Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis is the Director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum. She first came to Toronto in 2017 as the Museum’s first Director of Collections and Public Programs after serving as Senior Strategic Advisor to the Sharjah Museums Department in the United Arab Emirates for ten years. Her career started in Scotland with curatorial positions at the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh and Glasgow Museums, the largest civic museums organisation in the country. Dr Al-Khamis holds a PhD in Islamic Art from the University of Edinburgh and has devoted her entire professional career to the fostering of intercultural dialogue and pluralism through museums and the arts.
Navona Calarco is a Massey Junior Fellow and PhD student in Medical Biophysics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience. She is particularly excited about applying new neuroimaging and statistical methods to probe age-old questions, such as how we represent the world around us (and how this can go awry), and how it is that the brain can give rise to conscious experience. Outside of research, she enjoys teaching statistics and coding to other scientists and to kids at a local community centre. She also spends a lot of time with her chat, and trying to regain a default ranking on chess.com.
Louise Dennys is Publisher Emerita of Penguin Random House Canada, a role just created for her following a 30-year career as Executive Publisher and Executive Vice-President at Canada’s largest publishing house. Known as “the writers’ editor”, she has worked with many of Canada and the world’s most renowned writers, including Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, Yann Martel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, P.D. James, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Dr Gabor Mate. Etc. Among her many career distinctions, she has published four Nobel Prize winners – while also seeking out new voices in both fiction and non-fiction.
Most inspiringly, she started small but with courage and passion. Early in her career, at the age of 25, Louise, distressed to see good writers being turned down, started her own publishing house, learning how to hand typeset and sell books. (She should visit the Bib Room). Soon after, she joined the independent house Lester & Orpen Dennys, releasing many seminal bestsellers including the first Illustrated History of Canada, and None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, until founding the renowned imprints Knopf and Vintage Canada in the nineties. She has several times been voted Editor of the Year and also Publisher of the Year, and was heralded as a Woman of the Year by Toronto Life Magazine on a few occasions.
Dedicated to freedom of expression, Louise is a past President of PEN Canada. Notably, during her time in office, she was responsible for secretly spiriting her author Salman Rushdie into Canada following the death sentence imposed on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini, a move that resulted in the Canadian government’s supporting his case to the United Nations.
She’s a recipient of the Order of Canada, a founder of the International Literary Festival at Harbourfront, and a Doctor of Civil Law honoris causa at Bishop’s University. She’s most proud of her current role as a director of Nashulai Maasai Conservancy–co-founded by the young Maasai leader Nelson Ole Reiya in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, and her husband Ric Young, a leader in transformative social change. The UN, in awarding Nashulai (which in the Maa language means “We Co-Exist”) the UNDP Equator Prize 2020, called the indigenous-governed conservancy a “paradigm shifting model of conservation and regeneration for the 21st century”.
Eve Egoyan is an internationally celebrated artist whose medium is the piano. She continually re-invents her relationship with her instrument through the creation and commissioning of new works. Eve was a resident of Massey College while completing her Masters at the University of Toronto following four years of scholarship and study in Berlin and London.
She has recorded thirteen solo CDs which have received international accolades including one of “Ten Top” classical discs by the New Yorker magazine.. Eve is one of fifty Canadian performers and conductors given and designation of “CMC Ambassador” by the Canadian Music Centre and is one of Canada’s primary ambassadors for Canadian music abroad. Eve is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) and an elected Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London, England (ARAM). She has also been selected as one of 25 top Canadian pianists of all time by the CBC.
Eve began working with new technologies in 2009 in collaboration media artist David Rokeby. More recently Eve created a series of works for herself which delve into the space between “what a piano can do” and “what I wish a piano could do” combining acoustic piano with new technologies and premiered an evening of these works during the 21C Music Festival in Koerner Hall.
Eve continues to create new works for augmented/acoustic piano including new commissions (for Innovations en concert in Montreal and others) as well as new collaborations (with animator Christopher Hinton and improviser/composer Mauricio Pauly) alongside a full interpretative practice. Eve is the subject in Su Rynard’s “Duet for Solo Piano”, a feature length film.
