Program Director
Associate Professor Sarah Wakefield | Department of Geography
HST450Y1 | Undergraduate Research Project, HST451Y1 | Independent Research in Health Studies, HST480H1 | Independent Research in Health Studies
Professor Wakefield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Program in Planning. Her research has two main themes: (1) food security policy and practice; and (2) improving neighbourhood health through participatory community development and community-based research. These areas are connected by an overarching interest in understanding how individuals and organizations work together to create healthy, just, and sustainable communities. She works closely with community organizations and health policy actors to enhance the relevance of her research.
Professor Wakefield teaches a number of courses in Geography and Planning, including a third-year course on health geography and a graduate course entitled Health in Urban Environments. Since her appointment at U of T in 2003, she has held a number of administrative positions, including Acting Sustainability Director (2008) and Director of the University of Toronto’s Collaborative Program in Community Development (2008-9, 2011-12). She is also currently Chair of the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education Research Ethics Board.
Faculty
Assistant Professor Dan Allman | Dalla Lana School of Public Health
PHS300H1 | HIV Prevention Research
Dan Allman is Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, a member of the HIV Social, Behavioural and Epidemiological Studies Unit, and a member of the CIHR Social Research Centre in HIV Prevention (SRC).
The work of Dr. Allman focuses on the social and structural production of risk and well-being, particularly for those considered marginal, vulnerable or peripheral to a society’s core. Interests include the sociology of health and medicine, social equity, global health and new techniques for public health research. Dr. Allman enjoys teaching, translating knowledge and building capacity within university and community settings.
Dr. Allman is widely published. Recent articles include contributions to Journal of the International AIDS Society, SAGE Open, African Journal of Reproductive Health, Digital Culture & Education, Health Education Research, Journal of Cultural Economy, and The International Journal of Clinical Practice. Dr. Allman is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Culture, Health & Sexuality.
Professor Abdullah Daar | Dalla Lana School of Public Health
PHS100H1 | Grand Opportunities in Global Health
Dr. Abdallah Daar is a Professor of Public Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana Faculty of Public Health, University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment in the department of Surgery. He is Senior Scientist at University Health/Toronto General Research Institute, and is Director of Ethics and Commercialization at the Sandra Rotman Centre, University Health Network and University of Toronto. At Grand Challenges Canada, in addition to being a member of the Board of Directors, he is the Chief Science and Ethics Officer and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board. Professor Daar was the founding Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (2009-2011) and is Chair of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University International Institute of Global Health. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Genome Canada and a Member of the United Nations Secretary-General's Scientific Advisory Board.[1]
After medical schools in Uganda and London, England, he went to the University of Oxford where he did postgraduate clinical training in surgery and also in internal medicine, a doctorate in transplant immunology, and a fellowship in organ transplantation. He was a clinical lecturer in the Nuffield Dept. of Surgery at Oxford for several years before going to the Middle East to help start two medical schools. He was the foundation chair of surgery at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman for a decade before moving to the University of Toronto in 2001.
Professor Daar's academic career has spanned biomedical sciences, organ transplantation, surgery, global health, and bioethics. He works in various advisory or consulting capacities with the UN, the World Health Organization and UNESCO, and was a member of theAfrican Union High Level Panel on Modern Biotechnology, and chaired the 4th External Review of the WHO/World Bank/UNDP/UNICEF Special Program on Tropical Diseases Research and Training.
Daar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the New York Academy of Sciences, and is a Senior Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto. He is a member of UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee and of the Ethics Committee of the Human Genome Organisation.
His international awards include the Patey Prize of the Surgical Society of Great Britain, the Hunterian Professorship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics of Science and the Anthony Miller Prize for Research Excellence at the Dalla Lana Faculty of Public Health, University of Toronto. He holds the official world record for performing the youngest cadaveric-donor kidney transplant. His major research focus is on the use of life sciences to ameliorate global health inequities, with a particular focus on building scientific capacity and increasing innovation in developing countries, in addition to studying how life sciences technologies can be rapidly taken from “lab to village”. He has published over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals and as chapters in various books. He has also published six books including the latest one co-authored with Peter Singer, The Grandest Challenge: Taking Life-Saving Science from Lab to Village. He is currently working on his seventh book titled Garment of Destiny.
Professor Paul Hamel | Labratory Medicine and Pathobiology, Faculty of Medicine
HST464H1 | The Nature of International Health
Email: paul.hamel [at] utoronto.ca
Office: Room 6318, Medical Sciences Bldg., 1 King's College Circle
Prof. Hamel is Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. He has a research lab in the Faculty of Medicine on the St. George campus where his group studies molecular-genetic pathways that govern signalling between fields of cells, that determine cell fate and that regulate the development of the mammary gland and breast cancer. He also teaches in the area of global health and human rights with a focus on the dominant social-economic forces that shape global health discourse and practice.
