ABOUT US

Nominated Principal Investigator – Josephine Pui-Hing Wong
Josephine Pui-Hing Wong, RN, PhD, Professor and Research Chair in Urban Health, has extensive experience in critical public health and urban health promotion, including the development of access and equity policy, public health practice frameworks, and community-based capacity building programs to promote health equity. Her scholarship of teaching focuses on making visible how historical and current structural violence (re)produces ‘preventable’ health disparities. Her program of research focuses on structural determinants of health, social identities, and health practices; migration and social (dis)integration; and HIV, sexual health and mental health in diasporic and transnational communities. She leads multidisciplinary teams to design, implement and evaluate intervention studies on stigma reduction, mental health promotion and collective resilience in the Asian, Black, Latinx and MENA communities in Canada and internationally. Currently, she is leading the evaluation of CHAMPs-In-Action, a 5-year community-based program to reduce HIV stigma and promote HIV championship, and PROTECH, COVID-19 rapid response research to mitigate the negative impacts of racism, psychosocial distress and grief on Asian Canadian communities as well as reducing stress among frontline healthcare providers.

Co-Principal Investigators – Kenneth Fung
Dr. Kenneth P. Fung is a cultural psychiatrist and Clinical Director of the Asian Initiatives in Mental Health (AIM) at Toronto Western Hospital, University Health Network. He is also Professor and the Director of Global Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry at University of Toronto’s the Temberty Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Fung’s research, teaching, and clinical interest include cultural psychiatry, global mental health, and psychotherapy, especially Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), CBT, and mindfulness. He conducts national and international research in stigma, resilience, mental health promotion, and immigrant and refugee mental health. Dr. Fung is the current president of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture (SSPC). He is highly sought after, both nationally and internationally, for his expertise as a trainer, consultant, and researcher in applying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to promote mental health across diverse communities.

Co-Principal Investigators – Mandana Vahabi
Dr. Mandana Vahabi is a Professor at the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and an adjunct scientist at ICES. Dr. Vahabi is a social epidemiologist with expertise in population-based assessment, planning and evaluation in population health programs. Her research and scholarship focus on health equity and social determinants of health among vulnerable populations including immigrants and refugees, in the areas of cancer screening/prevention, mental health and HIV/AIDS.  

Co-Principal Investigators – Ka Tat Tsang
Dr. Ka Tat Tsang is currently a Professor and the Director of the China Project of the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. He also holds the Factor-Inwentash Chair in Social Work in the Global Community. Before moving to Canada in 1989, he taught at the University of Hong Kong. His research program aims at building an integrated knowledge base for social work practice in a globalized environment. Such a knowledge base integrates theory, practice, and research. Dr. Tsang has conducted many research studies and has received research funding from the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and other prestigious funding bodies. He has authored books and book chapters and has published extensively in refereed academic journals. Dr. Tsang’s scholarship is known internationally. He has been invited to deliver lectures and training programs in many countries, including the US, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Korea, Thailand, New Zealand, and Turkey. His work has been introduced to African countries like Algeria, and he is currently developing collaborative work with other countries such as Tanzania and Sierra Leone.  

Co-Principal Investigators – Maurice Poon
Maurice Kwong-Lai Poon is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at York University and Co-chair of the Advisory Research Committee at Asian Community AIDS Services. His current research focuses on gay Asian diasporic identities and politics, the social construction of violence in gay intimate relationships, and HIV/AIDS issues related to Asian men who have sex with men. He is active in the development of human services for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Asian community in Toronto. 

Co-Investigators – Janet Yamada
Janet Yamada  RN, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing.  She completed her Ph.D. in Nursing Science at the University of Toronto and a Postdoctoral fellowship in knowledge translation/implementation science methods at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. Dr. Yamada’s research focuses on theory-informed strategies to improve health care professionals’ practices. 

Co-Investigators – Carla Hilario
Dr. Carla Hilario is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta. Over the past 10 years, she has conducted qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research with youth, including immigrants, refugees, racialized young people, and Indigenous youth. Her current research focuses on health equity and improving youth mental health. 

Co-Investigators – Jenny Liu
Dr. Jenny JW Liu is a Postdoctoral Associate with the MacDonald Franklin OSI Research Centre and an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Schulich School of Medicine, Western University. Dr. Liu is also an elected board member of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture, an international organization devoted to fostering cultural aspects of mental health and illness. Dr. Liu received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). Her background is in the science of stress and resilience. She works with stakeholders to identify the determinants of resilience in different communities and support efforts to promote or build resilience using a number of evidence-informed strategies and approaches. 

