2023 IDRC International Doctoral Research Awards recipients

Omolola Alade is a PhD candidate at McMaster University. In her doctoral project, she is employing a mixed methods approach to centre women’s voices and African perspectives at the heart of intimate partner violence prevention and response among healthcare professionals in resource constrained settings. She will use typologies of help-seeking for intimate partner violence among women, a qualitative evidence synthesis and a qualitative descriptive study to explore community-informed considerations for making health care centres viable sources of help for intimate partner violence in a community in Southwestern Nigeria.

Jeremy Allen is a PhD student at the the University of British Columbia. His research uses remote sensing and GIS to examine the impacts of armed conflict on agriculture and forests in eastern Afghanistan and Tajikistan. His work develops methods to identify conflict-driven changes to forest cover and the crop types of smallholdings. Understanding these agricultural dynamics is vital for improving food security outcomes. The results from this research will contribute to the growing academic discussion on the environmental dimensions of armed conflict, and together with local collaborators, inform development and restoration work currently underway in the region.

Daniel Amoak is a PhD candidate at Western University. Using spatial and community-led approaches, Daniel’s research looks to explore the role of social networks and seed security in enhancing the food security, climate change resilience and health outcomes of smallholder farmers in Malawi. His research aims to comprehend the impact of informal networks on social and spatial access to seeds in two distinct sites exposed to recurring environmental shocks and the resulting gendered implications. This research will produce local-level insights into actionable policies and contribute to an equitable, inclusive and sustainable food system in agrarian regions, which is integral to achieving the sustainable development goals in agrarian regions. 

Otuto Amarauche Chukwu is undertaking his doctoral studies in health policy at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. He is a licensed pharmacist, award-winning scholar and social impact innovator with over a decade’s experience in health systems strengthening and policy research in sub-Saharan Africa. His PhD research is on cancer control policy where he is specifically exploring strategies to expand access to cancer control services in low- and middle-income countries.  

He has international development experience, having worked with organizations like UNICEF, WHO and the United States Pharmacopeia. He has won several international research grants and awards, and has published in various areas of policy, health systems strengthening and reform. He is a Vanier Scholar, and a Junior Fellow at Massey College.

Hillary Birch is a PhD candidate at York University. Her research explores how projects of global health intersect with processes of urbanization, shaping flows of water in a city and changing its quality. Her doctoral project focuses on the complexities and contradictions of efforts by global health actors to improve water quality in Lusaka, Zambia, where rapid urbanization and climate change leave many urban residents facing serious health consequences associated with poor sanitary conditions. Her research aims to inform how global health projects in water and sanitation can contribute to more sustainable urban futures by better supporting disease outbreak preparedness and the delivery of good quality drinking water for all.

Renee Davy is a PhD student at McGill University. Her doctoral research explores how marginalized youth’s engagement with community writing and grassroots publishing can shape their social and academic identities. Using a participatory action research approach, her work aims to challenge the deficit discourse surrounding marginalized youth and their language and literacy development. Her project will highlight how writing can be taught in a way that promotes collaboration and writing as social action. Her project will also highlight how marginalized youth can use writing to challenge circulating discourses that frame them as failures, troublemakers and as unable to effect social change. 

Ria Jhoanna Ducusin is a PhD candidate at York University. Her doctoral research in geography examines how ecological conditions and socio-political relations create and shape flooding in coastal cities, and the ways in which intersectional axes of gender and class shape differential impacts of flood and food system risks. Informed by a political economy of local urbanization and feminist political ecology scholarship, her research aims to strengthen our understanding of the causes, experiences and mitigation of flood disasters in rapidly urbanizing and industrializing coastal cities in the Philippines, with a case study in Bacoor City, Cavite. 

Marie Goretti Uwayezu is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research will assess breast cancer screening practices among women living in Rwanda. The study will focus on the utilization of common breast cancer screening modalities available at the population level in Rwanda and women’s levels of awareness and health beliefs about both breast cancer and screening. Additionally, the study will investigate the calls to action regarding breast cancer screening that are received by women in Rwanda. Subsequently, Uwayezu will seek to understand the association between these determinants and the utilization of breast cancer screening modalities among women in Rwanda, aiming to provide appropriate recommendations for action.

Amber Hussain is a PhD student at the University of Alberta in nursing science. Her research will explore the experiences, especially related to mental health, of teen mothers in Pakistan. Becoming a mom as a teen brings significant life changes, such as transitioning into adulthood, marriage, and parenting, impacting both the mother and the baby. The challenge of being a teen mother can increase the chances of developing mental health issues. With the aim to develop supports and tools for teen mothers, Amber will interview teen mothers to understand their experiences and suggest ways to improve their mental health. The findings will allow teens to talk about their experiences and needs and suggest programs and police policies to improve their mental health in Pakistan and other countries.  

