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Dr. Naheed Dosani Dr. Naheed Dosani is a palliative care and family physician at Inner City Health Associates and William Osler Health System. He is the founder and project lead of Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless (PEACH), a mobile, shelter-based outreach program that delivers palliative care for Toronto’s most vulnerable individuals regardless of their housing status or factors such as poverty or substance use. This model of care has inspired similar programs in other cities across the continent. Raising awareness of the critical need to support access to palliative care for homeless and vulnerably housed people is one of Dr. Dosani’s passions. His advocacy efforts include education and research, an active social media presence and coverage in national print and broadcast media. In 2018, Canada’s Governor General, Julie Payette presented Dr. Dosani with a Meritorious Service Cross for being a trailblazer in caring for those who fall through the cracks of our healthcare system. In May 2019, Dr. Dosani received a humanitarian award from the Canadian Society of Palliative Care Physicians. |
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Sarina Isenberg Sarina Isenberg is a scientist at the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health System, and an assistant professor at the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Institute for Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Sarina’s research goals are to assess access to palliative care provincially and nationally, and design studies to improve access to and the quality of palliative care across settings (i.e., home-based palliative care, outpatient clinic, hospital-based consultations, and palliative care units) and for non-malignant populations (e.g., heart failure, lung diseases, and opioid use disorder). Sarina has been a co-principal and a co- investigator on 11 research projects (totaling C$996,000) supported by national and international grant funding agencies. She has published over 35 peer-reviewed publications (fourteen articles as the first author and four as a senior author). Sarina received her PhD at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Health, Behavior, and Society. |
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Dr. Stacey Pitsilides Dr. Stacey Pitsilides is a Senior Research Fellow at Northumbria University. She has curated various events for public engagement around death and technology and collaborated with Hospices, introducing co-design as a method to artistically work with the bereaved. Her research has featured in a range of festivals including Death: The Southbank Centre's Festival for the Living, The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, Internet Week Europe, FutureFest, the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the Southbank Centre’s Beyond Belief Festival and Dying Matters Week. She is the editor of a special issue on Networked Emotions for the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and been consulted by tech companies, such as Google, during their development of new digital legacy tools. |
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Donna Dooher
Donna’s been skipping the light fandango through the Toronto restaurant scene since she and her partner, Kevin Gallagher, opened the beloved Mildred Pierce Restaurant in the city’s west end over 30 years ago. Her background in the world of hospitality is vast; from teaching cooking both in studio (Cookworks) and on T.V. (Food Network show called The Cooksworks), to publishing cookbooks and collaborating with magazines (Out to Brunch and Wish/Market to Table Cookbook), to supporting the food community (National Chair of Taste Canada, Chair and CEO of Restaurants Canada) and all of this being done while she runs the renowned Mildred’s Temple Kitchen. Hospitality is at the heart of everything that Donna does. Some time ago she started to observe the important role hospitality played in ‘end-of-life’. Over the years, she has been supporting friends and clients by facilitating events that help them celebrate the lives they have lost and provide a way for all to hear the amazing stories of those beloved family members. This interest underscores what Donna’s end-of-life tag line says “How one leaves life on this planet speaks to how one lived life on this planet” |
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Elinor Keshet Elinor is a policy advisor and senior consultant at Ontario’s Policy Innovation Hub, an internal consultancy where she helps ministry clients tackle their complex policy challenges. As a futurist, Elinor created the Ontario government’s only ‘Introduction to Strategic Foresight’ course. She has helped over 500 public servants build internal capacity for futures thinking so government can respond more flexibly to change. In her previous role as an Innovation Strategist at Idea Couture, she applied service design and foresight methods to solve client challenges in fields like healthcare, insurance, and banking. Elinor has spoken at events like the Global Service Design Network Conference and Public Health Ontario’s Vaccine Symposium. She likes taxidermy, photography, and once biked from Toronto to Pittsburgh. |
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Julia Echevarria Julia Echevarria is a Los Angeles native and MFA candidate in ArtCenter’s Media Design Practices program. Her interest in exploring mortality as a subject for design is the catalytic outcome of experiencing the year of her mother’s tumultuous death simultaneously to the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Living through these events in parallel, she became sensitized to the unique practical concerns of planning for a good death in the 21st century, the symbolic prevalence of death in life, and the problematics emergent from failure to acknowledge these symbolic forces, let alone engage with them. In her graduate design work she has investigated the absence of death-salient communications in American culture and mainstream technologies. In particular, Julia is interested in situating interaction design at the intersection of humanistic research, decision-making tasks, computation, and death salience. |