Eve works to improve gender equity in the world of contemporary music performance as a performer and as a voice in the community. Most recently, Eve was inducted into the CBC’s Hall of Fame and an hour-long feature on her work is available on line at CBC’s In Concert on Demand site.
Haley Forgacs is Junior Fellow at Massey pursuing her Masters in European and Russian Affairs through the Munk School of Global Affairs. She holds an Honours BA in English Literature and History from Queen’s University. Haley’s primary research interests surround information warfare and tactics of Russian disinformation regarding its war against Ukraine. This summer, Haley will work for the European Association of History Educators in The Hague, conducting research to help create holistic and inclusive historical narratives for history educators. Following her degree, Haley plans to work in non-Governmental organizations in Europe that investigate information warfare and disinformation campaigns.
Alyssa Ginsburg has been the College Events and Social Media Coordinator since January 2021. She cares deeply about creating a more equitable and just society. An experienced political, arts and community-based organizer, Alyssa campaigned for nearly a decade with the Put Food in the Budget campaign pushing to ensure the provincial government increased social assistance rates. She has also campaigned on political election campaigns at all levels of government and worked as a staffer for an MP, City Councillor and in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition at Queen’s Park.
Outside of the College, Alyssa has strong ties to the spoken word scene in Canada. As the founder and Artistic Director of WordSpell, she offered a stage to women, trans and non-binary spoken word artists in one of Canada’s longest running stages with that mission from 2012-2020. She has been central member of the Toronto Poetry Project for nearly a decade, serving as the Bookings/Events Manager and Assistant Artistic Director. Fun fact, she is one of only a few non-poets/writers who organizes spoken events in Canada.
Carolina Granado arrived last weekend to begin her time as a Massey Visiting Scholar. Carolina is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History of Science, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, with a background in science. She holds two Bachelor degrees in Physics and Mathematics from UAB and a Masters in History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science from the Université de Paris. Her thesis, provisionally entitled “Between science and politics: the role of experts in early international assessments on climate change (1985-1992)” discusses how climatologists, through complex social and institutional processes, informed policymakers about climate change and plausible solutions to it before major international negotiations began. She also studies the politics behind the creation, in 1988, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most relevant assessment institution still today.
Apart from the history of science, her thesis is strongly inspired by other disciplines such as environmental history, international relations, gender and environmental diplomacy. She is currently in the second year of her thesis, and has presented her work at international conferences including the History of Science Society Conference in Chicago, and the European Society for the History of Science Conference in Brussels. Ove the next the two years, she will be embarking on research stays at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, and at the Rachel Carson Institute, in Munich. In Toronto she will be doing archival research on Kenneth Hare’s papers, a climatologist that was a crucial actor in historical period she is researching. Welcome!
Dr. Eva Grunfeld is a leader in cancer health services and outcomes research. Her research focuses on evaluation and knowledge translation of cancer health services, covering the entire spectrum of cancer control activities from prevention to end-of-life care. She is internationally recognized for being in the vanguard of research on cancer survivorship, having led the first and some of the largest multi-centre trials, influencing clinical practice guidelines and policies internationally.
Dr. Grunfeld has over 170 peer-review publications, holds many peer-review grants as Principal Investigator, and has served on many committees to further the goals of cancer control in Canada and internationally. The leadership roles she has held include Chair of the Institute Advisory Board for CIHR’s Institute for Cancer Research; Giblon Professor and Vice-Chair Research with the Dept. of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto; Founder of Cancer Outcomes Research at Dalhousie University; and Physician Scientist and Director of the Knowledge Translation Research Network with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.
Dr. Grunfeld holds a medical degree from McMaster University and doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. She was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in December 2022.
