Education Coordinator, Partnerships and Technology
Centre for Faculty Development, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto

Alex coordinates the Atelier: Collaborative Education Research program and the CFD Resource Hub, and is on the planning committee for the Teaching for Transformation Annual Conference. She has been involved in healthcare education through various roles, using her technological, communication and media skills to further knowledge translation. Alex holds a Bachelor of Arts in Cinema and Media Studies from York University.

Education Development Lead, Clinical Teaching, CFD
Assistant Professor, Department of Speech-Language, Clinical-Lead.
Autism Student Led Environment. Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital Pathology, University of Toronto

Amanda is Education Development Lead for Clinical Teaching and the Program lead for the CFDs Teaching and Learning in the Clinical Context (TLC) and Stepping Stones programs. Amanda Binns, PhD is a clinician research and educator in the field of Speech-Language Pathology. She is an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, and clinical manager of a Student-Led Environment at Holland Bloorview. Her program of research extends from years of experience providing interprofessional supports for neurodivergent children and their families.

Beck previously worked at St. Mike’s in both Leadership & Organizational Development and the Education Portfolio, with a focus in education and advocacy on topics of inclusion, collaborative leadership, and interprofessional collaboration for staff, students and patients. As a trans man, he gender transitioned professionally while in the Education portfolio, finding both personal support and also very interesting critical lenses on how discourses of “disadvantage”, power, equity, and allyship can play out in the health care system and health professions education. Since he left Unity Health, he served as Director of Organizational Development at The 519 Church Street Community (2SLGBTQ+) Centre, and as the lead for the City of Toronto’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) learning program for staff. He has planned and led several educational events for Faculty Development Day and CFD programming, and graduated from the 2016-18 ESP cohort. He has a passion for engaging people in discussions of systemic injustice, and is dedicated to working towards impactful learning at all levels that invites people to see the structures that marginalize people and a to find and authentic path towards confronting those structures discomfort.

Farah Friesen, MI, joined the Centre for Advancing Collaborative Healthcare & Education (CACHE) in a Research & Strategy Associate role beginning September 13, 2021, on the heels of a whirlwind (pandemic-focused) year as the Coordinator, Office of the CEO, Women’s College Hospital and a prior 6.5-year tenure at the Centre for Faculty Development (CFD). At the CFD, Farah played a number of pivotal roles including as a knowledge broker, research coordinator, and program coordinator. Trained as a librarian (Master of Information), Farah has a passion for facilitating collaboration and informed decision-making through access to information and knowledge mobilization.

Farah’s main research interest is in critically examining traditional academic performance indicators, encouraging alternative perspectives on metrics, and working towards a broader (re)definition of research and educational impact. Farah will extend these efforts into supporting CACHE’s research, scholarship, and innovation portfolio.
In her spare time, Farah enjoys working out, thinking about mind-body dualism, following philosophy and psychology debates on free will/determinism, and attempting to watch all the movies from Roger Ebert’s Great Movies List (there are close to 500 films and so far she has watched about 300 of them).

Education Coordinator, Communications and Community, Centre for Faculty Development

Karen coordinates Communications and Communities (including Membership) at the Centre for Faculty Development. She has prior experience working in marketing and communications capacities and aims to increase awareness and engagement of CFD programming. She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Publishing from Centennial College.

Coming soon!

Associate Director, Curriculum Integration and Partnerships, Centre for Faculty Development
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto

Lecturer, Department of Family & Community Medicine, University of Toronto and Staff Physician, Mount Sinai Academic Family Health Team

Lindsay Herzog is a family physician at Mount Sinai Hospital and lecturer within the Department of Family and Community Medicine. Lindsay is the Associate Faculty Lead for Portfolio in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine MD Program, and the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Social Accountability Lead at the Mount Sinai Academic Family Health Team. Her research focuses on critical and transformative approaches in medical education, seeking to equip trainees with the capacity and motivation to provide care that is equitable and person-centered.

Director & Scientist, Centre for Interprofessional Education
Program Lead, Teaching for Transformation and Best Practice in Education Rounds Centre for Interprofessional Education
Associate Professor, Dept. of Speech-Language Pathology and the Institute for Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, and Wilson Centre Scientist, UofT

Stella is passionate about the transformative potential of health professions education, particularly critical pedagogies to enhance the collaborative, compassionate, and ethical aspects of health care practice. This passion was sparked by challenges experienced as a pediatric audiologist in the public-school system, which motivated her to study how people respond to value-conflicted, uncertain zones of interprofessional and collaborative practice. Her tri-council-, ministry-, and foundation-funded research thus explores theories of reflective practice and optimizes educational approaches that foster critical reflection, which she mobilizes into her education and leadership work.

Chief Strategy & Knowledge Officer, Casey House Hospital

Dr. Yasser Ismail is a health care leader, credentialed evaluator and scholar-practitioner whose work integrates transformative program evaluation, human-centered design research, and health professions education to mobilize knowledge for equity‑centered decision‑making. As Chief Strategy & Knowledge Officer at Casey House, he is guiding a multi‑year organizational transformation to make hospital-based care access inclusive for equity-denied communities—scaling a client‑centered design hub, embedding equity-centered measurement and evaluation across clinical programs, and aligning care pathways with the needs and wisdom of communities who face systemic stigma and discrimination.

Yasser’s leadership practice pushes beyond traditional client‑centered models toward community‑centered approaches pushing organizations towards a more expansive sense of accountability to the communities they are meant to serve by elevating both lived experience and practitioner innovation as evidence; reconciling quantitative and qualitative ways of knowing, and situating scientific rigor within transformative ethics. At Casey House, his teams have inaugurated a client-advisory infrastructure that directly links lived experiences of marginalization to strategic decision-making; scaled a peer support program that enables inclusive access to care for equity-denied communities, improved point‑of‑care equity data capture to over 90%, to integrate structural determinants into clinical decision‑making, and co developed an evidence-based food philosophy that demonstrates the provision of food as a significant lever of equity-focused health care.

As an Affiliate Fellow at TMU’s Canada Excellence Research Chair on Health Equity & Community Well-Being, Yasser co-leads longitudinal mixed-methods research on HIV prevention and care centering structurally marginalized communities. His ongoing partnerships with UHN’s Institute for Education Research (TIER) and UofT’s Centre for Advancing Collaborative Healthcare & Education (CACHE) underpin an emerging research program mobilizing knowledge for socially conscious health professions practice. This program situates adaptive expertise, critical reflexivity, and intersectionality as integrated competencies required for health professions practice to remain critically focused amid increasingly regressive social and health care policies locally and globally.