The EDID Committee is led by seven network members serving a 12-month term (March 2022-2023), who provide direction, support, and act as the main advisory body for OMNI-RÉUNIS with the central aim of strengthening and further incorporating concepts of equity, diversity, inclusivity, and decolonization into the OMNI-RÉUNIS’ learning, working environment, network-wide activities, practices, and policies.
Membership
Term: 2022-2023
Dr. Zahid Butt
University of Waterloo
Dr. Zahid Butt is a physician and infectious disease epidemiologist with over 15 years of public health experience. He is an Assistant professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. His research applies a ‘syndemic’ framework to examine inter-relationships between epidemics of infectious diseases, social disparities, co-morbidities, and substance use, using epidemiological, statistical, spatial and machine learning methods. His other areas of interest include digital public health, global health, spatial epidemiology, big data analytics, and public health informatics. Dr. Butt is an associate editor for BMC Public Health and section editor in chief of infectious disease epidemiology section at IJERPH.
Dr. Amy Hurford
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Dr. Hurford is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Biology and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Hurfords’ research is in theoretical ecology, evolution and epidemiology (including COVID-19). Dr. Hurford is the chair of the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Membership Committee for the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society.
Dr. Hanna Jankowski
York University
Dr. Hanna Jankowski is a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at York University. Dr. Jankowski’s main research interests are in nonparametric and semi-parametric statistics. A considerable amount of her recent work is in shape-constrained maximum likelihood estimation. The key idea behind this approach is to strike a balance between parametric methods and purely nonparametric methods by specifying a shape (e.g. convexity) of the function of interest. Dr. Jankowski is also interested in applied and collaborative work and some recent/current projects include clustering of the RNA sequences with applications to disease modelling as well as parameter estimation in mathematical biology.
Dr. Iain Moyles
York University
Dr. Iain Moyles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the Faculty of Science at York University. His research interests are in mathematical modelling, computation, and analysis for interdisciplinary problems. He has published papers on a variety of topics including lithium-ion batteries, sugar processing, nutrient transport in soil, pattern formation, and disease transmission. Dr. Moyles has received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland, the Irish Research Council, and in 2018 was a Charlemont scholar funded through the Royal Irish Academy. He is a member of the Canadian Center for Disease Modelling.
Dr. Jingjing Wu
University of Calgary
Dr. Wu received her B.Sc. in Computational Mathematics and Applied Software from Minzu University of China (1999), M.Sc. in Probability from Beijing Normal University (2002), and Ph.D. in Statistics from University of Alberta (2008). Her PhD thesis was awarded the Pierre-Robillard Award by SSC (Statistical Society of Canada) as the best doctoral thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian University in 2007. She joined University of Calgary in 2007 as an Assistant Professor in Statistics/Biostatistics, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013 and to Professor in 2020. Dr. Wu has served as the Associate Head – Research and took the role of Associate Head – Graduate and Graduate Program Director since 2020, at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Dr. Wu holds Discovery Grants from NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) since 2008. Dr. Wu has published about 40 research papers and supervised over 35 graduates and postdoctoral fellows. Her research interests include minimum distance estimation, statistical inferences for semiparametric models, asymptotic efficiency and robustness, mixture models, survival analysis, classification, feature selection, statistical genetics, etc.
Dr. Svetlana Yanushkevich
University of Calgary
Dr. Yanushkevich directs the Biometric Technologies Laboratory, the only research facility dedicated to biometric system design in Canada. She is a Chair of the Biometric Taskforce in the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. With her team, she is developing novel decision support and risk assessment strategies based on machine reasoning, with applications to biometric-enabled access control (risk assessment of misidentification) and healthcare monitoring systems (gait abnormalities detection, action/activity recognition, face attribute analysis).
Natasha Ketter
York University
Natasha Ketter is the Program Manager of OMNI-RÉUNIS based at York University. She is an impact-driven professional with international experience in global project management and strategic nonprofit communications, working primarily for non-government organizations in Canada, across Africa and Asia on children’s, gender, and health rights. She holds a Master of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership (MPNL) degree from the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, and an Honours Bachelor of Social Sciences in International Development and Globalization from the University of Ottawa.