Marissa Herzig is a first-year Junior Fellow and a first year English PhD student. She hails from the great city of Philadelphia, and received her undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, where she triple majored in English, French, and History, and minored in Jewish Studies and Korean. Marissa recently received her master’s in English literature from the University of Virginia, where she focused on environmental humanities. At the University of Toronto, Marissa is a part of the Jewish Studies and Diaspora and Transnational Studies Collaborative Programs. Her research, which has been published in Johns Hopkins’ Macksey Journal and the Pittsburgh Review among others, focuses on the gendered and racialized implications of the nonhuman in Jewish folklore. In her spare time, she enjoys buying too many plants, hiking, and listening to audiobooks.
Hannah Hoag is this year’s Webster McConnell Journalism Fellow. Hannah originally trained to study rare genetic diseases, but she swapped her pipette for a pen to write about science instead of worrying about grants or tenure.
Hannah is the deputy editor and the energy and environment editor at The Conversation Canada. During her tenure, she has overseen coverage of COVID-19, the identification of unmarked children’s graves at the sites of former Indian Residential Schools, the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the B.C. heatwave and floods, and more.
She is a graduate of Queen’s, McGill and Boston universities. She learned to row in university and earned a spot on the Quebec provincial team, winning gold and silver medals at the Canada Cup.
Hannah has two decades of experience covering science, medicine and the environment for a variety of media, mostly as an independent reporter. Her bylines appear in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the New York Times, Science, Nature, the Atlantic and more. Hannah is passionate about the North, and was previously the founding managing editor of Arctic Deeply. She coordinated an international panel of women in polar research.
Her reporting on people, the planet and the perils we face has taken her around the world from the Arctic Ocean, where she lived on a Polish research ship for two weeks, witness to a rapidly changing climate, to Guyana, where she slept in a hammock under a leafy tropical forest and trapped bats under the cover of darkness.
Marianne Lahaie Luna is a second year PhD student in the Department of Geography and Planning and a Massey Junior Fellow. Prior to starting her doctoral degree, Marianne completed a Master of Public Health at the University of Toronto, specializing in Environmental Health, and holds a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Environmental Science from the University of Ottawa. Her passion for research led her to work with organizations such as the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Marianne also advocates for menstrual health rights through her work with the Lahaie Luna Lezama NGO, which she co-founded. The NGO has helped more than 1,000 women in South America menstruate with dignity through donations of environmentally and economically sustainable menstrual products. The NGO is also currently collaborating with physicians in Venezuela to conduct the largest study on menstrual health in Latin America. For her doctoral research, she will be working on understanding the socio and spatial influences that contribute to changes in food behaviours post-migration of Latin American migrants in Canada and Chile. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, yoga, knitting, and cooking for her loved ones.
Mia Lofranco is a Massey Junior Fellow in the first year of her PhD program in Italian Studies. After completing her Bachelor’s at the University of Toronto and her Masters of Studies at Oxford, Mia decided to pursue the PhD in order to continue her research on the link between gesture, the senses and community in Italian Medieval poetry. She is an avid reader, never misses an episode of Jeopardy and is actively training for her third degree blackbelt in Taekwondo.
Shamira Madhany is the Managing Director, Canada, and Deputy Executive Director, World Education Services.
As an immigrant and daughter of immigrants, Shamira grew up in a family witnessing the many challenges immigrants go through to fulfill their educational and career dreams. From an early age, she was driven by an intense desire to change the system that left immigrants, like her well-educated father, behind.
Shamira started work in the front lines, as an employment counsellor for newcomers, many who were internationally educated professionals working in low paying jobs to earn a decent living. Shamira’s passion and commitment to making an impact enabled her to quickly progress in the provincial government to senior level positions. Her position before she left government in 2028 was Assistant Deputy Minister for Health, Education, and Social Policy, in Cabinet Office. Shamira was the linchpin between all the bureaucrats between the social policy ministries and political staff and worked closely with the Premier of Ontario and her staff.
