Panelists
Raj Kothari is a Chartered Accountant and former Vice Chair of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Canada. He was also Managing Partner for the Greater Toronto Area and National Asset and Wealth Management Leader. His experience spans the areas of business assurance and advisory services, transaction support services, and valuation and related services to clients in a variety of businesses. Raj is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the Toronto General and Western Hospital Foundation and also serves on the boards of the Soulpepper Theatre Company, the Aga Khan Museum, the University Health Network and the Ontario Arts Foundation.
Shamira Madhany joined World Education Services as Managing Director Canada and Deputy Executive Director after more than two decades of public service. She has extensive experience working with licensing bodies, settlement agencies and higher education and post-secondary sectors in Ontario. She served as the chief architect of several government programs that enable highly skilled immigrants to obtain employment in their fields. Shamira played a key role in the launch of World Education Services Canada in 2000 during her tenure at the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration as Provincial Lead, Access to Professions and Trades.
Mary W. Rowe is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Urban Institute, a national platform focused on Canadian city building. She served as Executive Vice President of the Municipal Art Society of New York and was President of the Canadian platform Ideas That Matter. Mary is a Senior Fellow with Shorefast and a frequent contributor to national and international city-building programs, including UN-Habitat, the Massey Cities Summit, The Art of City Building and the World Urban Forum.
Anna Triandafyllidou holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University. In 2023, she took on the additional role of Scientific Director for a new $98.6 million project, Bridging Divides, awarded to Toronto Metropolitan University by the Government of Canada through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. Prior to joining the university, Anna was based at the European University Institute, where she held a Robert Schuman Chair on Global Pluralism. She is Editor of the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Chair of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee and member of the IMISCOE Board of Directors.
Mireille Paquet holds the Concordia University Research Chair on the Politics of Immigration at Concordia University, is the Scientific Director of the Équipe de recherche sur l’immigration au Québec et ailleurs and is a researcher and Institutional Lead for Bridging Divides. She has held multiple fellowships at Harvard University; the University of California, Berkeley; Institut Convergences Migrations at the Collège de France and CERC Migration. She has received a Concordia University Research Award in Social Sciences. Mireille is directly involved in public policy, acting as a consultant and advisor for different government departments and non-governmental organizations.
Shiva S. Mohan is Research Fellow, CERC Migration. He is a human geographer with research interests situated at the interface of migration and mobility studies, island studies and political geography. Shiva's doctoral dissertation focussed on Venezuelan displacement to Trinidad and Tobago, interrogating the island-nation’s responses to the in-flow of migrants. He is Research Associate at the International Migration Research Centre, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University and at the Environmental Mobility Research Unit. He is a member of the Migration and Development Research Cluster at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, The University of the West Indies.
Yasmeen Abu-Laban is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Citizenship and Human Rights in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a researcher with the Bridging Divides program. She has published widely on themes relating to immigration and border control policies, anti-racism and multiculturalism and citizenship theory. She was elected President of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association in 2022 and has also served as President of the Canadian Political Science Association and Vice President of the International Political Science Association.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University. He is also a part-time Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Before he was the CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California and prior to these roles, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), which won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and between 2012 and 2016 was elected to the ACM Council. Since 2010 he has been a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, bias and ethics on AI, data science and algorithms in general.
Ana Beduschi is Full Professor of Law at the University of Exeter, where she specializes in international human rights law, technology, international migration and refugee law. She is the Director of the Research Centre for Science, Culture and the Law at the University of Exeter Law School. Ana has held Visiting Research Fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, University of Geneva. She earned her PhD in Law from the University of Montpellier in 2011. She was admitted to the Bar as an Attorney-at-Law in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2001.
Munmun De Choudhury is Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is best known for developing computational techniques to responsibly and ethically use social media to understand and improve mental health. Munmun has been recognized with multiple awards, including the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award. She was Faculty Associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and Postdoc at Microsoft Research, and she obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University.
Anatoliy Gruzd is Professor of Information Technology Management and holds the Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University. He is also Director of Research at the Social Media Lab, Toronto Metropolitan University, and a researcher with the Bridging Divides program. Anatoliy’s various research initiatives focus on studying the impact of social media platforms on communication, collaboration and information dissemination as well as on the formation of communities online and how these changes affect society.
Ebrahim Bagheri is a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at TMU, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Social Information Retrieval and an NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Social Media Analytics. He is the Director of the NSERC CREATE program on the Responsible Development of AI (RAI) and the Scientific Co-Director of the Bridging Divides program. Ebrahim is a truly interdisciplinary researcher who has impacted industry, government and civil society through knowledge translation and community engagement. He received a NSERC Synergy Award in recognition of his contributions to knowledge transfer.
