Collaborators

Cindy Adams, MSW, PhD

Cindy directs the Clinical Communication Program at University of Calgary - Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. She has focused her career on developing communication curricula in veterinary education and practice. She designed and directed the first communication curriculum at Ontario Veterinary College from 1999-1996. During this time she also established one of the first research programs, including studies on observed and applied communication research, human-animal interactions, animal welfare and critical reflection as a core competency for effective practice. Her research interests include communication skills teaching; learning and assessment; practice based implications in small and large animals context;, human animal interactions; animal, child, social welfare; population health and well-being; epidemiology; and relational co-ordination and competence at the organizational and practice-based levels of implementation.

Serge Chalhoub, DVM, DACVIM

Serge Chalhoub graduated from the Faculté de médecine vétérinaire (FMV) of the Université de Montréal in 2004. Serge followed this with a one-year rotating small animal clinical internship at the same institution. Serge pursued a residency in small animal internal medicine at the Animal Medical Center (AMC) in New York City. He stayed on at the AMC as their first renal/hemodialysis fellow and then as a staff doctor. Dr. Chalhoub has been a faculty member at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (UCVM) since 2012. He was the recipient of the 2013 and 2021 Canadian Veterinary Medical Association’s Teacher of the Year Award, the 2015 University of Calgary Team Teacher of the Year Award, and the 2017 Carl J. Norden Distinguished Teacher Award. He has authored and co-authored numerous scientific articles and book chapters on veterinary point-of-care ultrasound, renal and urinary medicine, and lectures around the world on these topics.

Dr. Chalhoub was instrumental in the establishment of Pet Health Clinics for disadvantaged Calgarians, made possible by a partnership linking the University of Calgary’s veterinary school with a charity called the Calgary Urban Project Society. The Pet Health Clinics, which Dr. Chalhoub went on to coordinate, form part of the University of Calgary’s accredited curriculum in veterinary medicine. As a service-learning opportunity, the Pet Health Clinics enable 3^rd-year students in veterinary medicine to practice integrating their communication skillsets with their medical skillsets, notably during wellness examinations, with tenants and pets who live in housing managed by the Calgary Urban Project Society. In addition, the Pet Health Clinics have provided service-learning opportunities for graduate students in social work as well as in the veterinary school at the University of Calgary. Graduate students, for example, have assisted with evaluation research to inform the evolution of this service-learning initiative and comparable outreach efforts in other places.

Sylvia Checkley, DVM, PhD

Sylvia completed her DVM degree at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM). Following graduation, she worked in a busy rural community veterinary practice for eight years as an associate and then co-owner. Dr. Checkley also pursued graduate studies (Epidemiology) at WCVM, where she also worked as a Teaching Assistant, Sessional Lecturer, and Assistant Professor. She then worked for the Food Safety Division of Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, where she was a key member of the development and implementation team for a major livestock surveillance initiative - the Alberta Veterinary Surveillance Network (AVSN). Sylvia joined the UCVM Faculty in September 2009, with a half time appointment to the Provincial Laboratory for Public Health (ProvLab).

To learn more, please visit Sylvia's profile at:
LinkedIn

Sarah Curtis, MD, FRCPC (PEM), FAAP

Dr. Sarah Curtis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and a member of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. She is an active member of Pediatric Emergency Research Canada (PERC), Translating Emergency Knowledge for Kids (TREKK), and StaR Child Health, which is an international collaboration that seeks to enhance the quality, ethics, and relevance of clinical research in child health by promoting the use of evidence-based standards and guidance for the design, conduct and reporting of clinical trials with children.

To learn more, please visit Sarah's profiles at:
academia.edu
Research Gate

Chris Degeling, PhD, BVSc, MRCVS

Chris is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He returned to Australia after completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Calgary, having previously been in veterinary practice in Australia and the UK. His research and teaching interests revolve around the ethics and politics of human interactions with nonhuman animals, and the social and cultural dimensions of public health. His research is inter-disciplinary, and draws together insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and social and normative theories. He is the author of numerous articles on issues ranging from animal experimentation, to diagnostic innovation and biosecurity.