As Chief Diversity and Accessibility Officer for the Province of Ontario, Shamira served as the chief architect of several government cutting-edge programs, breaking down barriers to equality, which enable internationally educated professionals obtain employment in their fields and help newcomers in Canada integrate into Canadian life and for those with disabilities to become full members of our society.
Shamira’s commitment to women’s economic empowerment is evident in her policy and program work which highlights the unique employment barriers immigrant women face in the labour market. Over the years, Shamira led various programs that explored strategies and tools that immigrants especially women, can use to optimize connection and innovation for achieving gender equality in the workforce.
Shamira is a guest lecturer at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She also serves on the boards of Windmill Microlending, Herzing College Toronto, and was on the Board of Touchstone Institute until 2022.
Shamira was featured in Profiles in Diversity Journal’s 2019 Women Worth Watching® Awards, which recognizes women who have demonstrated high levels of leadership. She is also the recipient of the Metropolis Policy Maker Award at the 2020 Metropolis Canada Awards of Excellence.
Dr. Dorothy Nyambi is the President and CEO of Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), a non-profit international development organization with a mission to create business solutions to poverty around the world. Dorothy is a thought leader in international development, devoted to creating dynamic organizations that respect diversity, equity and inclusion and succeed in times of challenge and change. Dorothy has experience providing knowledge-based, strategic leadership for effective implementation of an organization’s mission and goals.
With a 25 + year career in the sector and applied governance experience, Dorothy’s work is founded on and informed by unique lived experience and a commitment to authentic leadership. Dorothy has significant and meaningful lived experience in the global south working in a wide range of sectors. She consistently demonstrates an ability to step forward and challenge the status quo, re-imagine and strengthen business processes, challenging old paradigms and programs in support of respectful human-centered design thinking.
Kelly Pike is an Associate Professor of Industrial Relations at York University and a York-Massey Fellow this year. Her research focuses on labour standards compliance in the global garment industry – in particular, how international regulatory efforts impact workers’ lives in both their factories and households. Her research has brought her to Lesotho, Kenya, Indonesia, and Vietnam, in addition to remote work in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Guatemala, India, and the Philippines. She spent the fall preparing for, and conducting fieldwork in various parts of Asia, evaluating training programs on sexual harassment prevention. She hopes to bring ten years of research together into a book this semester. Kelly has consulted for the ILO, World Bank, and several global clothing brands. She also currently serves as a member of CETA’s Domestic Advisory Group for Labour.
Dr. Neville Poy – Dr Neville Poy is a retired Plastic Reconstructive Surgeon, having specialized in Burns, Hands and Aesthetic Surgery, and Directorship of Canada’s first Burn Unit. He is a past Quadrangler at Massey College, and worked with medical and non-medical communities, the performing arts, the military, philanthropy and voluntarism. He has received the Officer of the Order of Canada and Officer of the Order of St. John and is Honorary Colonel Emeritus of the Queen’s York Rangers, Canadian Reserve Army.
The Honorable Vivienne Poy, PhD., Senior Fellow of Massey College, Chancellor Emerita of U of T, is an author, entrepreneur, historian, fashion designer, community activist.
In 1998, she was the first Canadian of Asian heritage to be appointed to the Senate of Canada where she focused on gender issues, multiculturalism, immigration, and human rights, and was instrumental in having May recognized as Asian Heritage Month across Canada.
After her retirement from the Senate of Canada in September 2012, she remains actively involved with organizations and communities across Canada.
Vivienne has received numerous awards, nationally and internationally, as well as honorary degrees and professorship from South Korea, Hong Kong, China, USA and across Canada. In 1996, she received The International Women’s Day Award from the Women’s Intercultural Network for her commitment as a role model to Canadian women.
Clemency Robinson graduated from the University of Ottawa’s Greek and Roman Studies program last year and now a first-year Massey Junior Fellow. She is a Master of Museum Studies student at the Faculty of Information, where she was awarded the Faculty of Information Fellowship. She is particularly interested in exhibition design and interpretation and she has experience working at the Museum of Classical Antiquities and the Bytown Museum in Ottawa. She is also a member of the Hart House Archery Club.
