Advisory Board
Erin Stern
Honorary Assistant Professor and Associate Professor
Dr. Erin Stern is an Honorary Assistant Professor with the Gender, Violence and Health Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an Honorary Associate Professor with the University of Cape Town. She was the study coordinator and lead qualitative researcher of the evaluation of the Indashyikirwa intimate partner violence prevention programme in Rwanda, as part of the What Works to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls Programme. Her background is in qualitative research and uptake, with expertise in prevention of gender-based violence and gender transformative programming evaluation. She has extensive experience conducting research for programme formation and evaluation for various organisations, including UNDP, UN Women, CARE International, Promundo, Oak Foundation, Sonke Gender Justice, KMG Ethiopia, and AIDS-Free World. Erin is a Senior Associate with the Prevention Collaborative.
Joy Schinazi
MA, MPH, Research and Planning Officer
Joy Schinazi holds an MA in Developmental Psychology from McGill University and a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Family and Community Health with a specialization in Maternal and Child Health from Harvard University. She has worked for over 10 years as a Research and Planning Officer in the Quebec Public Health Network. Her areas of expertise include strategic planning, knowledge translation and programme development and evaluation, with an emphasis on supporting marginalized communities. Joy is currently the Communications and Knowledge Transfer Advisor for CoVivre, an accelerator programme whose goal is to reduce health and socioeconomic disparities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Quebec.
Rachel Deutsch
Social Worker
Rachel Deutsch has worked for over a fifteen in social work and program coordination particularly with urban Indigenous peoples around trauma, family violence, addictions, the justice system, and homelessness. Most recently she was the interim director of The First
Peoples Justice Center of Montreal assisting Indigenous people in and out of the prison system and previously was the manager of the Cabot Square Project. She has a Master of Social Work and a Master of Arts in geography. She is a mother of two young children
Fanny Hersson-Edery
MDCM.CFPC. Family Physician.
Practices Family Medicine Obstetrics at the Jewish General Hospital. She was fortunate to be part of La Maison Bleue for 13 years where she worked in close collaboration with midwives, nurses, social workers and patients on shared care models and group prenatal care. She is currently involved in research interests on the birth experience and accompaniment in labour in women who are refugee or asylum seekers. She has been a teacher of medical students and Family Medicine residents at McGill for over 20 years and is currently the program director of the Family Medicine Postgraduate Residency Program at McGill University. She is the mother of 4 boys.
Zoua M. Vang
Associate Professor and Associate Investigator
Zoua M. Vang is an Associate Professor of Sociology and William Dawson Scholar at McGill, and Associate Investigator of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC). Reflecting her interdisciplinary scholarship, Zoua is also an Associate Member of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, and the Institute for Health & Social Policy at McGill University.
Zoua is the founding Director of the Indigenous Maternal Infant Health & Wellbeing (IMIHW) Lab where she has been working in partnership with Indigenous communities in Quebec on projects related to perinatal health, cultural safety, and racism/discrimination as social determinants of women’s health and wellness. Her research in the area of immigrant and refugee perinatal health explores the impact of gender inequality, race/ethnicity, and pre-migration factors (e.g., exposure to trauma) on post-migration maternal and infant morbidity and mortality.
Having gone through a medically high-risk pregnancy (and the associated challenges of raising a VLBW child), Zoua is passionate about improving pregnancy health, birth outcomes, and cultural safety for underserved BIPOC women and their families.