New & Evolving Academic Leaders Program

Senior Director, Philanthropy, Women's College Hospital

Navaz Mistry has worked in executive education and not-for-profit management for seventeen years.

At the Rotman School of Management, she worked with faculty to design and deliver leadership programs, focusing on innovation, collaboration, and leading through change. She worked with corporate and public sector clients in Toronto, across Canada, Australia, UAE, the UK, and the US.

Inspired by the leaders she met through this work, she transitioned to leadership roles in the not-for-profit sector. She currently leads a fundraising team at Women’s College Hospital and continues to facilitate sessions on leadership development, focusing on productive conversations. She believes all great work – strategy, innovation, culture – comes from productive conversations. 

Training & Education Lead, CASCADES (Creating a Sustainable Canadian Health System in a Climate Crisis) + Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health & Sustainable Care; Executive Lead, CASCADES

As Training & Education Lead for the Collaborative Centre and its flagship project, CASCADES (for which she also serves as an Executive Lead), Nicole guides the design, implementation, and evaluation of student and professional development programs. Via courses, webinars, workshops, coaching sessions, and a variety of educational offerings developed in collaboration with health partners, she seeks to deliver interdisciplinary learning opportunities that build pan-Canadian capacity for sustainable health systems.

Nicole holds a PhD from the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota, and an MA in Geography/Environmental Studies from the University of Toronto.

New & Evolving Academic Leaders Program

Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (UTSC)
Founder & Director, The Black Health Equity Lab (The BHEL)

Dr. Notisha Massaquoi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, with a graduate appointment in the Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. She is also the founder and director of the Black Health Equity Lab (The BHEL) which conducts rigorous community based health research and works with Black communities to develop advocacy tools, strategies and programs to improve health outcomes, wellbeing and success in Canadian systems.  She holds a BA in Psychology from Western University, an MSW, and a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto. Her early career established several health service organizations which serve Black communities in Canada, including Africans in Partnership Against AIDS, and TAIBU Community Health Centre. She developed and served for two decades as the Executive Director of Women's Health in Women's Hands Community Health Centre in Toronto – the only Community Health Centre in North America which provides specialized primary healthcare for Black and racialized women. She has consulted globally with the United Nations Social Development Forum on racism and its impact on workforces and with UNAIDS on organizational responses to HIV and migration. She is considered one of Canada's leading experts in developing equity responsive organizations and her research and advocacy have pushed Canadian institutions to address anti-Black racism and the collection of race-based data.  

New & Evolving Academic Leaders Program

Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Nouman Ashraf is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream within the Organizational Behavior area at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

He possesses a broad range of professional, academic and research interests, with a specialized focus on enabling inclusive and innovative practices within teams, organizations and boards. 

For the last decade and a half, he has held progressively senior roles at the University of Toronto, including most recently as the Director of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion the Rotman School of Management. 

He is a recognized thought leader in governance and has taught thousands of directors in the national Rotman program on Not-for-Profit Governance in partnership with the Institute for Corporate Directors since its inception in 2007.  

Nouman serves as Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Gender + the Economy. He is also an Associate at Trinity College within the University of Toronto and an Affiliated Faculty Member at the University of Toronto School of Cities, where he is the founder and Academic Director of the Leading Social Justice Collective. 

In his free time, Nouman mentors exceptional post-graduate students in his capacity as Senior Fellow Emeritus at Massey College within the University of Toronto. Most recently, he developed an online course on inclusive leadership in partnership with GetSmarter which launches in Fall 2023.

Stepping Stones Program, New & Evolving Academic Leaders Program

Staff Psychiatrist, Hospital for Sick Children
Associate Dean, Clinical Affairs & Professional Values
Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Associate Professor, University of Toronto

Dr. Pier Bryden has been a staff psychiatrist at the Hospital for Sick Children since 2001 and has subspecialty certification in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry with the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Canada. 

She is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Clinical Affairs & Professional Values, for the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Bryden is a graduate of the University of Toronto, University of Oxford, and McMaster University.

Her academic publications include papers on medical education, medical professionalism, and ethical and legal aspects of child psychiatry. She is the co-author, with Dr. David Goldbloom, of a popular book on psychiatry titled, “How Can I Help: A Week in my Life as a Psychiatrist,” and with Dr. Peter Szatmari of “Start Here: A Parent’s Guide to Helping Children and Teens Through Mental Health Challenges.”

Dr. Bryden was the 2018 Recipient of the University’s prestigious President’s Teaching Award, the 2020 Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Region 3 Mentor of the Year Award, and the 2021 Sarita Verma Award for Advocacy and Mentorship in Postgraduate Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Praseedha Janakiram, MD, CCFP, FCFP, MPH Advanced Standing in Family and Community Medicine.

Dr. Janakiram is a family physician based at the Crossroads Refugee Clinic at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada while also practicing community-based HIV primary care and family medicine.

Dr. Janakiram serves as the Program Director for Global Health Education at the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.  She is a Faculty Co-Lead for the New and Evolving Academic Leaders program at the Center for Faculty Development,  and is Co-Chair of "Advancing Women's Excellence in Family Medicine" (AWE-FM) a program to support emerging leaders in family medicine who identify as women from around the globe.

 ln May 2025, she had the honour of serving as Co-Chair of the Starfield Summit Toronto 2025, in close collaboration with global colleagues on the subject of “The Family Medicine imperative for better health system performance:  strengthening the three components of the PHC approach.”

Praseedha is deeply committed to education through capacity strengthening partnership, and cultivating family medicine leadership as a pathway to global health equity.

Reena Pattani is a staff physician and clinician educator in the Division of General Internal Medicine at St Michael’s Hospital and an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. She obtained her medical degree from McGill University and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto, where she was Chief Medical Resident in her final year of training. She completed a Master of Public Health at Harvard University as a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow. One of her scholarly focuses has been organizational effectiveness and workplace culture within healthcare. She currently serves as the Director of Learner Experience in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Education Practice Leader, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Robyn Davies is the Education Practice Leader for Physiotherapy services at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Ontario and a lecturer and the co-coordinator of the Advanced Neuromuskuloskeletal Physical Therapy Unit at the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Toronto. She received her physiotherapy degree from McMaster University and in 1998 completed a Masters of Applied Science in Manipulative Physiotherapy at the University of South Australia. Her interests lie in the areas of manual therapy and education. Robyn is a Fellow in the Canadian Academy of Manual Therapy and a recent graduate of the Education Scholars Program at the Centre for Faculty Development in the University of Toronto.

Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Associate Director & Member, Leadership Table, Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health & Sustainable Care

Ross Upshur BA (Hons.), MA, MD, MSc, MCFP, FRCPC, FCAHS is currently the Dalla Lana Chair in Clinical Public Health and Head of the Division of Clinical Public Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. At the University of Toronto, he is a Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Associate Director of the Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health and Sustainable Care, Affiliate Member of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Member of the Joint Centre for Bioethics. He serves as Co-chair of the WHO Ethics and Governance Working Group, chairs the Canadian College of Family Physicians Ethics Committee and is Special Advisor to the Ethics Review Board of Doctors Without Borders. Research interests span multiple domains at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, clinical medicine and public health with applications to climate change, pandemics and artificial intelligence. He is an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.