Associate Professor Bart Harvey | Dalla Lana School of Public Health
HST330H1 | Population Health
Dr. Bart Harvey currently teaches at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and also teaches courses at the undergraduate level in epidemiology, statistics, and public health. He has received several awards, including the Golden Apple (Teaching Excellence) Award from the American Medical Writers Association in 2006 and the Excellence in Teaching award from the Department of Family & Community Medicine in 2007. His current research interests include the efficacy of breast self-examination, adolescent health and lifestyle, healthy eating and body image, self-directed learning among undergraduate medical students, assessment of Canada's public health workforce, and workforce survey of Canada's community medicine specialists. He has been published in several prominent journals including the Canadian Journal of Public Health, Adult Education Quarterly, Paediatrics and Child Health, and Academic Medicine.
Professor Nancy Kreiger | Dalla Lana School of Public Health
HST373H1 | Epidemiology
RESEARCH INTERESTS
• cancer epidemiology
• epidemiology of osteoporosis
• measurement
• research ethics
• community-based prevention trials
• behavioural risk factors for chronic diseases
EDUCATION & TRAINING HISTORY
2012 UHN-Rotman Leadership Development Program
1994 Fellow, American College of Epidemiology
1982 International Agency for Research on Cancer: Advanced Quantitative Methods for Cancer Epidemiology
1980 Yale University Graduate School, Ph.D. (epidemiology)
1979 Yale University Graduate School, M.Phil.
1975 Yale University School of Medicine, M.P.H.
1972 University of Pennsylvania, B.A. (psychology)
OTHER AFFILIATIONS
2008 – Present Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
2001 – Present Professor, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto
2001 – Present Professor, Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Toronto
2001 – Present Senior Scientist, Cancer Care Ontario
Professor Lynn McDonald | Co-Director, Institute for Life Course and Aging Collaborative Program in Aging, Palliative and Supportive Care
HST308H1 | Aging and Health
Dr. McDonald, Professor, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, is Co-Director Director of the Institute for Life Course and Aging Collaborative Program in Aging, Palliative and Supportive Care, and Scientific Director of the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly (NICE), dedicated to the inter-professional care of older adults. She has been leading the NICE Elder Abuse Team: Knowledge to Action research grant (2008-2011), the NICE Older Women and Financial Literacy grant (2010-2012), and a multi-layered project on Defining and Measuring Elder Abuse and Neglect (2010-2012). Dr. McDonald is currently leading several research studies, including a Public Outreach SSHRC grant on Financial Literacy and Custodial Grandparents (2012-2013), a SSHRC Partnership Grant on Engaged Scholarship: Evaluation of Knowledge Mobilization for Older Adults in the Community (2012-2018), and an HRSDC New Horizons for Seniors Program Elder Abuse Awareness Grant entitled a National Survey on the Mistreatment of Older Canadians, all beginning in 2012.
In 2002 she was awarded the Governor General’s Golden Jubilee medal for her contributions to Canadian gerontology. In 2007 she received the Betty Havens Award in Longitudinal Research for her contributions to research in aging. Dr. McDonald is a co-author of a major Canadian textbook, Aging in Contemporary Canada, 2nd edition (2008), and a number of other books and articles including one of the first Canadian texts on elder abuse. She has been a board director of the Canadian Association of Gerontology and served as Editor, Policy and Practice and Acting Editor, Social Sciences for the Canadian Journal on Aging. She also has been a board director of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a member of the Board of Accreditation for the Canadian Schools of Social Work and a member of the CIHR Institute of Aging, Social Dimensions of Aging Committee. In addition, her expertise has been sought by the Canadian Senate, Special Senate Committee on Aging, in the preparation of their report on Canada’s Aging Population: Seizing the Opportunity; and by the National Judicial Institute as a speaker for their conference on Judging Women; Aging, Mental Health and Culture.
Dr. McDonald has a long history of teaching excellence, and conducts graduate courses at both the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and the Institute for Life Course and Aging. In her capacity as Professor and as Principal Investigator of multi-million dollar grants, she has taught and trained hundreds of graduate students and served as supervisor or thesis committee member to dozens of doctoral and masters students.
