Dr. Husam Abdel-Qadir is a clinician-scientist at Women’s College Hospital (WCH) and Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment to the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation. He holds the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Outcomes. He has also been awarded the Hold’em for Life Professorship in Cancer Research at
the University of Toronto. His rapidly growing research program in cardiovascular health is based at the WCH and the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre. 
The overarching aim of Dr. Abdel-Qadir’s research is to address research gaps resulting from cardiology trials inequitably recruiting men who are younger, healthier, wealthier, and more educated than the people who commonly develop cardiac disease. Dr. Abdel-Qadir’s research has been most impactful in improving our understanding of cardiovascular disease in people with cancer (the discipline of “cardio-oncology”), as well as our assessment and treatment of people with atrial fibrillation. His PhD research focused on the management of cardiovascular disease among women with early breast cancer and was recognized with the 2018 John Charles Polanyi Prize in Medicine/ Physiology, “the highest honor researchers can receive from the province of Ontario”.
 
Dr. Abdel-Qadir’s highly productive research career has produced articles in Cardiology and Oncology journals with the highest impact factors and readership (e.g., Circulation, European Heart Journal, JAMA Cardiology, and Journal of Clinical Oncology). Dr. Abdel-Qadir’s expertise in the field of cardiology was recognized through numerous research awards and international presentations. He has received several awards including Young Investigator Awards from the European Society of Cardiology (2017) and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society (2021), the first-place award in the Young Investigator Competition of the Global Cardio-Oncology Summit (2017), as well as the Atrial Fibrillation Research Award of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society (2017 and 2020). He was also selected as the Early Career Women's Heart and Brain Health Chair (2018-2024) and National New Investigator Award (2019) from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). His growing international stature and reputation have led to invited presentations of his research at international medical conferences hosted by the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, European Society of Cardiology, and the Global Cardio-Oncology Summit. He has also been invited to deliver Medical/ Cardiology Grand Rounds at various institutions internationally and across Canada.

Dr. Abejirinde is an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto and a Scientist at the Institute for Better Health, Trillium Health Partners. Her research team- the Moonshot Collaborative for Translational Health Equity conducts applied health systems research to understand and address complex problems in healthcare focusing on structurally marginalized populations. With a belief that communities hold power to achieve transformative healthcare, Dr. Abejirinde works collaboratively with policymakers, patients/caregivers, community organizations, and researchers from other disciplines to translate equity at a systems level. Her work particularly focuses on the health and wellbeing of immigrants, refugees, racialized populations, rural/low-resource communities, and older adults. Dr. Abejirinde is a 2022 AMS Healthcare Fellow in Compassion and Artificial Intelligence, and co-lead of the digital health equity hub of the International Collaborative for Translational Digital Health- a trilateral partnership between the University of Toronto, University of Manchester and University of Melbourne.

Toronto

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Afshin Abrishamkar is a Research Officer in the Medical Devices Research center at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and an Assistant Professor (status) in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Afshin holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the ETH Zurich and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the PSL Université Paris and McMaster University. His multidisciplinary research is at the intersection of microfluidics, biomedical engineering, and material science, and aims to develop new microfluidic platforms for controlled fabrication and processing of bio-inspired advanced materials for health-related and biomedical applications.

He is currently working on collaborative research projects with researchers at NRC, University of Toronto, Unity Health Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University, and McMaster University.

Alan Ackerman is a Professor of English and Associate Director, PhD, for the Graduate Department of English.  He is the author of four books: Energy and Economy in American Literature (Cambridge UP, forthcoming); Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale UP, 2011); Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar (U of Toronto P, 2011); The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), and editor of numerous volumes, including Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, co-edited with Magda Romanska.  In 2019-2020, he was a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellow in the Humanities, Jackman Humanities Institute.  From 2005 to 2015, he served as editor of the quarterly Modern Drama, the most prominent journal in English to focus on dramatic literature, established in 1958.  He continues to serve on the Editorial Advisory Board and Executive Committee of the journal.

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Dr. Karen Acton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education within the Educational Leadership and Policy (ELP) program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto.

Dr. Acton brings extensive experience from both K-12 and higher education systems, having served as a teacher, department head, principal, system-level administrator, and Education Officer with the Ministry of Education. Dr. Acton previously held a position of Assistant Professor at Western University in the Faculty of Education before coming to OISE. Drawing on this broad leadership background, Dr. Acton currently teaches masters and doctoral-level courses in educational leadership and policy, research methods, program implementation, and school change. She also contributes as a research consultant for the charitable organization Learning for a Sustainable Future.

