Faculty award recipients

Alan Shepard Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Employee Award

Kathryn Underwood
School of Early Childhood Studies, Faculty of Community Services

Kathryn Underwood is committed to EDI, works on dismantling ableism and actively advocates for people with disabilities by teaching inclusion in the School of Early Childhood Studies. She contributes to other schools as a past member of the RFA Equity Committee and current member of Access Ryerson, in addition to teaching and research. She uses her privilege to hire and promote underrepresented groups including people with disabilities and Indigenous peoples in her work, both at Ryerson and beyond. She has won a SSHRC grant to conduct a nationwide, longitudinal study on the impact of ableism on families including in Indigenous communities.

Dean's Service Award

Annette Bailey
Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Faculty of Community Services

Annette Bailey has demonstrated exceptional service at all levels of the university. She led development of key milestones in the major curriculum modification of the Ryerson, Centennial, George Brown Collaborative Nursing program. Her leadership and commitment to service in this area is a major feat that spreads across three highly-engaged institutional sites with many external stakeholders. She also serves on many committees such as Academic Standards, Academic Integrity and Senate. What is most impressive is Bailey's capacity to lead in these service roles with unwavering inclusion so that faculty and staff feel appreciated and inspired to be actively involved.

Shelagh McCartney
School of Urban and Regional Planning, Faculty of Community Services

Shelagh McCartney has made an exceptional contribution to service both within Ryerson and in the broader communities of scholarship and practice. Interweaving service, teaching and research to build places and spaces for positive social change has been the hallmark of McCartney's work. The key themes of her service are collaborating to build community in planning, supporting a better School of Urban and Regional Planning, bringing urban design to Ryerson, improving community wellness and mentoring students. All of her service activities, both internal and external to the university, seek to promote collaboration between disciplines, sectors and partners.

President’s Award for Teaching Excellence

Jasna Schwind
Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Faculty of Community Services

Jasna K. Schwind is an exceptional educator and scholar. This commitment is evident in her untiring dedication to positioning students for success through innovative learning and teaching strategies. Her teaching incorporates Narrative Reflective Process, an innovative and creative self-expression approach to teaching-learning that is founded on her extensive research in the area of adult education. She is passionate about enriching the educational experience of students through continuously developing, implementing and evaluating innovative teaching-learning strategies, including mindfulness, to support students' mental health and wellbeing. Schwind inspires students and colleagues alike to achieve professional greatness.

Provost’s Experiential Teaching Award

Judy Finlay
School of Child and Youth Care, Faculty of Community Services

Judy Finlay's approach to experiential learning has featured a wide range of intensive learning engagements that include dozens of students from across the University traveling to northern Indigenous communities in response to suicide crises; national child and youth rights events that allow students to engage with young people directly pursuant to a range of major social-economic and environmental issues; and in-class pedagogies enriched by talking circles, professional simulation, and flipped classrooms. Finlay is committed to a pedagogic approach based on relational practices, in which every student matters and every wisdom is acknowledged.

YSGS Outstanding Contribution to Graduate Education Award

Suzanne Fredericks
Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Faculty of Community Services

Suzanne Fredericks is a professor and graduate program director in the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing. As a professor, she regularly supports graduate student engagement in professional meetings, conference attendance and collaboration on scholarly and research projects. For example, Fredericks launched a student engagement initiative titled Maximizing Your Career Success: a series of lunch-and-learn sessions, live actor simulations and panel discussions focussing on career advancement. Fredericks has led the creation of a PhD in Urban Health program. If successful, this program will provide rigorous methodological and theoretical education to graduate students in the field of Urban Health.

Dean's Teaching Awards - Faculty (RFA)

Julian Hasford
School of Child and Youth Care, Faculty of Community Services

Julian Hasford is a sincere, humorous and exceptionally talented teacher. He brings to class an openness to explore whatever themes are engaging for students. He has developed experiential learning opportunities through site visits to community partners and he utilizes his relationships with marginalized communities to ensure students have access to speakers representing a wide range of social and identity locations. Hasford brings his identity, his experiences in other countries and his story of immigration to the classroom. Beyond the classroom, Hasford provides students, including emerging Black scholars, with guidance and coaching that will make a difference to the Academy as a whole.

