Working with: Dr. Patricia O’Campo
Dr. Farah Mawani is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist with over 20 years of global, national, and local experience in research and solutions for reducing social and mental health inequities. She is a CIHR Health System Impact Fellow and Mitacs Accelerate Fellow based at MAP; the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University; and the Centre of Learning and Development in Regent Park. She received a 2020 Li Ka Shing Research Excellence Award for her contributions to Unity Health Toronto and commitment to community engagement, equity and inclusion. Her scholarship advances theory, methods, and measurement to enable a deeper understanding of social and health inequities, and effective solutions for reducing them. She translates that evidence to design and advocate for evidence-based targeted supports, interventions, and policy change for communities experiencing inequities.
Her wide-ranging experience includes five years as national manager of a multi-million dollar CIHR-funded longitudinal survey of immigrant and refugee children youth in Canada, conducting national research on underemployment and mental health as a Tom Symons Research Fellow based in Statistics Canada’s Health Analysis Division, and developing Canada’s first National Mental Health Strategy as a Senior Policy and Research Analyst at the Mental Health Commission of Canada.
She increases social and health equity at the community level by establishing long-term community-university-health system partnerships. She advances community-based research, implementation science, and peer/lived experience research approaches to address historical exclusion, and increase relevance, uptake, effectiveness and impact of solutions. She is currently leading:
- Building Roads Together Global Solutions Network, a community-health system-university partnership to scale an evidence-based peer walking group program she designed
- Global research on COVID-19 socioeconomic recovery, non-communicable disease inequities, and government action on social determinants of health
- An evaluation of the Centre of Learning and Development’s community-based COVID-19 response in partnership with the COVID-19 and Marginalization (MARCO) project.