New faculty hires
The Faculty of Community Services is pleased to welcome the following new faculty members this fall:
Sue Bookey-Bassett, Assistant Professor, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing
Sue Bookey-Bassett completed her PhD in nursing at McMaster University’s Aging Community and Health Research Unit in 2018. Her doctoral work involved the development and feasibility testing of an interprofessional education (IPE) intervention to support collaborative practice for older stroke survivors with multiple chronic conditions in the home care sector. Bookey-Bassett has held numerous practice, education and research roles across health care organizations, academic institutions and professional nursing associations. She has expertise in designing, delivering and evaluating education programs for health professions students and practicing health care professionals. Bookey-Bassett is an active board member for Erinoakkids and the Registered Nurses Foundation of Ontario. Her nursing clinical background is in perinatal and neonatal nursing. Bookey-Bassett’s program of research relates to IPE and collaboration within and across all health sectors. Current work focuses on exploring the role of IPE in care transitions and integrated models of care.
Cheryllee Bourgeois, Assistant Professor, Midwifery Education Program
Cheryllee Bourgeois is a mother of three, aunty to many and a Metis Midwife at Seventh Generation Midwives Toronto. She graduated from the Ryerson Midwifery Education program in 2007 and worked as a registered midwife for 11 years before giving up registration to work under the authority of the Indigenous community under the Ontario exemption clause for Aboriginal Midwives. While she grew up on the west coast, her Cree and Assiniboine ancestry are rooted in the Red River District of southern Manitoba and the Missouri River Basin in North Dakota. Bourgeois has taught in the Ryerson Midwifery Education Program since 2008. She sits on the Core-leadership of the National Aboriginal Council of Midwives and has been involved in multiple projects supporting Indigenous communities to bring birth closer to home. Her work includes international Indigenous partnerships to support the education, skill development and practice of traditional Indigenous midwifery in Peru and Mexico.
Treisha Hylton, Assistant Professor, School of Child and Youth Care
Treisha Hylton is an interdisciplinary instructor in the field of child and youth care, criminology, and social work, with an emphasis on equity and social justice for African/Black Canadian girls and their broader community. This is complemented with 15 years of professional experience working with various organizations such as Native Child and Family Services, Toronto Catholic District School Board, The Massey Centre and the City of Toronto. Her research interests are focused on centering African Canadian epistemologies to advance social justice and equity in education.
Sandra Juutilainen, Assistant Professor, School of Nutrition
Sandra Juutilainen is a member of Oneida Nation of the Thames and also of Finnish-Canadian heritage. She has experience working in the area of Indigenous health at the community, provincial and federal level in Canada and with Sami communities in the Nordic countries. She completed a PhD in health sciences at the University of Oulu, Finland in 2017. Upon return to Canada, she received a Health System Impact Fellowship award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Her ongoing research projects include a mixed-methods study funded by the Rick Hansen Institute and Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation: ‘Indigenous populations and spinal cord injury: utilizing an Indigenous lens to establish meaningful data.’ She holds an adjunct assistant professor appointment at the University of Waterloo where she is the principle investigator on a SSHRC-funded study ‘Truth Telling: gardens, farming and food experiences at the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School.’
Nima Khakzad, Assistant Professor, School of Occupational and Public Health
Before joining Ryerson University, Nima Khakzad was an assistant professor of system safety (2015-2019) at the Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. Khakzad has bachelor and masters’ degrees in civil engineering, and a PhD degree in oil and gas engineering. His research is mainly focused on safety assessment and management of (petro)chemical facilities with regard to domino effects, natural-technological accidents and terrorist attacks. He is a member of the editorial boards of Safety Science and Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, and the co-chair of the Technical Committee in Chemical and Process Industry in European Safety and Reliability Association. Khakzad will be joining Ryerson in November, 2019.
Daniela Malta, Assistant Professor, School of Nutrition
Daniela Malta completed her doctoral work at the University of Toronto in the department of nutritional sciences. She is a Registered Dietitian and holds an adjunct appointment at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Malta’s research interests are centered upon investigating comprehensive dietary strategies and patient-related outcomes in cardiovascular disease states. Malta has also been engaged in several collaborative groups. Most recently, she is a contributing member of ‘The Science of Salt’, an ongoing initiative of the Canadian Institute for Health Research and Heart and Stroke Foundation Chair in Hypertension Prevention and Control. This is a specialized group of health researchers that produce systematic reviews on the relationship between salt and health outcomes.
Fiona Moola, Assistant Professor, School of Early Childhood Studies
Fiona Moola is a research scientist at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and assistant professor (status) at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Rehabilitation Sciences Institute. In her new role, Moola is leading a research partnership between Ryerson University and Holland Bloorview. With support from the Bloorview Research Institute at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in 2017, Moola started the HEART lab. In the HEART lab — or the Health Experiences and Arts Based Research team — Moola works with undergraduate students, graduate students, and staff to better understand the health impact of the arts in the lives of children with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Moola also studies the merits of the arts-based research canon in the production of knowledge about marginalized childhoods.
