Author Biographies

Dr. Salima Meherali is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta. Her research interests are in migration and global maternal, child, and adolescent health. As a principal investigator, she has been involved in community-based participatory action research projects that actively engage with women and adolescents to enhance their healthcare decision-making and improve health and well-being. Dr. Salima Meherali has a special interest in research synthesis, scaling up evidence-based interventions in community settings, and knowledge translation research.
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Simone Lebeuf is an Adolescent Medicine Pediatrician at the Stollery Children’s Hospital and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Alberta. She completed her undergraduate medical training and pediatric residency at the University of Calgary, and her subspecialty training in Adolescent Medicine at the University of Toronto. She has established an academic Adolescent Medicine presence at Stollery Children’s Hospital. Her clinical areas of interest include transition to adult care, sexual health, adolescent-led families, and transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. Her academic interests focus on pregnant and parenting youth and clinician health and wellbeing.
Sarah Munro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington School of Public Health and a Scientist with the Centre for Advancing Health Outcomes, and Co-Director of the Contraception and Abortion Research Team. Before joining UW in 2024, she was Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the University of British Columbia. She completed her BA (Hon) and MA in the UBC Department of English, focusing on public health communication. She then pursued a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC (2012-2016) focused on knowledge translation (KT). She completed a joint Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016-2019) in implementation science with the UBC Department of Family Practice and Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Her fellowships investigated the factors influencing the implementation of family planning innovations in primary care. In 2019 she began her faculty position at UBC. Using qualitative and knowledge translation methods, she investigates the factors that influence the implementation of evidence-based innovations in health services and systems, with a focus on improving equity and access to sexual and reproductive health care for underserved populations. Her areas of research expertise include contraception, abortion, shared decision-making, knowledge translation, and implementation science.
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Ashley Vandermorris is a Staff Paediatrician in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and a member of the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health. She completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University, her medical degree at Harvard Medical School, a residency in pediatrics and fellowships in Adolescent Medicine and Global Child Health at SickKids, and an MSc in Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. She is also an Assistant Professor of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto. As an Adolescent Medicine physician, she is committed to championing the ideals of accessibility, advocacy, equity, justice, and collaboration as the fundamental tenets that will enable improved health outcomes for youth. Clinically, she works in the Transgender Youth Clinic and the Young Families Programs within the Division of Adolescent Medicine, where her clinical focus is on supporting youth navigating the intersections of structural and social determinants of health to achieve healthy developmental trajectories.
Hasina Samji is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and a Senior Scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. She received her doctorate in infectious disease epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she also completed her MSc. Subsequently, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship, awarded by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, at the BC Centre for Disease Control. She joined the Faculty of Health Sciences at SFU as an Assistant Professor in 2017. She has expertise in the design and implementation of observational cohort studies and the analysis of administrative health data. She studies healthcare access for underserved populations, including those with HIV, who use drugs, and children and youth. She is a Research Associate at the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addictions (CARMHA) and has spearheaded research to estimate the prevalence of mental disorders in BC to inform health services planning for the BC Ministry of Health. She is the Principal Investigator for the Youth Development Instrument (YDI). She received a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Association for HIV Research in 2011, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2015, and a Mowafaghian Child Health Award from the Faculty of Health Sciences in 2020.
Wendy V. Norman is a Professor in the Department of Family Practice, and an associate member in both the School of Population and Public Health, and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research interests include family planning health services, health professional education, and population health. She brings this multidisciplinary expertise into her role as the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Family Planning Innovation (2024-2032) and formerly as the  Public Health Agency of Canada Chair fo research on family planning health equity interventions (2014-2024). She was awarded the prestigious Darroch Award in sexual and reproductive health research in 2015 by the New York-based Guttmacher Institute. The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada awarded her their inaugural National Mentorship Award in 2020, and the Canadian Government recognized her in 2021 as a “Woman of Impact”.
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