Dean's Teaching Awards - Contract Lecturers (CUPE 1 and 2)

Karen Arthurton
School of Social Work, Faculty of Community Services

Karen Arthurton is an arts-based social work educator, innovating the use of music, storytelling and spoken word in her pedagogy. Social work students have taken note. Over the years, Karen has honed her craft, creating brave, creative, collaborative and powerful spaces in and out of the classroom. She has also invested in relationality, building deep connections with colleagues, students and staff that last. Her pedagogy is a sight to behold, her impact on students is personal and political and she is one of the primary reasons social work undergraduate education is in good hands at Ryerson.

Lisa Marie Pena-Sabanal
School of Child and Youth Care, Faculty of Community Services

Lisa Pena Sabanal is an extraordinary contract lecturer who not only inspires her students, but who also has advanced the School of Child and Youth Care through her never-ending efforts to contribute to its goals and ambitions. She has conquered high ropes courses to teach students courage and vulnerability, and she has organized international placement trips to help students think beyond their local context. She has developed a range of courses, taught students about intersectionality and models the values of our profession—courage, humility and determination to make a difference.

Collaborative Research Award

Josephine Wong
Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Faculty of Community Services

Josephine Pui-Hing Wong is a professor at the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing. Her research program focuses on gender, migration, HIV, mental health and stigma. She uses a community empowerment and capacity-building approach to engage affected communities in designing and implementing groundbreaking studies that promote cross-sectoral collaboration between leaders from the faith, media and social justice sectors, and people living with HIV or mental illness. She is currently leading two team grants, funded by CIHR, to reduce HIV vulnerabilities and mental illness stigma, which will have policy and practice implications at the provincial, national and international levels.

Early Research Career Excellence Award

Shelagh McCartney
School of Urban and Regional Planning, Faculty of Community Services

Shelagh McCartney is an exceptional early researcher with 40 recognitions for design, teaching and professional accomplishments. McCartney's groundbreaking work focuses on built outcomes, occupant/environment relationships and the social implications of housing systems with relevance to Indigenous and other marginalized communities in Ontario and globally. She leads and hold several grants, including SSHRC Partnership Development and Insight Development that meet local needs through creating innovative governance, management and design solutions. Guided by First Nations partners, in her SSHRC-funded review of literature, McCartney examined the development of housing metrics in Canada and their compatibility with values among Mid-Canada Corridor First Nations.

Dean's Scholarly, Research and Creative Activity Award

Thomas Tenkate
School of Occupational and Public Health, Faculty of Community Services

Throughout his career, Thomas Tenkate has been an active researcher with a focus on assessing human health risks from exposure to environmental hazards. This research activity is illustrated by a total of 290 SRC outputs and nearly $5M in funding for research/projects. Since coming to Ryerson in 2011, Tenkate has been a very productive researcher with 124 SRC outputs and has received over $3.4M in funding for research/projects (with over $1.3M as principal investigator). A distinctive feature of Tenkate's approach to research is collaboration, with all of his projects involving multidisciplinary and multi-organizational teams.

Ian Young
School of Occupational and Public Health, Faculty of Community Services

Ian Young is an early-career researcher with an exceptional publication record and research productivity. His research aims to improve important public health outcomes, specifically how to reduce the burden of food-borne, water-borne and vector-borne disease. Since joining Ryerson in 2016, he has published 21 peer-reviewed journal articles (with eight as lead author) and 23 conference proceedings (with seven as lead author), delivered seven knowledge translation presentations and received nine grants (with eight as PI). He has a strong commitment to student mentorship, with involvement on four graduate student advisory committees and supervision of four to seven undergraduate research projects each year.