Co-Investigators – Nina Xuan
Dr. Xuan (Nina) Ning is an Assistant Professor at Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College. Trained in sociology and humanities, Dr. Ning’s research program focuses on gay men and lesbians’ social well-being and cross-cultural contextualization of mental health promotion interventions, with a special focus on enhancing the well-being of socially and economically marginalized groups. Dr. Ning has established research networks in Canada and Asia. Her expertise and research experiences enable her to play a vital role in probing into Chinese university students’ mental health issues from a sociological perspective and lead qualitative research on this topic.

Co-Investigators – Weijia Tan
Weijia Tan is a PhD Candidate of Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, Canada. She is a Registered Social Worker in Ontario, Canada. Weijia is also a core member of the global R&D team of Strategies & Skills Learning & Development (SSLD) system, and a lecturer of the “100-Person Lecturer Group of Life Education” for Jinan Life Education Base & Jinan No. 2 Funeral Home (formerly Lianhuashan Funeral Home in Jinan City). Weijia is specialized in the areas of hospice, dementia, active ageing, and grief support and empowerment. She also teaches social work practice courses at Factor-Inwentash School of Social Work and serves as a MSW practicum supervisor. Weijia has been participated in chairing several Canadian municipal, provincial, and national projects, and provided training for social work students, teachers, and frontline social workers in Canada and China.

Project Coodinator – Isabella (Silang) Huang
Isabella (Silang) Huang is the research coordinator of the Linking Hearts Canada research team. She has an academic background in Political Science, Philosophy, and Global Studies. She had extensive study and life experience in Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, and Mainland China and engaged with various NGOs and research institutions. Her research interests are in the migrant diaspora, gender, labour, and social movements. With her language fluency in Mandarin and Cantonese, she conducted research on Chinese migrant workers’ communities and how macro-level policies exert influence on individuals and families on a micro-level, culturally, economically, and socially in the Global South and Global North. Her previous ethnographic research on first-generation Chinese migrants and second-generation migrants in China and social movements in Hong Kong allows her to incorporate documentary filmmaking with ethnographic research to explore broader social issues. Also, she is passionate about advocating and promoting social justice and equity in racialized and marginalized communities. She is committed to using qualitative research in advancing the well-being of disadvantaged communities. 

Postdoctoral Fellow – Rui Hou
Dr. Rui Hou is currently a postdoc researcher in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Toronto Metropolitan University. Before joining TMU, Hou was a postdoc fellow in the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Queen’s University in 2020. His current research interests are in sociology of emotions, digital sociology, and surveillance studies. Hou’s articles have appeared in New Media &Society, The China Quarterly, and Surveillance &Society. 

Postdoctoral Fellow – Bishwajit Ghose
Bishwajit is a healthcare researcher and has been involved in data analysis and visualization in health and social sciences for over ten years. Bishwajit did BSc and MPH in nutrition, and PhD in Social Epidemiology, and completed four years of postdoctoral research at the University of Ottawa and Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. During the past six years, Bishwajit has published about 100 articles in the areas of childhood infectious diseases, chronic diseases, maternal and child malnutrition, mental health, lifestyle medicine, social determinants of health and quality of life, and violence against women. Bishwajit has also served as an academic editor for BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth for two years, and currently involved with PLOS ONE and Frontiers in Public Health. Bishwajit’s side interests are big data analysis, graphic designing, and web development. He gives guest lectures on quantitative research methods and data analysis using R, Stata and Python, and write interesting blog articles on analytical techniques on his website infoart.ca and on Medium.

Doctoral Research Assistant – Kedi Zhao
Kedi Zhao is a PhD Candidate at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. He is the member of the global R&D team for the Strategies & Skills Learning & Development (SSLD) system. He is interested in cross-cultural research, particularly through an integrative framework that includes the macro, messo, and micro levels, to understand and explore various cross-cultural issues. Specifically, his research interests employ global knowledge production and exchange in social work and other relevant disciplines, the general acculturation of immigrants and migrants, anti-Asian racism, and immigrants’ and migrants’ understandings of specific cultural factors. In addition, Kedi also teaches relevant courses at the Faculty and participates in several provincial and national research projects in Canada and China.

Website Designer – Shaylee Zhang
Graduated with a computer science degree, Shaylee has been in the web development field for over 15 years. From July, 2020 She works in PROTECH as Web Design & Maintenance Coordinator in charge of site design, maintenance, and traffic monitoring. As technology keeps evolving, Shaylee always stays on top of the latest tech trends. She has a great appetite for learning new things and always being inspired by how advanced technology can change people’s lives. Shaylee also joined a few non-profit organizations and worked as volunteers to help people in need and address various social issues. Her extensive IT skills and community service experience will keep the project moving forward with creative and sound technology solutions.