The Reach Alliance
Reaching the hard to reach

Team

 
 

Reach Alliance Team

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Marin MacLeod

Executive Director

Marin is the Executive Director of the Reach Alliance at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is a Reach alumnus, and investigated UNHCR’s biometric cash assistance program for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Marin then led strategic partnerships at the Reach Project, including organization of the annual Reach Symposium. Prior to joining the Reach Alliance, Marin was the Knowledge Management & Translation Associate at Grand Challenges Canada, where she led the organization’s approach to impact measurement across their diverse portfolio of global health innovations. Her focus was on the systems and processes used to capture results, and to share knowledge generated by grantees through the organization’s unique innovation platform. Marin has experience doing research, program design and implementation across Asia, Africa and Latin America. She holds a B.A. (Hons) from Queen’s University as a Loran Scholar, and a Master in Public Health from the University of Toronto.

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Moni Kim

Research Officer

Moni is coming to Reach from the Social Justice Education Department at OISE, having previously worked on the Translational Research Program at the Faculty of Medicine. Moni has more than ten years experience working for leading development organizations to mobilize international partnerships with civil society, academic institutions, government and private stakeholders. These collaborations involved scaling up local and global responses to HIV prevention and treatment efforts in sixteen of the hardest-hit countries of sub-Saharan Africa and expanding innovative youth entrepreneurship among the world’s most marginalized communities. She also contributed to a range of critical public health work with indigenous peoples, incarcerated populations in Canada, North Korean refugees, and elderly seniors living in extreme poverty in Uganda. Moni holds a Master of Public Health from Dalla Lana School and a certificate in International Development from the Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University.

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Keenan Dixon, PMP

Marketing Coordinator

Keenan is the Marketing Coordinator for the Reach Alliance at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Prior to joining the Reach Alliance, she was the Sr. Communications Officer for the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering at U of T. She holds an H.B.A. in International Relations and History from the University of Toronto, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Public Relations (Honours) from Humber College. In 2020, Keenan completed the requirements to achieve her Project Management Professional designation.

Jason Sealy

Coaching Consultant

Jason is the Reach Alliance Coaching Consultant where his focus is to leverage Reach as a vehicle to support the development of team-based skills for our student research teams. Jason creates frameworks and coaches students to operationalize and practice the behaviors of highly successful teams. A 2019 recipient of the NAV CANADA Supplier Award for Service, Jason drives leadership development with the world’s top Air Navigation Service Provider. Jason designs and delivers programs to drive high performance with Canada’s Air Traffic Controllers. Jason is a Team Performance Coach with the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University and supports team performance with university, provincial and national sport programs. He is also a Performance Coach at Queens University and several boutique agencies in Toronto. Jason works at the intersection of Positive Psychology, Sport and Business, supporting leaders and teams to become the best at getting better. Most importantly, Jason is husband to Carm and proud Dad to Tobias and Malia. Jason holds an MA in Leadership from the University of Guelph, a BA in Economics from the University of Toronto and is Certified in Applied Positive Psychology.

 
 
 

Managing Fellows

Managing Fellows are Reach Alumni who continue to actively contribute to Reach’s objectives

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Aditya Rau

Managing Fellow

Aditya Rau is a Senior Analyst at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. The Center is Mastercard’s philanthropic hub, dedicated to advancing sustainable and equitable economic growth around the world. Most recently, Aditya was an International Youth Fellow with the Aga Khan Foundation in Tanzania, where his work focused on strategy and communications for an early childhood development program. Prior to this, Aditya helped advise top Canadian and global organizations at Navigator, Canada’s leading high stakes public strategy and communications firm. Aditya is a Managing Fellow at the Reach Alliance, and an alum having investigated the mechanisms employed to increase birth registration rates in post-Apartheid South Afri¬ca, and studied food insecurity and digital upskilling in violent communities in Mexico. Aditya earned an Honours B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto (Trinity, ’16) where he studied as a Whiteside Scholar.

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Kimberly Skead

Managing Fellow

Kimberly is a doctoral student in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto where she is focused on developing tools to identify patients at risk of cancer or heart disease across a range of population contexts. She is the National Scientific Coordinator of the Canadian Partner¬ship for Tomorrow’s Health, the Research Program Coordinator for the Canadian Data Integration Centre and the founder of the Ontario Rising Stars in Cancer Research Trainee Network. Kimberly is a Managing Fellow at the Reach Alliance, and an alum having investigated the mechanisms employed to increase birth registration rates in post-Apartheid South Afri¬ca. She is also the recipient of the Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the Cecil Yip Doctoral Research Award.

