Research Fellows

Dr. Flora I. Matheson, PhD, is a medical sociologist specializing in gender inequities in mental illness, addictions and physical health, particularly among marginalized populations. She is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and a research scientist at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health (CRICH) and the Keenan Research Centre of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, both at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. She is also an affiliated scientist in the Mental Health and Addictions Program at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, and recognized as a member of Canadian Addictions Researchers.

Dr. Matheson's research has shown that neighbourhood stress is associated with gender-based health inequalities in obesity, depression, hypertension, drinking behaviour, poor self-reported health, and youth smoking. She is also actively engaged in research on the co-occurrence of mental illness and chronic health conditions among men and women in Ontario; problem gambling and illicit drug use among men and women in Toronto; and the experiences of women offenders in Canada, including substance abuse and re-integration.

For CRUNCH, Dr. Matheson is leading the development of an urban marginalization index for Ontario (sponsored by PHIRN) and is assisting with analytical, sampling and study design issues in the GTA West and Regent Park studies.

Dr. Sejal Patel, PhD, is an assistant professor in Ryerson University's School of Early Childhood Education, in the Faculty of Community Services. She trained in developmental psychology and education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) and held a CIHR Strategic Training post-doctoral fellowship and Peterborough K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation fellowship at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health (CRICH) at St. Michael's Hospital. Her program of research investigates the effects of (1) innovation in service provision and education, and (2) innovation in the designed environment, on inequities in healthy child development.

Sejal leads two primary projects where she collaborates with Dr. James Dunn. First is a population health intervention study examining the effects of school and neighbourhood redesign on children's developmental health in Regent Park, in collaboration with Dr. Patricia O'Campo at CRICH and others. The second collaboration is a population-based study of the effects of early childhood service integration on children's developmental health, in collaboration with Dr. Carl Corter at the Institute of Child Study at OISE/UT. 
 
Sejal’s professional goals include conducting intervention research with marginalized populations to help reduce inner city health disparities, collaborating with community partners and engaging in knowledge translation to help inform public policy.

Dr. Ketan Shankardass, PhD, is an assistant professor in Wilfred Laurier's Health Sciences Program, Faculty of Science. He studied Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Toronto and received a research doctorate in Epidemiology from the University of Southern California in 2008. Before joining the faculty at Wilfred Laurier, Ketan was a research associate at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health (CRICH) at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, where he held a Peterborough K.M. Hunter Foundation post-doctoral fellowship award.

Dr. Shankardass's research contributes to a better understanding of how interventions can help reduce inequities in health. He is particularly interested in how neighbourhoods are experienced as stressful or resourceful, depending on the characteristics of their built, natural and social environments.

At CRUNCH, Dr. Shankardass is working on the Hamilton Neighbourhoods project, exploring how air quality improvements and other neighbourhood changes help explain why “readiness to learn” test scores in pre-school children living in the largely industrial neighbourhoods of North Hamilton improved over the last eight years, while these scores appeared to stay flat or actually worsen in other parts of Hamilton.

Happily, Dr. Shankardass's work with CRUNCH has brought him back to Hamilton; he grew up in the valley town of Dundas and attended McMaster University for his undergraduate studies.