Caroline Tolton is a Juris Doctor candidate at the Faculty of Law. She has an Honours Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from U of T and has been an intern at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History since 2019. She is a past recipient of the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize and serves as an ambassador for the Vimy Foundation. She also serves as an intake volunteer at Downtown Legal Services. In her free time, Caroline loves to read, hike, learn languages, and visit new places.
Rumina Velshi, President and CEO, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Rumina was born in Uganda and came to Canada in her teenage years as a refugee following the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin in 1972. She holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in civil engineering, a Masters in Chemical/Nuclear engineering and an MBA from the University of Toronto.
In August 2018, she was appointed by the Prime Minister as President and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Canada’s nuclear regulator, regulating all nuclear facilities and activities in Canada, including the nuclear fuel cycle. In February 2020, she was also appointed Chairperson of the Commission on Safety Standards, established by the International Atomic Energy Agency and she served as a Board member of the Ontario Energy Board.
Rumina is very active and engaged in promoting careers in STEM, especially for young women.As a wife and a mother of two, Rumina is familiar with the challenges women face in balancingtheir many roles. After joining the CNSC as President and CEO, Rumina launched a Women in
STEM Initiative to support career development at the CNSC and is working at an international level to bring gender equity to the nuclear sector by mentoring young woman.
Rumina was one of the founding members of Canada’s Women in Science and Engineering, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Institute for Women in Engineering and Science. Rumina is one of 150 Canadian women whose stories are compiled in Your Turn, a book published to mark Canada’s 150th anniversary and inspire the next generation of women leaders.
Rumina is the founding member of Focus Humanitarian Assistance Canada, an internationally recognized humanitarian assistance agency and served for four years as the Aga Khan Foundation Canada’s City Chair for Toronto for the World Partnership Events, Canada’s largest annual event dedicated to increasing awareness and raising funds to fight global poverty.
Celebrated as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women, Charlie Wall-Andrews is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, creative industries leader, and lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University. As Executive Director of SOCAN Foundation, she established many programs that prepare artists to turn their talent into sustainable careers.
She has a BA in music and an MA in Ethnomusicology from York University, an MBA from Ivey Business School and is currently completing her Management Ph.D. at Ted Rogers School of Management. She is on the Board of Directors of the Canada Council for the Arts and is the Vice-Chair of Music Canada’s Advisory Council. In 2019, she was appointed a global Legacy Fellow for the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship.
Her research explores various subjects including: entrepreneurship ecosystems, innovation in the creative industries, critical study of diversity and leadership in organizations and most recently received a Mitacs Award to study the enablers, barriers and challenges of Canada’s music industry with the Diversity Institute.
And, she is an Associate Composer at the Candian Music Centre where she writes avant-garde and instrumental music.
Ruediger Willenberg is a teaching stream professor of Information Technology Engineering at his alma mater, Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Ruedi was a Massey Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2014 while pursuing a PhD at UofT’s Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He served as Lionel Massey Fund co-chair from 2010 to 2011 and was awarded the Moira Whalon Prize for contributions to the College spirit in 2011. Ruediger is a proud feminist-in-training who strives to reduce his frequent outbursts of Mansplaining. He serves on his university’s gender equity committee and supports the “Traumberuf Professorin” program, which mentors female PhD students and graduates to increase the ratio of female professors in applied sciences. He also loves to enlighten his students about the invaluable contributions that women like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton have made to computing. For the last 6 months, Ruedi has been on sabbatical and served as a Senior Resident at Massey. He has worked with our brilliant college printer Kit MacNeil on 3D-printing new as well as replacement type to use with the bibliography room’s printing presses, resulting among other things in the Junior Fellow High Table keepsake. He will continue this project remotely from Germany and during extended summer visits that conveniently overlap with TIFF. As further means of procrastination, Ruedi likes to play the guitar or spend too much time at Massey meals, telling Junior Fellows about the hundreds of classic movies they absolutely need to see.