Mentored Case Studies

  • Digital Upskilling in a Conflict Zone - Co-mentor with Erica Di Ruggiero (2020-Upcoming)
 
 

Reach Alliance Faculty Mentors

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Ahmed Mahmoud

Research Associate, Water and Energy Research Lab; Program Manager, Centre for Global Engineering

Ahmed Mahmoud, P.Eng helps manage the Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN). Ahmed works with CGEN faculty members and external partners to identify and fund research initiatives in global development at the University of Toronto. He also helps administer CGEN’s student engagement opportunities, including its academic courses and extracurricular activities. At WERL, Ahmed is working with Professor Amy Bilton on designing a passive pond aeration system for rural aquaculture in southeast Asia.

Mentored Case Studies

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Amy Bilton

Associate Professor, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering; Director, Centre for Global Engineering

Amy Bilton is the Director of the Centre for Global Engineering and an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Water and Energy Research Lab (WERL), which focuses on developing innovative water and energy technologies and computer-based design methods. She has worked on development projects in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Mexico. She completed her Ph.D. and M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics at M.I.T. and her B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science, Aerospace Option, from the University of Toronto. Amy has also worked as a Systems Engineer at Pratt and Whitney Canada and Honeywell Aerospace.

Mentored Case Studies

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Anita McGahan

University Professor and George E. Connell Chair in Organizations and Society, Rotman School of Management; Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Anita M. McGahan is University Professor and George E. Connell Chair in Organizations and Society at the University of Toronto. Her primary appointments are at the Rotman School of Management and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She is cross appointed to the Medical School and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; is Senior Associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard University; is the Chief Economist in the Division of Global Health Innovation at the Massachusetts General Hospital; and is a past President of the Academy of Management.

She holds a PhD in economics from Harvard, an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BA from Northwestern University. McGahan’s credits include four books and over 150 articles, case studies, notes and other published material on competitive advantage, industry evolution, and global health. Her current research emphasizes entrepreneurship in the public interest and innovative collaboration between public and private organizations. In 2010, she was awarded the Academy of Management BPS Division’s Irwin Distinguished Educator Award. In 2012, the Academy conferred on McGahan its Career Distinguished Educator Award for her championship of reform in the core curriculum of Business Schools. In 2018, McGahan was awarded both the Inaugural Educational Impact Award and the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize from the Strategic Management Society. In 2012 she was elected a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, and in 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management.

Mentored Case Studies

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Avni Shah

Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

Professor Avni Shah is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross-appointment to the Marketing area at the Rotman School of Management . Using field and laboratory data, Avni investigates how payment influences consumer decision-making and consumer well-being particularly in financial and health contexts. Her research has covered a broad range of topics such as looking at how paying with different forms of payment influence purchase behavior and how paying a surcharge on unhealthy food items influences unhealthy food consumption. Avni's work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Psychological Science.

Mentored Case Studies

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Erica Di Ruggiero

Associate Professor of Global Health & Director of the Centre for Global Health, Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Erica Di Ruggiero is Director, Centre for Global Health, Director of the Collaborative Specialization in Global Health, and Associate Professor of Global Health, Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division, and the Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Di Ruggiero is a global public health expert and opinion leader whose research focuses on evaluating the health and health equity impacts of different policy and program interventions on marginalized groups (e.g. labour policies; interventions that aim to reduce food insecurity). She is also interested in how different types of evidence shape global policy agendas and influence global governance in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. She is editor in chief for Global Health Promotion. Prior to joining the university, she was the inaugural Deputy Scientific Director with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research-Institute of Population and Public Health where she led the development, implementation and evaluation of strategic research, capacity building and knowledge translation initiatives to address different research priorities including health equity, global health, maternal and child health, environmental health and population health intervention research. Di Ruggiero obtained her BSc in Nutritional Sciences, a Masters of Health Science in community nutrition and a PhD in public health sciences from the University of Toronto. She is a registered dietitian. For more information, see: http://www.dlsph.utoronto.ca/faculty-profile/diruggiero-erica/

Mentored Case Studies

  • Jalisco, Mexico: Addressing Food Security
  • Co-Meta Project: Social development for the poor (Upcoming)
  • Digital Upskilling in a Conflict Zone (2020)(Upcoming)
  • mVaccination: Mobile App For Effective & Efficient Vaccination (Upcoming)
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Jill Cameron

Associate Professor and Vice Chair Research, Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Jill is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair Research in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences Institute in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and an Affiliate Scientist at Toronto Rehabilitation Institute – UHN. She has held Ministry of Health, Ministry of Research and Innovation, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Awards. Dr. Cameron has also received a Faculty of Medicine Graduate Faculty Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (Early Career). The ultimate goal of her research is to support families as they transition across care environments with the aim of optimizing life in the community. She has conducted research in the area of stroke, critical illness, mental health, heart failure, and advanced cancer.