Professor Nancy Olivieri | Department of Medicine
HST440H1 | Health and Pharmaceuticals
Dr. Olivieri received her B.Sc. from the University of Toronto followed by her MD from McMaster University in 1978. She pursued training in Internal Medicine and Haematology at McMaster, the University of Toronto, and Harvard University. Over the past 25 years Dr. Olivieri has sustained continuous funding for research in haemoglobin disorders. She is the author of over 200 scientific papers, reviews, and book chapters, and was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 1996.
Dr. Olivieri's interests in international health arose in 1996 from her work in Asia. In Sri Lanka she and her collaborators documented the range of clinical severity and compliations in patients with Haemoglobin E beta thalassemia, the world's most common serious haemoglobinopathy. Over this period their research teams stimulated community outreach, prevention programs, clinical guidelines, and capacity building for thalassemia with a national Thalassemia centre being established in 2001. Dr. Olivieri has since been pursuing similar work in Bangladesh and continues efforst to expand an Asian Thalassemia network with links throughout Asia.
Dr. Olivieri is currently a Senior Scientist in the Toronto General Research Institute at Toronto General Hospital and a Professor of paediatrics, medicine, and public health sciences at the University of Toronto. She currently teaches a fourth year undergraduate course, UNI440H1 | Health and Pharmaceuticals, in the health studies program at University College, exploring different aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, its role in society, its influence on research, and its influence on the evidence base of medicine.
Lecturer Scott Rayter | University College
JSU237H1 | Introduction to HIV/AIDS: Health, Sexuality, and Gender
Dr. Scott Rayter obtained his Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto in 2003, writing on He Who Laughs Last: Comic Representations of AIDS under the supervision of Linda Hutcheon. He has published articles and presented conference papers on AIDS-related and other queer literature. He has taught courses in Canadian and American literature and contemporary poetry for U of T's Department of English. He has also taught in the Sexual Diversity Studies since its beginnings, including the programme's introductory course, optional courses in literary and filmic representations of AIDS, and a course cross-listed between Sexual Diversity Studies and Canadian Studies called Queerly Canadian. He was the Acting Director in 2003-04, and is currently the Associate Director of the SDS programme. He is presently serving on the Steering Committee of the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and most recently he co-curated and wrote the catalogue for Queer Can Lit, an exhibtion of books, journals, zines, and photos at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. He is also co-editing The Queer Canadian Reader (Canadian Schoalrs' Press).
Professor Emeritus Metta Spencer | Department of Sociology (UTM)
HST409H1 | Special Topics in Health Studies
Professor Emeritus Metta Spencer has specialized in peace and war studies, and as the founding president and director of the Canadian Disarmament Information Service (CANDIS), she published the monthly Peace Calendar from 1983 to 1985, when the publication changed to magazine format and took the name Peace Magazine. In 2009, Spencer organized the Zero Nuclear Weapons public forum in Toronto, jointly sponsored by four major Canadian peace organizations with which she has been involved since the mid-80s: Physicians for Global Survival, Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate organization Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and Science for Peace.
She has also become involved in climate change activism (by chairing since 2007 a Science for Peace committee to study and campaign for carbon taxation policy) and has researched edutainment, or social change through storytelling.
Instructors
Dr Jennifer Bethell
HST373H1 | Epidemiology
Jennifer Bethell completed her PhD in epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in 2012. Her doctoral thesis work focussed on self-harm, using health administrative databases to study emergency department use by children and youth in Ontario. Since 2015, she has been a postdoctoral research fellow at Toronto Rehabilitation Institute – University Health Network, working on a patient engagement project to involve Canadians affected by dementia in research priority-setting. She also holds a Masters in biostatistics from the University of Toronto and has worked in governmental and non-governmental research funding organisations.
Assistant Professor Andrea Cortinois | Dalla Lana School of Public Health
PHS100H1 | Grand Opportunities in Global Health
Dr. Cortinois is an Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He has almost 30 years of experience in global health working as a journalist, an applied researcher, educator, and manager of health-related interventions, on four continents. He teaches courses in migration and health and global health. His research agenda focuses on the links between globalization, migration and health and on the use of information and communication technologies in support of equity-oriented interventions.
Dr. Paul Holyoke
HST310H1 | Critical Health Policy
Dr. Paul Holyoke is Director of the Saint Elizabeth Research Centre which has an extensive applied research portfolio across six themes: person-centred care, older adult care, personal support, end of life care, rehabilitation in home care, and knowledge translation and exchange.
Paul’s own research interests include people’s experiences with the Canadian health system; evaluation of health care policies, programs and systems; and the governance and management of health care organizations in Canada. He is and has been an investigator in a wide variety of research and evaluation projects in many areas in healthcare and knowledge exchange. He has experience in both qualitative and quantitative methods.