Mark Daley is the Chief AI Officer at Western University and a full professor in the Department of Computer Science with cross-appointments in five other departments, the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, and the Western Institute for Neuroscience. He is also a faculty affiliate of Toronto's Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Mark has previously served as the Vice-President (Research) at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and Chief Digital Information Officer, Special Advisor to the President, and Associate Vice-President (Research) at Western. Mark is the past chair of Compute Ontario and serves on a number of other boards.
Foutse Khomh is a Full Professor of Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair on Trustworthy Machine Learning Software Systems, an NSERC Arthur B. McDonald Fellow, and an FRQ-IVADO Research Chair on Software Quality Assurance for Machine Learning Applications. He received a PhD in Software Engineering from the University of Montreal in 2011, with the Award of Excellence. He also received a CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize for 2019. His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, machine learning systems engineering, cloud engineering, and dependable and trustworthy ML/AI. His work has received four, ten-year Most Influential Paper Awards, and seven Best/Distinguished Paper Awards. He initiated and co-organized the Software Engineering for Machine Learning Applications symposium and the RELENG (Release Engineering) workshop series. He is co-founder of the NSERC CREATE SE4AI: A Training Program on the Development, Deployment, and Servicing of Artificial Intelligence-based Software Systems and one of the Principal Investigators of the DEpendable Explainable Learning project. He is also a co-founder of Quebec's initiative on Trustworthy AI (Confiance IA Quebec (external link) ) and Scientific co-director of IVADO (external link) . He is on the editorial board of multiple international software engineering journals and is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Radin Hamidi Rad is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in computer engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University. His main research interests are artificial intelligence, information retrieval and graph analysis. As a software and data specialist, he performs data analysis, reports on research analysis findings and provides technical solutions to research staff to aid in their research. Radin also provides guidance and recommendations on best practices from a data privacy and security lens to Bridging Divides research staff, ensuring all applicable policies and processes are being followed.
Josephine Wong is Professor and Research Chair in Urban Health at the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Toronto Metropolitan University and a researcher for Bridging Divides. She has extensive experience in critical public health and urban health, including the development of access and equity policies and inclusive frameworks for public health practice. She works closely with racialized, immigrant and refugee communities to co-develop innovative solutions that promote health equity and positive social change. Underpinned by the principles of social justice and equity, Josephine’s research focuses on gender identities and health practices, social determinants of mental health and HIV/STBBI vulnerabilities in diasporic and transnational communities. She leads intervention studies on stigma reduction and collective resilience in the Asian, Black and Latinx communities in Canada and China.
Georgiana Mathurin is a graduate student and a graduate student researcher. She holds MAs in Immigration and Settlement Studies and Early Childhood Studies, both from TMU. She is passionate about immigrants with precarious migration status, specifically Black women and mothers. Georgiana's research intends to bring awareness, build on existing knowledge, and fill research gaps. Additional, she is a contract lecturer at the School of Early Childhood, George Brown College. In 2023, Georgiana was awarded the Viola Desmond Award for her exemplary role as a leader in the Black community at Toronto Metropolitan University and in the wider community.
Maruja (Marla) Milagros B. Asis is a Senior Researcher at the Scalabrini Migration Center. She is a sociologist with more than 30 years of research experience in international migration and social transformation, with a special focus on the Asian region. Her research and publications explore the themes of gender, family and migration, migration and development and migration governance. Marla has extensive experience working on transnational research projects and is actively involved in various consultative bodies on international migration.
Andre Renzaho is a public health researcher specializing in global migration, health equity and cultural competence in health care. He is the inaugural Professor of Humanitarian and Development Studies at Western Sydney University. He has published extensively, and his role as a leading researcher in global migration health has been recognized by multiple awards and mentions, including in the Stanford/Elsevier’s Top 2% Scientist Rankings. Prior to academia, he held senior positions and leadership roles with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the United Nations Children's Fund, Concern Worldwide, Care Australia, Médecins Sans Frontières and World Vision International.
Elizabeth Saewyc is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar and Director of the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She founded and heads the Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre and is a researcher with Bridging Divides. For over 25 years, Elizabeth’s research has focused on different groups of marginalized youth, emphasizing how stigma, violence and trauma affect adolescent health and risk behaviours as well as the protective factors that foster resilience among these vulnerable populations. Elizabeth is Fellow with the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the American Academy of Nursing and the Canadian Academy of Nursing, and she was inducted into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Researcher Hall of Fame.