Jenna Reid, Assistant Professor, School of Disability Studies
Jenna Reid is a fibre based artist who works primarily with the practices of quilting and natural dyes as a way to engage with activist based aesthetics. Reid’s studio work explores inter-institutional violence informed by the histories of queer, feminist, and mad movement organizing. Reid’s fibre art has been exhibited both locally and internationally. With a completed studio-based PhD in Critical Disability Studies from York University, Reid developed a critical craft praxis as a way to explore how creative practices can intervene in ways that make change happen in the world. As a professor in the emergent field of mad studies and disability studies, Reid uses art in the classroom to create ruptures, open up new lines of inquiry, and help students open up transformative possibilities.
Petra Roberts, Assistant Professor, School of Child and Youth Care
Petra Roberts is Trinidadian-born and began her career as a child protection worker in Thompson, Manitoba. Roberts went on to become a child advocacy officer in Winnipeg before spending 14 years as a mental health clinician. Returning to Trinidad, Roberts was project manager at the Caribbean Epidemiology Centre/Pan American Health Organization and an instructor at the University of the West Indies. Returning to Winnipeg, Roberts worked with the Child and Adolescent Anxiety Disorder Out-Patient Program and as a sessional lecturer at the University of Manitoba. In 2017, Roberts joined Algoma University as an assistant professor. Roberts’ research interests lie in the area of children and families, mental health, child welfare, and out-of-home care for children in Canada and the Caribbean. Her current research uses oral history to record colonial child and youth care experiences, and the role of the Anglican church, with a former residential school survivor and a resident of the orphan asylum in Trinidad.
Charlene Ronquillo, Assistant Professor, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing
Charlene Ronquillo is a Registered Nurse whose program of research focuses on nursing and health informatics, implementation science and the intersection of these fields. Most recently, Ronquillo held research posts in the United Kingdom as an associate research fellow in implementation science at the University of Exeter Medical School and as a health service improvement research fellow at the University of the West of England. Ronquillo is active in the international nursing informatics community and is the current vice chair of the newly established Student and Emerging Professionals Group of the International Medical Informatics Association (external link) .
Linda Rothman, Assistant Professor, School of Occupational and Public Health
Linda Rothman originally trained as an occupational therapist at the University of Toronto, and worked with neurologically impaired children in a variety of settings. After obtaining a master's in community health and epidemiology at the University of Toronto, Rothman worked in arthritis epidemiology. She subsequently joined the Research Institute at the Hospital for Sick Children, where she worked and completed a PhD at the Institute for Medical Sciences, at the University of Toronto. Rothman did her postdoctoral training in kinesiology and health sciences at York University. She is an adjunct scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Her area of expertise is in unintentional injury prevention and she has been involved in research related to sport, playground, road traffic and car occupant injuries. Her current research focus is on child pedestrian and cycling injury prevention related to school travel and the built environment.
Fatih Sekercioglu, Assistant Professor, School of Occupational and Public Health
Fatih Sekercioglu also holds an adjunct assistant professor appointment at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine Dentistry. Before joining Ryerson, Sekercioglu was a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Western University and an environmental health manager with the Middlesex-London Health Unit. Throughout his 15 year public health career, Sekercioglu worked as an environmental health manager, child and family health manager, vector-borne disease program coordinator and public health inspector. Sekercioglu completed doctoral studies in geography at Western University. He was a Canadian Institute of Public Health Inspectors (CIPHI) Board of Certification examiner for ten years and was the CIPHI National Exam Panel member between 2012-2019. He was appointed as the CIPHI Ontario Board of Certification Representative between May 2018 and July 2019.
Kristin Snoddon, Associate Professor, School of Early Childhood Studies
Kristin Snoddon’s research and professional experience includes collaborative work with deaf communities in developing sign language and early literacy programming for young deaf children and their parents. Her recent research has focused on developing a parent American Sign Language curriculum that is aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Additionally, she analyzes policy issues related to inclusive education, sign language rights and acquisition planning for ASL. Before coming to Ryerson, she taught at the University of Alberta and Carleton University. She currently serves as coordinator for the World Federation of the Deaf’s Expert Group on Deaf Education. She also serves as executive editor for Deafness & Education International.
Erin Ziegler, Assistant Professor, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing
Erin Ziegler is a primary healthcare nurse practitioner (NP). She obtained her BScN and MN from Ryerson University and PhD from McMaster University. As an NP, Ziegler is the clinical director of a transgender primary care program. She holds a CIHR doctoral award for ‘Innovative Thinking to Support LGBTQI2S Health and Wellness.’ She completed the Transdisciplinary Understanding and Training on Research Primary Health Care fellowship. Her program of research focuses on primary healthcare for LGBTQ12S individuals and advanced practice nursing education and activities. She is a member of the Canadian Centre for Advanced Practice Nursing Research. Ziegler teaches in the third year of the collaborative, MN and NP program at Ryerson University.
