Team

Meghan Winters (pronouns: she/her) is a CIHR/PHAC Applied Public Health Chair (Gender and Sex in Healthy Cities) and a Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She leads the Cities, Health, and Active Transportation Research Lab, where with a wonderful team of trainees and staff she leads a responsive research program looking at how city policies, plans, and infrastructure can support healthy and safe transportation, with equity front of mind. She is happiest when working in close collaboration with cities and stakeholders to conduct research and create tools that address real-world challenges.

M.S. Cloutier is a Professor at l’Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique and director of the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société. Her expertise in health geography and urban studies supports her research interests on walkability in urban areas, including risks faced by the most vulnerable pedestrians (children, older adults), and road safety in general. She leads the Pedestrian and Urban Space Laboratory (LAPS) and co-leads the Pedestrian Smart City Laboratory (VIP, funded by the CFI-Leaders fund). Her research is supported by Canadian (CIHR, SSHRC) and Quebec (FRQSC, actions concertées) funding agencies and she collaborates with various actors in the public and private sector as well as with researchers in Quebec, Canada, and France.

Dr. Sara Kirk is a Professor of Health Promotion and Scientific Director of the Healthy Populations Institute, at Dalhousie University. Her research explores the design of supportive environments for chronic disease prevention, using a ‘socio-ecological’ approach that considers how individual behaviours are influenced by other broader factors, such as income, education, societal norms and the built environment.

Martine Shareck is a population health researcher and Assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Université de Sherbrooke (Québec, Canada). She holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair on urban environments and health equity among young people. Trained in social epidemiology, health promotion and health geography, she has expertise in research with marginalized populations, on the social determinants of health, in mixed-methods program evaluation and in urban health inequities.

Linda Rothman is an Assistant Professor at the School of Occupational and Public Health at Toronto Metropolitan University, an Adjunct Scientist in Child Health Evaluative Sciences at the Hospital for Sick Children, and an Assistant Professor (status only) at Dalla Lana, School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Linda’s research is focused on developing rigorous, evidence-based, multidisciplinary applied public health research related to injury prevention, active transportation, and healthy cities with an equity lens.  Linda’s recent research projects include studying the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on road traffic volumes and collisions in 4 Canadian cities and the evaluation of new road design modifications such as cycle tracks, reduced speed limits and automated speed enforcement.

Andrew Howard is a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon and injury epidemiologist at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto.  He is interested in preventing childhood injury, in particular road traffic injury.  His research focuses on real world interventions, with actual injury and activity outcomes.

Yan Kestens is a full professor in the Département de médecine sociale et préventive à l’École de santé publique de l’Université de Montréal and a researcher at the Centre de recherche en santé publique, where he leads the SphereLab. His research program supports the transformation of cities with the aim of improving population health and reducing health inequalities. In partnership with municipal decision-makers and actors, and through various methodological innovations, his work explores person-environment interactions, and more broadly the impact of living environments on populations.

Dr. Sarah Moore is an Assistant Professor in the School of Health and Human Performance, Faculty of Health, and a Healthy Populations Institute Scholar at Dalhousie University. Her research expertise is in the childhood growth and development, movement and play behaviours, and adapted physical activity for children and youth with disabilities. Dr. Moore is interested in assessing the benefits of and barriers to play and physical activity. She has a particular interest in tracking healthy behaviours from childhood through adulthood and believes that several adult conditions have pediatric antecedents.

Associate Professor Ben Beck is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Head of Sustainable Mobility and Safety Research in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, Australia. Ben is an internationally renowned leader in active transport research, especially in relation to bike riding. He leads an interdisciplinary research program bringing together experts in public health, urban and transport planning, engineering, complex systems science, behaviour change and road safety to advance the safety, accessibility, and equity of active mobility.