About Us
We are a team of researchers who are working in partnership with Sunnybrook’s President’s Anti-Racism Taskforce (PART), the Indigenous Data Governance Table, the Black Data Governance Table and other Indigenous, Black, racialized and equity-deserving Sunnybrook workers, and equity leaders, researchers, and educators from other institutions, to inform anti-racism initiatives at Sunnybrook and beyond.
Meet our team
STUDY LEADS
Dr. Csilla Kalocsai
Dr. Csilla Kalocsai is a cultural anthropologist and education scientist at Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI). She is passionate about equity and social justice and hopes that her team’s research can contribute to meaningful change across the healthcare system. Her research program explores social justice efforts in health professions education and care, including anti-racism education in academic hospitals, patient/service user involvement in mental health professions education, and harm reduction education in the emergency departments. She increasingly uses community- based participatory research approaches to her work and relies on ethnography, narrative inquiry and arts-based methodologies. Her work has been published widely, including The Lancet Regional Health Americas, Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory and Practice, BMC Health Services Research, Journal of General Internal Medicine, BMJ Open, Frontiers in Psychiatry and Academic Psychiatry. She holds an MPhil in Gender and Culture from the Open University, UK and a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, US.
RESEARCH COORDINATOR
Dr. Oshan Fernando
Dr. Oshan Fernando is a research coordinator at Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) who received his PhD in
cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His areas of research interest include colonialism and
state formation, identity formation, the politics of memory, and medical education. At SRI he is involved in several studies including this one exploring the possibilities and limits of anti-racism education and praxis, and in another evaluating the Sunnybrook Program to Access Research Knowledge (SPARK) for Black and Indigenous medical students.
RESEARCH ANALYST
Kyla Simms
Kyla Simms is a Research Analyst at Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI)
and a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is a qualitative
researcher whose research interests focus on racialization, racism, generational
migration, Blackness, and national belonging. She holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from McMaster University. Currently, she is part of a study at SRI exploring the possibilities and limits of anti-racism education and praxis in health sciences centers, with the goal of fostering systemic changes within medical institutions.