Karen Soldatic is a leading international scholar of disability, marginality and global inequality. Her research uses a broad lens to explore how social, cultural and political factors influence health and community well-being. Joining TMU from Western Sydney University, she has extensive expertise in collaborating directly with marginalized communities that experience poor health outcomes due to intensive social, emotional, cultural and economic inequality. Over the years, her unique empirical work has helped bridge numerous divides, resulting in diverse communities gaining more equitable access to disability, health and social service institutions across Australia, South Asia and South-East Asia. Her work is internationally renowned and impactful in informing global disability and inequality policy debates, advocacy and research.
Sandeep Agrawal is Associate Dean in the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research and Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, where he established and was inaugural Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning. He is also a researcher and Institutional Lead for Bridging Divides. An accomplished author of three books and more than 100 articles and reports, Sandeep has made significant contributions to urban planning through the lens of multiculturalism, human rights and equity, with notable impacts on city bylaws, planning policies and legislation. Sandeep is a recipient of the Canadian Institute of Planners’ national academic award for his significant contribution to planning education and research.
Jérémie Molho is Senior Research Associate, CERC Migration, an affiliated researcher for Bridging Divides and former Marie Curie Fellow at the National University of Singapore and the European University Institute. His research adopts a comparative urban studies approach. He has conducted fieldwork in emerging global cities such as Istanbul, Doha and Singapore and has developed an interest in visual and video-based research methods. Jérémie's current research compares the urban policies and politics of attraction and retention of migrants with complex trajectories spanning across Asia, the Middle East and Canada. He is also interested in the role of arts and culture in the urban inclusion of marginalized migrants across different world cities.
As Executive Director of City Building, TMU, Cherise Burda leads collaborations and knowledge mobilization strategies for academic research in city building and urban innovation and policy research on issues of sustainable regional planning and development, housing affordability, placemaking and transportation. Her previous roles included Ontario Director of the Pembina Institute, Program Director with the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver and Senior Researcher with University of Victoria’s Eco-Research Chair of Environmental Law and Policy. Her work as a spokesperson, advisor and author of over 40 policy reports, book chapters, academic publications and articles has directly influenced policy change in Ontario and British Columbia. Cherise holds an MA in environmental policy from University of Victoria, as well as a BSc in environmental science and a Bachelor of Education, both from University of Toronto.
Cathy Yang Liu is Professor and Department Chair of Public Management and Policy and Michael and Enid Mescon Endowed Chair at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University. She conducts research and publishes widely on topics related to community and economic development, urban policy, migration and the labor market as well as entrepreneurship and the creative economy in both the United States and international contexts. Her research has been supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and others.
Gil Penalosa is Founder and Chair of the Canadian non-profit organization 8 80 Cities and Founder of Cities for Everyone. He is Academic Chair at the Norman Foster Institute as well as Expert Advisor to the International Society for Urban Health. He was twice elected as Chair of World Urban Parks. Gil holds an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management and received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Faculty of Urban Planning at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. In 2023, Gil was selected by Identity Review as one of its 15 Thought Leaders in Sustainable City Development and ranked 13 in Planetizen’s Top 100 Most Influential Contemporary Urbanists.
Geoffrey Rockwell is Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. He studies video games, textual visualization, text analysis, ethics of technology and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He is the author of books and articles on sustainable research practices and human-computer interaction. With Stéfan Sinclair, Geoffrey co-developed Voyant Tools, an award-winning suite of text analysis and visualization tools. He is currently working on a book on dialogue and artificial intelligence that looks at the conversations we have about AI and the conversations we can have with the new chatbots like ChatGPT.
Zhixi Zhuang is a Registered Professional Planner and Associate Professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning, Toronto Metropolitan University, and a researcher for Bridging Divides. As the academic director of the Toronto Metropolitan Centre for Immigration and Settlement and Founder and Director of DiverCityLab, her research explores growing urban diversity in Canadian cities and how city builders can instill the values of equity and inclusion into policies and practices. Specifically, she investigates the intersections of individual characteristics, their impacts on lived experiences in cities and how diversity and differences shape places and communities. Her mixed-methods and arts-informed research aims to impart a holistic perspective on immigrant integration, placemaking, civic engagement and inclusive policymaking.
Sophie Yohani is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. She is a registeredpsychologist with a background in counselling psychology, global mental health, and elementary education. Her research examines migrants’ mental health, psychosocial adaptation, and community-engaged mental health practices. She also engages in interdisciplinary research and community psychology programming focused on the well-being of African/Black families and communities in Canada. Sophie is the recipient of the University of Alberta’s Killam Annual Professorship (2021) and the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers’ Lifetime Achievement Award (2016), recognizing the contributions of an immigrant in education and health in Alberta. Sophie’s professional affiliations include the College of Alberta Psychologists, Canadian Psychology Association, and the Canadian Register of Health Service Psychologists.
