuses on generating population-level evidence for addressing the global syndemic of obesity, undernutrition and climate change. Penney is also interested in methodological aspects of policy evaluation, in particular developing approaches to support understanding how and why policies work or fail to improve policy learning. She is co-investigator on the International Food Policy Study, a five-country collaboration.

Penney returns to Canada after serving as a research associate in the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., supporting the system-level evaluation of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy, a nationwide policy to reduce sugar in soft drinks by targeting importers and manufacturers. She completed her PhD in the same department, in dietary public health with a focus on local food availability and population-level diet and obesity prevention, funded by the Cambridge Trusts. Prior to her PhD, she studied cognitive psychology and computer science, completed a CIHR-funded master’s degree in health promotion, and published in the area of obesity with a focus on population health intervention research as a research associate at Dalhousie University’s Healthy Populations Institute.

Andria Phillips

Andria Phillips (RN, MScN, CCNE) joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor, and has been appointed undergraduate program director for the second entry BScN program. She has been a member of the School of Nursing since 2006, teaching as a part-time faculty and on a contractually limited appointment from 2017 to 2019. From 2018 to 2019, Phillips served as undergraduate program director for the second entry BScN program.

Phillips graduated from Ryerson University in 2003 (BScN) and York University in 2010 (MScN). Most recently, she completed the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing Simulation Certification Modules and earned the Canadian Certified Nurse Educator Certificate. She has 15 years of experience caring for clients across the lifespan in the emergency department and has taught nursing students in the Nursing Simulation Centre, classroom, and in medical/surgical, rehabilitation and long-term care clinical settings.

Phillips was the faculty lead for the 2019 Nursing Games Ontario event held at York University. Her interests include incorporating new strategies for teaching and learning across various nursing education settings and creating communities of support and collaborative learning for nurses, nursing students and faculty.

Mathieu Poirier

Mathieu Poirier joins the School of Kinesiology & Health Science as an assistant professor and will become a member of the WHO Collaboration Centre on the Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance. After receiving his PhD in health policy from McMaster University, he joined York University’s Global Strategy Lab as a research associate leading the Global Legal Epidemiology research program.

His interdisciplinary research program ranges from evaluating the impact of international laws to developing innovative transnational health equity metrics and generating policy-relevant research on socially and politically determined inequities in health. Recent work evaluating the impact of the Framework Convention on Tobacco on global cigarette consumption will continue to expand to a policy analysis of tobacco control in Europe and a large-scale quantitative study of gender-specific patterns of global cigarette consumption.

Poirier previously directed vector-borne disease research and contributed to lymphatic filariasis elimination efforts for the Notre Dame Haiti Program from 2012 to 2014 in Léogâne, Haiti. He has contributed to health systems strengthening work with the La Paz, Bolivia PAHO/WHO country office and has collaborated with researchers in Chile, Ecuador and Colombia to study inequalities in smoking prevalence.

Ruth Robbio

Ruth Robbio joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor. She completed her master’s in nursing administration at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Mich., and her PhD studies in the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto. She has extensive experience in acute care nursing and baccalaureate nursing education.

With nursing turnover being a critical issue in Canadian hospitals and high levels of stress experienced by nurses during the transition period from student to registered nurse, Robbio’s mixed-methods research explores the socialization needs of new graduate registered nurses and identifies e-mentoring as a potential socialization strategy to support new nursing graduates’ transitions into professional practice. Her research provides evidenced-based e-mentoring program components and design features for an e-mentoring intervention to assist with new graduate role transition and workplace adjustment.

Robbio aspires to close the mentoring gap in nursing education and practice through her passion for teaching, service and scholarly activities. Her philosophy of teaching is grounded in human science – that is, a belief that students are unique lifelong learners and more than a sum of their parts or “learning evidences.” It is from this premise that a caring culture of learning is co-created.

Sandra Skerratt

Sandra Skerratt joins the School of Nursing as an assistant professor. She has been a lecturer at York University within the Faculty of Health since 2012, with a cross appointment between the School of Nursing and the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health. She holds a master of nursing degree and currently practices part-time as a nurse practitioner in acute care of adults. Skerratt is in the process of applying for a doctor of philosophy in nursing with a collaborative specialization in global health.

Since 2010, Skerratt has been part of a medical health team travelling to Northern Ghana to provide critical health care to patients in resource-limited settings. In 2016, she assumed a leadership position with the team and is now the nursing co-leader responsible for recruitment and training of nurses. Five nursing students from York U have accompanied her on the Ghana mission trip.

In 2016 and 2018, she was awarded a minor research grant from York University’s Faculty of Health. She is currently the principal investigator on two research initiatives focusing on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in low-middle income countries and the importance of building a sustainable global nurse workforce to address the NCD epidemic.

Jessica Sutherland

Jessica Sutherland joins the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. She has a BA from Ryerson University, an MA from the University of Toronto and a PhD from Ryerson University. Her research interests are in the intersection between developmental science and the law, including peer influence on adolescent decision-making, juvenile delinquency and adolescent well-being. Outside of academia, she has worked in the public and non-profit sectors in a research capacity.

Her teaching background includes undergraduate courses in forensic psychology, development and the law, and research methods. She also has taught workshops on academic writing and facilitated writing support at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In the Department of Psychology, she will be primarily teaching undergraduate writing courses and conducting research on undergraduate writing pedagogy.

Lynda van Dreumel

Lynda van Dreumel, an experienced educator in health management and a registered occupational therapist, joins the School of Health Policy & Management. Her research explores health professional regulatory models and their influence on interprofessional care in health systems. Her professional career has spanned clinical and administrative roles across various health-care sectors, including as a professional practice leader at the University Health Network, a project manager at a Community Care Access Centre, a policy adviser of health system transformation at a Local Health Integration Network and a private consultant.

Throughout her career, she has been actively engaged in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, including Organizational Behaviour, Management, Health-Care Financing and Funding, and Quality Management in Health Care. Her teaching approach involves making health-care management concepts meaningful to students by drawing upon relevant examples from her clinical and professional experiences and providing impactful experiential learning opportunities.

Van Dreumel is a certified health executive with the Canadian College of Health Leaders (CCHL), a past executive board member for the Hamilton Chapter of CCHL, and she currently serves as board Chair for Hospice Wellington in Guelph, Ont.

Adrian Viens

Adrian Viens is an associate professor of global health policy within the Faculty of Health at York University. His research centres on issues at the intersection of moral, political, and legal philosophy and public policy, with a particular focus on how human behaviour, social conditions and regulation impact health. This work has been primarily interested in demonstrating the various ways in which philosophical analysis and regulatory theory can inform and shape how we should approach different issues within global health policy, practice and research.

His latest book is Public Health Law: Ethics, Governance, and Regulation (Routledge, 2017; co-authored with John Coggon and Keith Syrett). He has degrees in philosophy and law from the universities of Toronto, Oxford and London. He is also an honorary member of the U.K. Faculty of Public Health, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health and editor-in-chief of Health Care Analysis.