To learn more, please visit Chris's profiles at:
Research Gate
Google Scholar

Paul S Hansen, PhD

Paul is a Specially Appointed Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Hokkaido University, Japan. He completed a PhD in anthropology at the University of London's SOAS, Post-doctoral research based at The Japanese Museum of Ethnology and Hokkaido University and has lectured in anthropology at the University of Calgary and Tsukuba University. His research focuses on animal-human-technology relationships and the embodied, ethical, and affective permutations of such interrelations in Japan and Jamaica. Recent publications include a book co-edited with Blai Guarne Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century (London:Routledge), a pair of articles in 2018: "Linking Cosmopolitan and Multispecies Touch in Contemporary Japan" in the journal Japan Forum and "Fuzzy Bounds: Doing Ethnography at the Limits of the Network and Animal Metaphor" in the open access journal Humanimalia, and co-edits an ongoing blog with Gergely Mohacsi and Emile St.Pierre entitled More-Than-Human Worlds hosted by the Journal NatureCulture https://blognatureculture.wordpress.com/

Jennifer Hewson, MA (Family Studies), PhD (Educational Studies)

Jennifer received her MA in Family Studies and PhD in Educational Studies, both from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hewson is an Assistant Professor teaching research and gerontology in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include program and service delivery models for seniors, sense of community belonging for older adults, isolated seniors, and intergenerational programming. She is also on several intersectoral committees focusing on aging-in-place and age-friendly cities.

To learn more, please see Jennifer's profiles at:
Faculty of Social Work
Research Gate

Rhiannon Jones, Policy Librarian

Rhiannon is the EMBA/MBA Liaison Librarian at the University of Calgary. She has a BA from York University, a Master's in Library and Information Science from Western University, and an MEd from the University of Calgary with a focus on Adults, Community, and Higher Education. She is also a sessional instructor in the Werklund School of Education. Her current research interests examine the role academic libraries can play in fostering mental wellness in students and how libraries can support neurodiverse students.

Susan Kutz, DVM, PhD

Susan is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Kutz also holds positions as the Director of the Alberta Node of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, is a member of the Board for the Arctic Institute of North America; and sits on the Terrestrial Mammals Sub-committee for CoSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada). She leads a unique 4th year veterinary student rotation in the Canadian North, delivering veterinary services to remote and under-serviced Dene communities. Her areas of expertise include wildlife parasitology, disease ecology, ecosystem health, arctic ecology, climate change, and community-based disease surveillance.

To learn more, please visit Susan's profiles at:
Kutz Research Group
Research Gate
LinkedIn

Kate McLennan, Research Assistant

Kate will be finishing a Bachelor of Health Sciences- Honours degree at the University of Calgary in December 2022. After beginning her undergraduate studies at Dalhousie University, Kate joined the Health and Society stream of the Health Sciences program, with a concentration in Psychology. During her third year at the University of Calgary, Kate completed a research practicum, supervised by Dr. Trafford Crump, that investigated provincial health authorities’ decision-making regarding COVID-19-related surgical postponements. Later that year, Kate was a recipient of the O'Brien Centre Summer Studentship research grant, which allowed her to explore how community stakeholders in Calgary are supporting disadvantaged older adults’ relationships with pets. This research was supervised by Drs. Ann Toohey and Melanie Rock, and resulted in a publication in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. For her Honours Thesis, Kate conducted a thematic analysis investigating media coverage of disability in Albertan newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the summer of 2022, Kate worked as a research assistant to Dr. Rock, assisting in knowledge translation and mobilization of previous research on the City of Calgary’s model for managing animal services.

Olga Solomon, PhD

Olga Solomon, PhD is faculty in the University of Southern California Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy. She is known internationally as the leading linguistic anthropologist in human-animal studies, as well as for her U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded ethnographic research on African American families' experiences of autism and healthcare disparities in Los Angeles County. For the last decade, Olga has conducted ethnographic research on human-animal interactions involving children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and their families. Olga's article on "social lives" of official records, a critical discourse analysis of health and educational records of children with autism spectrum disorder co-authored with Amber Angell was awarded the 2015 Diana Forsythe Award by the American Medical Informatics Association. As a collaborator on the SSHRC-funded study, she will contribute her expertise in ethnographic methodology, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and the use of qualitative software for analyzing large multi-modal data corpora.

To learn more, pleas see Olga's profiles on:
Research Gate
Academia.edu
Google Scholar

John Wright, Policy Librarian

John is Director of the Business Library and Politics, and Public Policy Librarian at the University of Calgary. He has a BA in History from the University of Toronto, an MA from Carleton University in Russian and East European Studies, a Master's in Library and Information Science from Western University, and he completed his Candidacy in Political Science at Queen’s University. John has worked as an adjunct professor in Political Studies at Queen’s University, a policy researcher for the Parliament of Canada, a senior policy advisor for the federal government, and a government documents and policy documents librarian for Queen's University and the University of Calgary. John has published literature on Canadian politics and on library and archival issues. His current research area is ideology, politics and democracy and the role of libraries as public institutions.