The Queen's Health Sciences Equity, Diversity and Inclusion fund brings student initiatives to life and helps to build a more equitable faculty by integrating equity priorities into our curricula, research projects, professional development opportunities and our culture.

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Stephanie Nixon, PhD, is Vice Dean (Health Sciences) and Director (School of Rehabilitation Therapy) at Queen’s University. Prior to joining Queen’s in July 2022, Stephanie spent 15 years as a professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD in Public Health and Bioethics in 2006 at the University of Toronto, and a post-doc at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in 2007. Stephanie was director of the International Centre for Disability and Rehabilitation from 2012-2021. Stephanie is a straight, white, middle class, able-bodied, cisgender, settler woman who tries to understand the pervasive effects of privilege. Stephanie developed the Coin Model of Privilege and Critical Allyship as a way to translate core ideas about anti-oppression to people in positions of unearned advantage.

Jeffrey Kiyoshk Ross is an Ontario Certified teacher with over 20 years of communications, journalism, and marketing experience working with First Nation communities and organizations in the territories that are now called Canada. As a graduate of teaching, he’s been lucky to teach in Pikangikum, Pickle Lake, and Thunder Bay and develop and deliver curriculum that is informed by Canada’s FNIM diverse histories and cultures. Jeffrey Kiyoshk was the First Nation House Librarian at the University of Toronto, where he curated the selection of books to reflect Indigenous voices by and for Indigenous people before turning his attention to consultation and began a career in helping organization become inclusive of Indigenous voices and aware of the amazing history that has created this place called Canada. His mother Ramona, is a survivor of the Mush Hole residential school, and his father is Black from St. Vincent. “These experiences have helped me to understand the human world we navigate and the non human relationships that guide and teach us as well.”

Llana James' research illuminates the emerging implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the context of clinical care, population health outcomes, rehabilitation science and public health. Her trans-disciplinary and applied approach is designed to critically appraise and improve AI and ML integration, while developing and implementing interventions that seed new, ethical futures. As a result of her ground-breaking work, she is the inaugural AI, Medicine and Data Justice Post-Doctoral Fellow at Queen’s University.