Luis Aguiar
Affiliate
Dr. Luis Aguiar is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and UBC Okanagan. He seeks to understand and follow how resistance against an emerging post-industrial citizenship is being organized between cleaners and their unions across borders. He has also written on transnationalism and southern European migration, as well as whiteness and racism.
Ute Bültmann
Affiliate
Dr. Ute Bültmann is Professor of Work and Health in the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. She was a PWHS visiting scientist in 2019, co-supervised and hosted PWHS student Anita Minh for two years of her PhD studies, and is currently a co-investigator on our CIHR Work, Immigration, and Disability grant.
Kathleen Deering
Affiliate
Dr. Kathleen Deering (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the UBC, a faculty member at the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity, an Associate Member, Division of Occupational and Environmental Health, with the UBC School of Population and Public Health, a Canadian HIV Trials Network Investigator, and Women’s Health Research Institute Associate Member. Her research interests include community-based research with people who have experienced high levels of lifetime and ongoing trauma and violence; investigating how structural, policy and community interventions can address health and health services access inequities; understanding key aspects of trauma-informed practice, with a focus on aligned peer-based approaches, that can address and disrupt the impacts of trauma, violence and stigma as health services barriers; and methodological issues in health equity research.
Paul Demers
Affiliate
Dr. Paul Demers is Director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre in Ontario and a Professor at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He is internationally recognized for his expertise on the health effects of workplace exposures and sits on many expert panels, including the International Agency for Research on Cancer working groups that evaluated carcinogens such as dusts and fibres, firefighting and formaldehyde. He has extensive research experience and accomplishments, including his leadership of CAREX Canada, a workplace and environmental exposure database.
Jonathan Fan
Affiliate
Dr. Jonathan Fan collaborates on a systematic review and meta analyses of occupational asbestos exposure and the risk of lung cancer. He is a former PWHS staff research scientist. He holds a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and an MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Esther Maas
Affiliate
Dr. Esther Maas is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Science at VU University in Amsterdam. As a PWHS postdoctoral fellow she worked on a program of research on gender and the evaluation of workers’ compensation policies and programs, with a particular focus on identifying effective and cost-effective approaches in facilitating early and sustained return-to-work after work injury. She completed her doctoral research at the VU University in the field of Health Sciences, in which she mainly focused on the cost-effectiveness of radiofrequency denervation for chronic low back pain. Her primary research interests include health technology assessment, economic evaluations, gender and health, and epidemiology, mostly related to musculoskeletal health.
Sonja Senthanar
Affilate
Dr. Sonja Senthanar is an assistant professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Northern BC. As a PWHS postdoctoral fellow she worked on a program of research that examined the return to work outcomes/trajectories, following a work injury or illness, of immigrant workers when compared to Canadian-born workers in BC. Sonja completed her doctoral studies in the School of Public Health & Health Systems at the University of Waterloo in 2019. Her dissertation used a qualitative feminist approach to explore the employment integration experiences of refugee women. Her primary research interests include employment outcomes, gender, and work disability relating primarily to immigrant and refugee populations as well as how these relationships change within the context of new forms of work such as precarious employment.
Laksika Banu Sivaraj
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Email: l.sivaraj@ubc.ca
Dr. Banu Sivaraj is working on a project evaluating the Health and Safety Excellence Program developed by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario. She completed her PhD in Applied Health Research and Evaluation in the College of Behavioral, Social, and Health Sciences at Clemson University, USA in 2023, where her dissertation focused on opioid prescribing among the pediatric population. During her doctoral program she worked as a research assistant in the Department of Public Health Sciences where she conducted quantitative research using 20 years of South Carolina Medicaid Claims data. She also worked as a data manager at the Addiction Medicine Center in one of South Carolina’s main health systems (Prisma Health–Upstate). Her research interests include occupational safety, substance use, substance use treatment and recovery, prescription opioids, and covid-19 vaccination.
France St-Hilaire
Affiliate
Dr. France St-Hilaire is a professor in the Université de Sherbrooke School of Management in Quebec. She was a PWHS visiting scientist in 2018, and remains involved in PWHS projects on early and sustainable RTW in the construction sector and the role of workplace policies and practices in RTW after injury in the health care sector.
Kate Weinberger
Affiliate
Dr. Kate Weinberger is an assistant professor in the UBC School of Population and Public Health, and an environmental epidemiologist with a background in climate science and environmental health. Her research focuses on the links between climate change and human health, especially changes in extreme weather events and aeroallergens. Her recent work examines the health impacts of extreme heat and the effectiveness of strategies to protect public health during extreme heat events.