Bilal Farooq is Canada Research Chair in Disruptive Transportation Technologies and Services and Associate Professor at TMU. He is also Founding Director of Laboratory of Innovations in Transportation (LiTrans) and a researcher for Bridging Divides. Always quick to take things apart to see how they work internally, Bilal brings his approach of “learning through curiosity” to his work in traffic flow simulation and prediction, connected autonomous vehicles and urban congestion. He worked in the software industry for several years before starting his PhD in Transportation Engineering at University of Toronto in 2006, which was followed by his post-doctoral research at EPFL, Switzerland. He received Early Career Researcher Awards both in Québec and Ontario.
Alexandra (Ali) Mazalek is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Innovation at TMU, founder and director of the Synaesthetic Media Lab (Synlab), TMU and Georgia Institute of Technology, and a researcher for Bridging Divides. Ali works at the forefront of computing and interaction design. Her research interests include the design and application of emerging physical sensing and digital media technologies to areas such as narrative expression, abstract thinking, scientific modeling, as well as the study and use of embodied cognition as a framework for tangible and embodied interaction design. She has published her work in a range of academic journals and exhibited at numerous galleries and festivals.
Radin Hamidi Rad is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in computer engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University. His main research interests are artificial intelligence, information retrieval and graph analysis. As a software and data specialist, he performs data analysis, reports on research analysis findings and provides technical solutions to research staff to aid in their research. Radin also provides guidance and recommendations on best practices from a data privacy and security lens to Bridging Divides research staff, ensuring all applicable policies and processes are being followed.
Rupa Banerjee is the Canada Research Chair in Economic Inclusion, Employment and Entrepreneurship of Canada’s Immigrants and Associate Professor of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behaviour at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is also a researcher in the Bridging Divides program. Her primary research interest lies in the employment integration of new immigrants to Canada, with a focus on the institutional barriers facing new immigrants in the Canadian labour market and issues of workplace diversity and ethno-racial discrimination, particularly as they apply to second-generation immigrants. Her work has been widely published in both international migration and labour publications.
Nick Dreher is a PhD candidate in Policy Studies and Migration at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is also a researcher with CERC Migration and the Soli*City partnership, and an affiliated researcher with Bridging Divides. His dissertation research focuses on how international and local actors collaborate to support the needs of precarious migrants and refugees. Other research interests include transnational migration governance, digital nomads and the future of work, qualitative methodologies and decolonial approaches to migration studies. He currently serves on the steering committee for the Global (De)Centre network.
Wendy Cukier is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy and Founder and Academic Director of the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she leads a team of more than 100 research staff. She is also a researcher for Bridging Divides. Wendy is one of Canada’s leading experts in disruptive technologies, innovation processes and diversity and inclusion and has published more than 200 articles exploring various aspects of these themes. She has been recognized for her role in advancing diversity and inclusion with the Meritorious Service Cross, Harry Jerome Diversity Award and other honours and awards.
Jean-Christophe Dumont is Head of the International Migration Division in the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), where he is in charge of the OECD annual flagship publication International Migration Outlook and numerous other publications on the economic impact of international migration, migration management and the labour market integration of immigrants and their children in OECD countries. He has also worked on migration and development issues and on the international mobility of health workers. He holds a PhD in development economics from the University Paris IX-Dauphine and has been a research fellow at Laval University, Quebec.
Suzanne Huot is Assistant Professor in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of British Columbia and a researcher for Bridging Divides. Her research program centres on immigration, the axes of occupation and Francophone minority communities. Using research approaches informed by occupational science, critical social theory and qualitative methodologies, Suzanne examines ways in which governmental decisions and actions are experienced at the local scale in relation to people’s daily occupations, interrogating the effects of these high-level decisions on peoples’ integration, belonging and sense of community cohesion. Her ongoing research focuses on equity issues that newcomers confront within contemporary policy contexts as they navigate post-migratory transitions within their host communities.
Shamira Madhany joined World Education Services as Managing Director, Canada, and Deputy Executive Director in 2018, after more than two decades of public service with the Ontario government. She has extensive experience working with licensing bodies, settlement agencies and higher education and post-secondary sectors in Ontario. She served as the chief architect of several government programs that enable highly skilled immigrants to obtain employment in their fields. Shamira played a key role in the launch of World Education Services Canada in 2000 during her tenure at the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.
Joel Martin is the Chief Digital Research Officer and Chief Science Officer at the National Research Council Canada. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, from the Georgia Institute of Technology and completed post-doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed research articles and taught at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. He has received awards for exceptional leadership and for innovative approaches to technology transfer. Since joining the National Research Council in 1994, Joel has served in multiple leadership roles in the Digital Technologies Research Centre, including Acting Director General, Senior Director, Director of Research and Development and Program Lead.