Dr. Acton’s research examines leadership and educational change through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches across local, national, and international contexts. Her publications explore topics such as principals as change agents, leadership in challenging circumstances, and transformative pedagogies in sustainability education – including age-appropriate climate change education for young learners. Her research also includes cross-national perspectives, such as a recent study examining the motivations of Doctor of Education (EdD) students across six countries.

Donna Rose Addis is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto and a Canada 150 Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging and Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Academy for Research and Education. She is also the Honorary Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. Professor Addis completed her BA and MA in Psychology at The University of Auckland, her PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Toronto, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. After 10 years at The University of Auckland, where she was Associate Director of the Centre for Brain Research, she moved back to Toronto to take up her current position. 

Professor Addis's work has yielded new theoretical and philosophical perspectives, including the recent reconceptualization of memory as future-oriented. With over 130 publications and more than 25,000 citations, she has received a number of prestigious awards (including New Zealand's Prime Minister's Emerging Scientist Prize) and is the youngest-ever fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Ajay Agrawal is the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management where he conducts research on the economics of artificial intelligence, science policy, entrepreneurial finance, and geography of innovation. Professor Agrawal is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, co-founder of The Next 36 and NextAI, and founder of the Creative Destruction Lab.

Aisha Ahmad is a multiple award-winning International Security scholar specializing in jihadist insurgencies operating in complex civil wars. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the Secure Futures Lab at the University of Toronto, a Senior Fellow at Massey College, a Fellow at Trinity College, a former International Security Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and the winner of the 2024 International Studies Association’s ISSS Emerging Scholar Award, which recognizes scholars who have made (through their body of publications) the most significant contribution to the field of security studies.
With respect to her scholarship, Dr. Ahmad has published in leading journals and has won multiple prizes for her research. She is the author of Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power (Oxford University Press, 2017), which was awarded both the distinguished 2017 Mershon Center Edgar S. Furniss Book Award for the best new book in international and national security and the 2018 Best Book in Comparative Politics Prize by the Canadian Political Science Association, and was listed as one of the 2018 Best Books in Foreign Affairs. Her article, “The Security Bazaar,” published in the flagship journal International Security, won the 2017 Best Security Article Award from the International Studies Association. Her 2021 article “The Long Jihad: The Boom-Bust Cycle Behind Jihadist Durability” was awarded Best Article in the Journal of Global Security Studies by the Diplomatic Studies Association section of the International Studies Association. 
She has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, and Lebanon, and has spent over a decade advising senior leaders in military, government, and international organizations on global security policy. She has also been “coined” by colonels and generals from multiple special branches of allied military and intelligence agencies.
With respect to her teaching, Dr. Ahmad is the 2018 winner of the Northrop Frye Award of Excellence for outstanding contributions to co-curricular learning and pedagogical innovation; this prize is awarded to one faculty member per year, across all three campuses, all disciplines, and academic ranks at the University of Toronto. She also won the 2018 University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus (UTSC) Assistant Professor Award for outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching at the Scarborough campus. In 2018, she was named the 2018 “Muslim Woman of the Year” at the Muslim Awards of Excellence MAX gala, which celebrates outstanding achievements by a Muslim Canadian in their field. 

Ishtiaque Ahmed is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He directs the Third Space research group at the DGP Lab. He is also a graduate faculty member of the School of Environment, a Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, and a Senior Fellow at the Massey College. He co-organizes the monthly UofT Critical Computing Seminar that hosts speakers analyzing computer science and its applications from the perspectives of marginalization, bias, and oppression. He also co-directs the PRISM program at the CS Department that trains students from marginalized communities for higher education in computer science. He also leads the weekly Critical Data Science reading group that studies and analyzes recent scholarly work around AI and Machine Learning from various critical points of view. His research interest is situated at the intersection of computer science and the critical social sciences. His work is often motivated by social justice and sustainability issues, and he puts them in the academic contexts of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD). He operates through a wide range of technical and methodological apparatuses from ethnography to design, and from NLP to tangible user interface.

Ahmed earned his PhD at Cornell University, where he was advised by Steve Jackson. Before moving to North America, he studied and taught Computer Science at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). He developed and still mentors the first HCI community in Bangladesh. He is a Schwartz Reisman Institute Faculty Fellow ('21), Senior Massey Fellow ('21), Fulbright Centennial Fellow ('19), a Connaught Scholar ('18), a Fulbright S&T Fellow ('11), and an OpenStreetMap Scholar ('10). His current research is supported by all three divisions of Canada's federal tri-council research agency: NSERC, CIHR, and SSHRC, among others.

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