Arun Jentrick, a PhD candidate at Western University, focuses on the challenges confronted by women-headed households (WHHs) in Sri Lanka amidst the 30-year internal ethnic conflict. His research aims to: 1) identify challenges and opportunities for Sinhalese, Muslim, and Tamil WHHs; 2) compare challenges across communities; and 3) identify social, economic policies, legal interventions and shifts in social attitudes that might benefit WHHs in all three communities. Arun’s project stems from his experience as a development practitioner, noting the dearth of empirical data on WHHs in Sri Lanka. His findings will contribute to understanding how to address challenges and optimize opportunities faced by WHHs in Sri Lanka as well as in post-conflict settings around the world and inform Canadian foreign policy and humanitarian assistance. 

Kunal Mishra is a PhD student at the department of integrated studies in education at McGill University. His research interests lie in exploring how agentic thinking and decision making are developed using curricular interventions. His doctoral project examines how students use their agency to manage their goals, shape their perceptions and negotiate to find their voice in society.  

Positioned at the intersection of academia and developmental practice, his work also pushes the binaries of traditional research by adopting participatory frameworks and longitudinal research designs to understand dynamic impacts that entrepreneurship and 21st century curricula have on students. He collaborates with stakeholders across strategic, design and pedagogical portfolios to curate meaningful data–based stories from his research. Through his work with young people, he aims to create and amplify more holistic and enabling spaces in which youth can thrive.  

Serge Nyirinkwaya is a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary. Informed by narrative practice research, his doctoral studies focus on childhood experiences of intimate partner violence (CEIPV) through critical pedagogy, African storytelling and resilience lenses. The aim is to revisit with young people (YP) their CEIPV through participatory and non-retraumatizing storytelling circles in which YP are positioned as experts and archivists of their local knowledges. This will be achieved through a participatory digital archiving methodology to amplify YP’s voices to share their alternative stories and responses to CEIPV in ways that are important to them. The results will help open conversations about CEIPV in Rwanda and improve health policy and practice and will enable YP to contribute to their peers’ mental health. 

Ijeoma Okedo-Alex, a doctoral student at the school of population and public health at the University of British Columbia brings over 12 years of experience as a dedicated public health physician in Nigeria. She is committed to primary healthcare, disease prevention and addressing health inequities. Post-residency, she became a fellow of the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria. Ijeoma’s research interests span health policy, systems strengthening and human resources for health. Demonstrating a dedication to research excellence, she has successfully managed diverse international and local grants, showcasing her expertise through numerous publications. Her compelling PhD research, born from personal and shared experiences with violence against health workers, underscores her unwavering commitment to ensuring the safety of healthcare workers.  

Brianne (Brie) O’Sullivan is a PhD candidate at Western University studying the use of innovative medical delivery drone technology in three sub-Saharan African countries: Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar. In 2022, Brie was selected as the Government of Canada’s youth delegate to the World Health Organization and attended the 76th World Health Assembly in Geneva. Following this role, Brie was hired by Canada’s Office of International Affairs for the Health Portfolio as a policy analyst on the WHO team and the lead analyst on youth engagement strategies. Brie is also a medical drone research consultant and has worked on several projects implementing this technology within northern Canadian settings, including Moose Cree First Nation in northern Ontario.  

Tamara Pressman is a PhD candidate at McGill University. In direct response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal on the empowerment of girls and women, her research seeks to understand the mechanisms which drive household bargaining between spouses and influence the backlash women experience in attempting to achieve higher levels of empowerment within (and outside) the home. Working with participants in Lima, Peru, her project will test her theoretical model of household bargaining using lab-in-the-field experiments. The results of this research will not only shed light on how gender norms affect the effectiveness of empowerment programs but will guide new policy recommendations aimed at empowering women in developing countries while reducing the backlash they face during this process. 

Natalia Ruiz Cuartas is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph.  She is from Colombia and has experience working with women from rural communities, people with disabilities, the 2SLGBTQIA+ population and victims of the armed conflict in her country.  

Her doctoral research investigates the intersection between gender equality and agricultural science where she uses participatory action research to explore how agricultural research can be more gender-inclusive and what avenues exist for women to become innovation and research leaders in agricultural science in Cuba. Her study will contribute to understanding the impact of gender-inclusive Cuban policies on gender norms and institutional structures and enhance the ability to build other gender-inclusive capacities to link innovation, research and gender equality. 

Aarushie Sharma is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at York University. She previously worked as an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Hindu College, University of Delhi. Her PhD research focuses on the ethnographic study of toilet-politics and the infrastructure of sewage in Delhi, India. It aims to study how relations of inequality – such as on the lines of caste, class and gender – get (re)produced by historically contingent sewage infrastructures. It also aims to examine what the everyday management of sewage tells us about the working of the municipal state in urban India. Her previous work on the topic has appeared in Economic & Political Weekly and Conversations in Development Studies. Alongside her doctoral research, she is interested in the study of ethnographic film. At York University, she curates Ethnographic Lens, a seminar series on film and multimodality.  