Mentored Case Studies

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Joseph Wong

Vice-President, International, University of Toronto; Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy;

Joseph Wong is PI and founder of the Reach Alliance at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he is also the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation, and Professor of political science. He has published academic articles in leading journals in political science, development studies, political economy and global health, including recent articles about the Reach Alliance in the Bulletin of the WHO. Professor Wong has published four books, and is currently working on two book projects with Princeton University Press and Cambridge University Press. Wong’s 2017 TEDx talk provides a short and compelling introduction to the challenges of “reaching the hardest to reach.” Professor Wong has been a visiting scholar at leading universities in Asia (Seoul National University), the US (Harvard) and the UK (Oxford). He has advised international organizations such as the United Nations, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the World Health Organization, as well as for governments in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In 2020 Professor Wong was appointed to be the University of Toronto’s Interim Vice-President, International.

Mentored Case Studies

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Mariana Prado

Professor, Faculty of Law

Mariana Mota Prado obtained her law degree (LLB) from the University of Sao Paulo, and her master's (LLM) and Doctorate from Yale Law School. She is currently a Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. She has published extensively on law and development, including three co-authored books with Michael J. Trebilcock: Institutional Bypasses: A Strategy to Promote Reforms for Development (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Advanced Introduction to Law and Development (Edward Elgar, 2014), and What Makes Poor Countries Poor (Edward Elgar, 2011). A Brazilian national, she has taught courses at Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London, Direito Rio - Getulio Vargas Foundation Law School in Brazil, ITAM Law School in Mexico, Los Andes Law School in Colombia, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina and University of Puerto Rico School of Law in the United States. Her scholarship focuses on law and development, corruption and comparative law.

Mentored Case Studies

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Paola Salardi

Assistant Professor in Economics; Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

Paola Salardi is an Assistant Professor in Economics and the Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Her background is as an applied economist with a focus on economics of conflict, economic development, inequality and political economy. Paola’s research has focused on the short and long-term consequences of conflict on welfare, the changing role of women in post-conflict countries, the role of institutions in shaping the presence of violence and on inequality and women’s empowerment. This has included a broad geographic focus, including work on inequality and discrimination in Brazil, violence and school performance in Mexico, violence, education and women’s empowerment in Timor Leste, and humanitarian responses to crises in Kenya, Nepal and the Philippines. Alongside her academic work, Paola has also previously worked at the Inter-American Development Bank and as a consultant with UN WOMEN.

Mentored Case Studies

  • Solomon Islands: Community governance (Upcoming)
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Raji Jayaraman

Associate Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Raji Jayaraman is Associate Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her research in development and labor economics examines the role of incentives and social preferences on the decisions and performance of students, workers, and consumers. Her recent empirical work has examined the effect of incentive pay on worker productivity; school feeding programs on student outcomes; defaults on charitable donations; and immigration on employment. In collaboration with theorists, she has also worked on the identification of peer effects in social interactions models. Her research has been published in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics. She did her B.A. at McGill Univeristy, her M.A. at Yale University, and her Ph.D. at Cornell University.

Mentored Case Studies

  • India: Women's Police Stations (Upcoming)
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Stanley Zlotkin

Professor of Paediatrics, Public Health Sciences and Nutritional Sciences at the Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto; Chief at the Centre for Global Child Health, The Hospital for Sick Children

CM, OOnt, MD, PhD, FRCPC is a Professor of Paediatrics, Public Health Sciences and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto, a Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute and a Clinician/Scientist in the Department of Paediatrics at SickKids. He received his MD degree from McMaster University, his fellowship training in Paediatrics at McGill and his PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Toronto.

In the late 1990s Dr. Zlotkin led the development of ‘home fortification’ with micronutrient powders. By partnering with United Nations agencies over the past decade, essential minerals and vitamins have been distributed to millions of infants and young children globally for the control of nutritional anaemia. His current research and advocacy is focused on preventing malnutrition in children. He was awarded the HJ Heinz Humanitarian Award in 2001 for his international advocacy work for children, the CIHR National Knowledge Translation Award in 2006, the Order of Canada in 2007 and the Order of Ontario in 2016, for his contributions to improving the lives of children. Dr. Zlotkin was appointed as the inaugural Chief of Global Child Health at SickKids in 2012.

Mentored Case Studies