Trainees

Amberlee Boulton, MSW - PhD Student, Department of Community Health Sciences

Amberlee is a Ph.D. student in the Cumming School of Medicine Community Health Sciences Department, specializing in Population and Public Health. Amberlee’s current project, supervised by Dr. Rock, focuses on public health and service responses to animal hoarding. Amberlee attained her Master of Social Work (MSW) from the University of Calgary where she completed two practicums with Dr. Rock through the O’Brien Institute for Public Health (co-supervised by Dr. Morgan Mouton) and the Brenda Strafford Centre on Aging (co-supervised by Dr. Ann Toohey). Amberlee is currently employed as a research assistant for the Brenda Strafford Centre on Aging.

Her background includes supporting arts-based community programming for youth, families, and folks with intellectual disabilities in rural Nova Scotia. She is part of a farming cooperative, supporting a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and food security program in unceeded Mi’kma’ki, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Her research interests are human-animal relationships, anti-racist and intergenerational community development, and healthy aging.

Contact: amberlee.boulton@ucalgary.ca

Jade Hooper, MSc - PhD student, University of Stirling, UK

Jade is a PhD student based in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling (UK). For her PhD thesis she is looking at dog bite incidents from administrative health data across Scotland, with a particular focus on social inequality. Jade received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council as part of their Overseas Institutional Visit Scheme to work alongside Drs Melanie Rock, Sylvia Checkley and Niamh Caffrey at the University of Calgary to explore spatial variations in dog related incidents investigated by the City of Calgary.

Jade has previously worked for the England and Wales animal welfare charity the RSPCA, and has a BSc in Psychology and Animal Behaviour from the University of Chester (UK). She obtained a MSc in Social Statistics and Social Research from the University of Stirling and currently specialises in the use of administrative data for research. Jade is particularly interested in human-animal interactions and animal welfare, protection and the law. She has experience working with the Scottish Government and the Scottish SPCA using administrative data of criminal prosecutions for animal welfare, and the Scottish Sentencing Council looking at sentencing practices for wildlife crime and environmental offences. Alongside this, Jade is a Research Assistant working on social work projects using administrative data related to child protection and looked after children. 

To learn more, please Jade’s profile at: https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/256486

Contact: jade.hooper@stir.ac.uk

Vanessa Vegter, MSc - PhD student, Department of Education

Vanessa is a third year doctoral student in the Werklund School of Education's counselling psychology program at the University of Calgary. She obtained her Master's degree in counselling psychology from the Werklund School of Education, investigating the construction and maintenance of feminist counsellor professional identity. Vanessa's research interests in the field of counselling psychology include discourse, feminist, family, and systemic approaches to therapy, social constructionism, new materialism, posthumanism, human-animal relationships, and rural mental health. For her SSHRC funded doctoral research, Vanessa plans to investigate rural citizens' multispecied mental health recovery processes – that is, how animals feature in the varied ways that rural citizens make sense of and respond to "mental health" challenges in their lives. Vanessa's supervisory committee is comprised of her primary supervisor, Dr. Tanya Mudry, and committee members Dr. Melanie Rock and Dr. Jennifer Adams.

Contact: vmvegter@ucalgary.ca