Robin Sharma is a PhD candidate and member of the Technology, Learning, and Cognition Lab led by Dr. Adam Dubé at McGill University. His areas of work include game-based learning, mathematics education, human computer interaction and user experience. Robin’s expertise in the creation of curricular resources for game-based learning comes from working for non-profits like UNESCO, where he led the “Games for Learning” program at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace (MGIEP). He also collaborated with Ubisoft studios to create the official curriculum guides for the Assassin’s Creed Discovery Tour games. His PhD project aims to study the effectiveness of “narrative” as an instructional feature in theory-based educational games for building geometrical understanding of adolescents. 

Alhassan Siiba is a PhD student at Queen’s University. His research will explore the impacts of climate change and globalization of food systems on diet–related non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries, with specific focus on Ghana. Through a participatory approach, his research will shed light on the ways in which extreme climate events and globalization mechanisms impact smallholder farmers’ ability to produce food, make dietary decisions and avoid diet-related NCDs. Findings from the research will guide initiatives and regulations aimed at strengthening resilient food production practices, healthy eating habits and overall health among vulnerable populations in Ghana and beyond.

Romina Tantaleán-Castañeda is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. She is conducting her doctoral research in collaboration with the Federation of Indigenous Women of Atalaya Province (FEMIPA) in the Peruvian Central East Amazon. The study aims to explore ways to conceptualize and enforce the rights of mother nature from a legal pluralist approach based on Indigenous knowledge systems. The research will prioritize, center and amplify the knowledge, perspectives and voices of Indigenous women’s leaders and defenders on socio-environmental, territorial and climate justice issues, with the goal of understanding how they navigate, resist and Indigenize these issues. The study will use mixed methods and feminist participatory action research (FPAR) that is culturally and contextually place-based, informed by Indigenous and decolonial methodologies. 

Lorenzo Vargas is a PhD candidate at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research explores the role that community radio plays in the development of more inclusive environmental policies in local communities in the Amazon regions of Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador. The result of this research will help to highlight the importance of communication issues in allowing those most affected by the climate crisis – such as Indigenous communities and vulnerable people with limited access to media but holders of invaluable traditional ecological knowledge – to be seen, heard and acknowledged by the broader public and policymakers. These learnings will be useful to civil society and policymakers working to develop more effective, locally led and innovative policy response to urgent environmental issues.  

Snigdha Velugu is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. Her research, rooted in the lived experiences of menstruators, aims to uncover the influence of sociocultural, political, economic, household power dynamics, gender roles and physical environment on menstrual experiences in Hyderabad’s slums. Guided by biopolitics and poststructuralist feminism, she will employ a multi-method critical qualitative study design incorporating elements of participatory and arts-based methodologies into critical ethnography such as complete-the-story, a participatory interview strategy and digital storytelling. The findings from her study will: (1) highlight the sociocultural, socio-political and geographical factors affecting menstruator’s health and their bodily autonomy and agency; and (2) guide the transformation of menstrual hygiene management strategies championed by India’s government, NGOs and academics, ensuring they cater to the contextual needs of menstruators when crafting policies and programs.

Navya Vikraman Nair is a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, passionately exploring the intricate balance between environmental sustainability and community livelihoods. Her research delves into the dynamic ecosystems of Chilika Lagoon, India. With a focus on the nexus between blue carbon environments and water quality, her work aims to unravel the symbiotic relationships that underpin the viability of small-scale fisheries. Through interdisciplinary approaches, her goal is to offer insights that not only push the boundaries of our comprehension of coastal wetland dynamics but also present sustainable solutions to maintain the delicate balance between environmental conservation and the welfare of local communities. The study emphasizes the significance of well-informed environmental management strategies, aiming enhance ecosystems and empower local communities reliant on coastal resources. 

Sacha Williams is a Jean Martin Laberge global pediatric surgery fellow and PhD candidate at McGill University. Her research examines the impact of gender on pediatric surgical care in Africa, via a mixed methods approach. She is exploring the influence of social and structural barriers on equitable surgical access and outcomes for African children. Additionally, in collaboration with local stakeholders, she will develop a comprehensive, sustainable mitigation plan. Sacha has an MD, MPH in maternal and child health and MS in biotechnology. She is strongly committed to health equity, social justice and serving marginalized communities. 

Mariam Yamout is a PhD student at the University of Calgary. Mariam has been researching learners’ conceptual understanding of science concepts (e.g., heat) and the changes they undergo as learners gain expertise, employing language and gesture analyses. Her PhD dissertation expands this area of research by conducting cross-cultural research that explores similarities and differences in how scientists and learners in Canada and Lebanon understand climate change. This is an important area to explore because most of the research on climate change has been conducted in the Global North while the Global South is the most affected. The study uses constant comparative methodology for the analyses of participants’ language and gestures to explore possible cross-cultural variation among participants when formulating explanations about climate change.