Ansha Nega Ahmed
Ansha Nega Ahmed is a doctoral student in Rehabilitation Science, Queen’s University. Ansha has worked for more than a decade in academia and has ample experience in community development programs through large-scale research and intervention projects in collaboration with national and international partners. Ansha’s research interest and work experiences are related to post injury return to work, chronic illness rehabilitation, the health of vulnerable groups at work, occupational health and safety, ergonomics and community based inclusive development. She is particularly interested in improving the quality of life of the working age population, persons with disability and their families.
Ansha is a fellow in the Queen’s Public Scholarship program. In this year-long engagement, her aim is to create an evidence-based knowledge exchange vehicle to advocate for the rights of injury survivors. This call for action hopes to improve the support system in post injury return to work process within the low-income context. Ansha plans to implement ‘radical knowledge translation’ including dialogue, education, guidance, knowledge exchange, networking, and peer support, through the mentorship of the Queen’s Public Scholarship. Ansha is a lifelong learner to advanced knowledge and actions, and she strongly believes in functional collaboration with like minded people and important stakeholders to facilitate learning and create a better world for all.
Connect with Ansha on Email, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Isabella Aung
Isabella Aung is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Studies researching grassroots women’s digital activism in the ongoing anti-authoritarian movement in Myanmar. Her research explores how contemporary authoritarian power is both contested and sustained through social media. She earned an honors degree in International Relations with a minor in Mathematics from Linfield College, Oregon, and an MA degree in Political Science from Simon Fraser University. She also completed a semester abroad in Politics, French, and Arabic at the University of Nottingham, UK, with first-class honors standing.
She is currently a UBC Myanmar Initiative Fellow. She holds a doctoral scholarship, funded by the Research Network on Women, Peace, and Security (RN-WPS) at McGill University. She also holds a Graduate Research Fellowship at the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP). She has been recognized as an emerging scholar by le Réseau d’analyse stratégique/the Network for Strategic Analysis (RAS-NSA). She has recently been chosen as a Civil War Paths fellow at the University of York and an inaugural Public Scholarship Fellow at Queen's University.
Decolonizing academia and incorporating the lived experiences of women of Color into academic discourse are her ultimate goals as a researcher. Her research interests include Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), women of Color's political representation, and grassroots women's activism against authoritarianism. She specializes in Gender and Politics and Comparative Politics. In terms of methodology, she is trained in both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her regional expertise is in Canada and Myanmar.
Elizabeth Cameron
Elizabeth Cameron is a second-year Master of Arts student in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University. Her thesis research (supervised by Dr. Annette Burfoot) is a critical intersectional analysis of constructions of suspected endometriosis as a diagnostic category across medical literatures. Elizabeth’s research makes the first academic contribution in the social sciences which considers suspected endometriosis as a particular diagnostic category, and traces implications for care. The primary objective of Elizabeth’s research is to produce intersectional knowledge that makes people with suspected endometriosis visible as a population with unique care needs, experiences, and desires, and which can be translated into improved treatment for people with this diagnosis. With support from the Queen’s Public Scholarship Fellowship, she is developing a website to host plain-language reports and other resources adapted from her research to scale access to this information to a global level and make this knowledge directly available to people with suspected endometriosis and those concerned with their care. This website will be the first space dedicated to information about suspected endometriosis that is grounded in academic research.
Before her graduate studies, Elizabeth completed a Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in Sociology at the University of Calgary, where she currently works as a Research Assistant. She also works as a Teaching Assistant in the Sociology department and School of Kinesiology & Health Studies at Queen’s University and has previously been a TA in the department of Gender Studies. Additionally, Elizabeth is the Information Officer on the Executive Committee for PSAC 901 (2023-24), the union for graduate student employees at Queen’s University. She also serves on the board of directors at Levana Gender Advocacy Centre. Elizabeth is a writer, photographer, and video creator who previously worked as a multimedia journalist covering provincial health topics in Alberta, after graduating with a Diploma in Journalism, Photojournalism Concentration (Honours) at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. Along with Dr. Liza McCoy, Elizabeth co-created the short documentary film Dorothy Smith: Discovering a Sociology for People (2022). She has guest lectured about the film in several formats, including at the Canadian Sociological Association’s annual conference at Congress 2023.
Harrison Dressler
Harrison Dressler is a master's student in history at Queen's University studying the histories of capitalism, disability, and institutionalization. His SSHRC-funded research uses materialist analysis to examine the experiences of students who attended the Ontario Institution for the Blind between 1872 and 1917.
Excellent Eboigbe
MSc candidate, Geological Sciences and Engineering
I'm currently in my second year of the master's program in the Department of Geological Sciences at Queens University, motivated by a strong desire for comprehending and mitigating environmental pollution, particularly in developing nations. In collaboration with a local mining community in Nigeria, my current research seeks to understand the processes controlling the cycling of mercury in agricultural systems for different staple crops, using tools like total concentration, speciation, and stable isotope analysis. Additionally, I aim to determine if elevated levels of mercury in staple crops impacted by small-scale gold mining pose potential health risks to humans. With a background in Environmental Sciences, my future goal is to employ interdisciplinary methods that combine natural and social perspectives to partner with communities in developing and implementing sustainable environmental solutions.
Rebecca Hansford
Rebecca Hansford is a doctoral student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is working on different projects that explore health conditions affecting people living with intellectual or developmental disabilities. She has worked on projects exploring COVID-19 as well as cancer risk, staging, treatment, and survival. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on understanding breast cancer treatment among people living with intellectual or developmental disabilities. This work includes quantitative and qualitative analyses. In particular, the qualitative part of this study involves interviewing people living with intellectual or developmental disabilities who have experienced breast cancer. Rebecca is passionate about conducting accessible and inclusive research. After her schooling, she plans to continue working on projects that collaborate with people with lived experience across all steps of research, including from project conception to knowledge sharing.
Tasha Jawa
MD/PhD candidate, Centre for Neuroscience Studies & School of Medicine
Tasha Jawa is a fourth-year MD/PhD candidate in the Centre for Neuroscience Studies & School of Medicine. She previously completed her undergraduate Bachelor of Science honours degree in Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Toronto, followed by a Master of Science degree in Neuroscience & Quality Improvement/Patient Safety at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Tasha’s program of research explores the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying delirium in critically ill adults undergoing treatment for acute kidney injury with kidney replacement therapy, and seeks to examine the long-term consequences of ICU delirium on cognitive function and structural brain pathology. She further seeks to explore the effectiveness of a post-ICU Follow-Up Clinic on long-term cognitive and psychosocial outcomes among ICU survivors and their caregivers.
Micky Renders
Micky Renders is from Peterborough, Ontario. For over 30 years, she has enjoyed a career as an activist and art educator. Her efforts to raise awareness of social and political issues as a community-based artist have earned her national and provincial awards, including the prestigious Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching and the YMCA Peace Medallion. She sees the arts as having a significant role in addressing the current crises we face. Informed by a Zen practice, she believes, ‘we can no longer have everything we want… but we can be more than we ever imagined’. The Art and Waste in Panniqtuuq (Pangnirtung), Nunavut exhibition in October 2023 was a significant output of Micky’s interdisciplinary research-creation Ph.D. in Environmental Studies, for which she was awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Prize. Her photograph won the 2023 Art of Research: Partnerships for Inclusivity Prize. She is a Public Scholarship Fellow at Queen’s University and a Mitacs Intern at the Art Gallery of Peterborough.