He has a Ph.D. in Health Policy from the University of Toronto, a M.Sc.(Econ) from the London School of Economics and a law degree from the University of Toronto.
Paul brings extensive experience and leadership in policy and public management to his research activities, with a strong emphasis on identifying how to apply research findings in practice and how to influence the structures within which research evidence-informed change is desired.
In addition to his experience in the senior management ranks of Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, Paul has legal training and experience, and governance experience as a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Waterloo-Wellington Local Health Integration Network in Ontario.
Dr. David Langille
HST211H1 | Health Policy in Canada
David Langille teaches in the Health Studies Program at the University of Toronto and teaches Work & Labour Studies at York University. A political economist by training, his research and writing deals with corporate power and the role of social movements in maintaining democracy. Much of his life has been spent in political advocacy, community development and activism at the international, national, provincial and local level. David Langille is Treasurer of Canadians For Tax Fairness, was Executive Producer for the film Poor No More, and was the former Executive Director of the Centre for Social Justice.
Dr. Anthony Lombardo
HST209H1 | Introduction to Health: Determinants of Health and Health Care
Dr. Lombardo obtained his Doctorate degree from the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Program at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and holds Honours Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Sociology from McMaster University. Dr. Lombardo is the Executive Director of the Canadian Association on Gerontology, Canada's leading multidisciplinary association of practitioners, researchers, decision-makers, and students in the field of aging and is also the former manager of an international knowledge transfer network in the field of aging. Since 2006 Lombardo has been providing consultation in sociobehavioural health research, project evaluation, health promotion, and research grant development. His work has been published in Critical Public Health, the Journal of Health Communication, and Symbolic Interation, among other publications. He has presented at numerous national and international conferences in sociology and public health with teaching undergraduate and continuing education courses in population health, the determinants of health, social research methods, qualitative analysis, and health promotion program planning and evaluation.
Dr. Daniel Schluter
UNI103Y1 | Gradients of Health in the Urban Mosaic, HST250H1 | Introduction to Research Methods in Health Studies, HST350Y1 | Health Research and Practice, HST400Y1 | Health Studies Practicum
Dr. Schluter completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1998, and is a sociologist with experience in academic and community-based research on HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and child health. He has been a Sessional Instructor with the Health Studies program at University College since January 2012, and previously spent ten years as an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Columbia University School of Public Health in New York City.
Faraz Vahid-Shahidi
HST411H1 | Political Economy of Health & Marginalization
Email: faraz.vahidshahidi {@} utoronto.ca
Office: HS 505
Faraz Vahid Shahidi is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Division of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He has a Master of Philosophy in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford. He currently holds a Leonard Syme Doctoral Training Fellowship in Work and Health. His research is located at the intersection of political economy and population health, with a focus on contemporary politics of austerity. He is a graduate of the Health Studies Program and has been teaching in the Program since 2012.
Dr. Raza M. Mirza received his MSc and PhD degrees from the Graduate department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Toronto's Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. His areas of expertise and teaching interest include research methods, medical decision-making, the socio-behavioral determinants of health in persons aging with a chronic illness, and factors influencing late-life social, mental and physical well-being. He has been an invited speaker at national and international gerontology and geriatrics conferences, workshops and symposiums, and has consulted with various levels of government on diverse issues related to an aging population. Dr. Mirza is currently a Senior Research Associate at the University of Toronto's Institute for Life Course and Aging and the Network Manager for the non-profit organization The National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly (NICE; www.nicenet.ca), an international knowledge transfer network in the field of aging.
Christopher A. Klinger, PhD is a Senior Research Associate with the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social
Work’s Institute for Life Course and Aging at the University of Toronto. His research interests are in health systems and policy, with a focus on hospice palliative care. Christopher’s PhD thesis work - at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation alongside the Collaborative Doctoral Program in Aging, Palliative and Supportive Care Across the Life Course - centered around different approaches to care at the end of life, including economic impact. His post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Medicine, Division of Palliative Care focused on advance care planning and patient-reported outcome measures in the hospice palliative care domain alongside the role of the palliative care unit in the health care system. He chairs the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly’s End-of-Life Issues Theme Team, a knowledge transfer network dedicated to enhance the care of older adults both in Canada and abroad, and the Quality End-of-Life Care Coalition of Canada’s Research and Knowledge Translation Committee, a group of national stakeholder organizations concerned about quality end-of-life care. Christopher has presented at numerous conferences on aging, hospice palliative care and public administration, and regularly teaches undergraduate course on aging, health systems/policy and public administration.
