Our Team

Dr. Usha George, Principal Investigator, is recognized for her expertise in newcomer settlement and integration, especially in the context of the South Asian community. She has completed 10 studies in the field of newcomer settlement for the Ontario Region Settlement Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) as well as several studies funded by the SSHRC.  In addition to authoring numerous peer-reviewed publications arising out of the studies, Dr. George developed the cultural profile of 101 source countries of Canada’s immigrants for CIC’s HOST program and was the national coordinator for the section on social work and immigrant communities in a national study on the future of social work in Canada funded by HRDC (1999-2000). Dr. George is based in the School of Social Work and is the Director of the Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement (RCIS) at Ryerson University.

Dr. Esme Fuller-Thomson, Co-Investigator, has significant expertise in quantitative and mixed methods studies and has served as co-investigator for a SSHRC funded study on discrimination faced by immigrants in the workplace where Dr. George was the PI.  She has co-authored 35 peer-reviewed articles on the topic of immigration or visible minorities since 2000, with 23 of these published in the past five years.  Her research has been funded through a variety of sources including SSHRC, Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario, Retirement Research Foundation, and the Toronto Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, and immigrants’ health has been the focus of much of this research.  Dr. Fuller-Thomson holds the Sandra Rotman Chair in Social Work, and is the Interim Director of the Institute for Life Course and Aging at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Ka Tat Tsang, Co-Investigator, is well known for his research and writing on Chinese immigrants.  Over the last two decades, he has created the SSLD (strategies and Skills Learning and Development) and the ICCP (integrative Cross-cultural Clinical Practice) models, and applied them to diverse populations in Canada and globally.  He has done extensive research with immigrant communities, including a number of SSHRC funded projects, as well as community-based studies funded by bodies such as the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the Wellesley Institute of Toronto.  Dr. Tsang has also been actively involved in the development of social work in China since the 1980s.  His current projects in China involve collaboration with a number of leading universities such as Tsinghua, Shandong, and the Beijing Institute of Technology. Dr. Tsang is the Director of the China Project and holds the Factor-Inwentash Chair in Social Work in the Global Community at the University of Toronto.