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Burcu Turkay Burcu Turkay is a product and service designer with an MA in Sustainable Design from Kingston School of Art, London, UK and a BSc in Industrial Product Design from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. After working in various industries throughout her career, she focussed on investigating the role of design to tackle societal and environmental challenges. She is currently with Active Minds as a Lead Product Designer where she designs wellbeing products and services with and for people with dementia and their carers. Dying has always fascinated her as a design subject and her Masters graduation project approached the human body as a product of nature and investigated the sustainability issues around death and the death care industry. |
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Vickie Micallef Vickie was born and bred in the West End of Toronto. Vickie married Mike Micallef and lived with him for 48 years, travelling to England, Singapore, Grand Rapids Michigan and back to Mississauga. She had many careers due to the amount of travelling her and Mike did. Vickie’s philosophy on life is not to fear death. We are going to leave this earth at some time in the future so why worry? Instead, Vickie worries about living each day to the fullest. Vickie believes that life is an adventure and she intends to have as many adventures, as she can in her short time here on earth. Vickie has been a payroll clerk, Benefits Administrator, a computer trainer, IT Project Manager, UBER Driver and much more. Continuous learning is her mission. The most important of all these “adventures” was helping her husband, who suffered from Huntington’s Disease, and decided when to accept Medical Assistance in Death – known as MAID. CBC did a small story on their journey. Vickie wants to show the value of MAID to society, the relief it brings to both the suffering and the caregiver. |
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Kate Sellen Dr Kate Sellen is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCADU and Canada Research Chair in Health Design (Tier 2). She leads the Health Design Studio at OCAD U and was the inaugural director of the Health Design Master’s Program. Kate spent her early career as an interaction designer leading design research, digital strategy, and interaction design in the private sector. She now works on bringing an inclusive and interdisciplinary design approach to healthcare design challenges. Much of her work focuses on design for safety critical and on high sensitivity topics, including overdose and opiates, and communication at end of life. She previously held positions at University of Toronto’s Technology for Ageing Gracefully Lab, Knowledge Media Design Institute, and AT&T. |
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Rosemary Georges Rosemary has taken on various roles in health research for the past six years and has an interest in mental health research, social determinants of health, immigrant and minority mental health, and patient and family care for cancer patients. In 2018 she successfully defended her Master's thesis on the mental health needs of Syrian refugees and immigrants which was a qualitative investigation that explored the mental health perceptions, resources, and coping methods of Syrian migrants in Canada. Rosemary has a Bachelor of Science degree with Honours in Psychology and Health Studies (2015) from York University, and recently completed a Master of Science in Health Services Research (2018) from the University of Toronto's Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation (IHPME). Rosemary is currently managing dying and death projects at the SE Research Centre such as The Reflection Room® and the Palliative Approach to Care (PA2CARE) Curriculum Evaluation. |
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Paul Holyoke Dr. Paul Holyoke’s research interests include people’s experiences with the Canadian health system; evaluation of health care policies, programs and systems; the governance and management of health care organizations in Canada; and societal perspectives on health, health care, illness and disability. He has a Ph.D. in Health Policy from the University of Toronto, a MSc(Econ) from the London School of Economics, and a law degree from the University of Toronto. From 2005-2011, Paul served a 6-year term as a member of the Board of Directors of the Waterloo-Wellington Local Health Integration Network, and he chaired its Community Council. |
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Real Eguchi
Real Eguchi is a professional landscape architect and was the Managing Principal/ Creative Director of Eguchi Associates Landscape Architects/ bREAL inc. art + design from 1990 to 2019. Prior to becoming a landscape architect, he worked five years in sustainable architecture and interior design. Real has had a long-term interest in community, art and the alignment of ‘sustainable’ beauty with personal, social and environmental health. Through his landscape architecture/ art/ somatic-based health practice, Real explores loss, grief and connection and is inspired by the multiplicity of whole relationships that non-prescriptive, proximate landscapes can promote. Real has been a MAID witness since April 2017. He was the primary caregiver for his mother who experienced dementia for 5 years prior to her death in 2003 and considers this one of the most challenging yet beautiful periods in his life. In the community of East York where he resides, Real was instrumental in the development of a municipal, environmental advisory committee and was the founding chair of an environmentally based, community development corporation in the early 1980’s. Real believes that our inability to truly acknowledge our anthropogenic impact on Mother Earth is due to our inherent fear of nature and our ongoing culturally facilitated, shared trauma. |
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Frances Rawlings Fran Quintero Rawlings in a deeply curious innovator, researcher and systems thinker. She is passionate about working on projects that improve both the human and design experience, especially those at the intersection between social justice and broader systemic change. She’s currently works as a freelance design consultant and her diverse experience ranges from frontline community development to organizational strategy building, spanning across multiple sectors such as government, non-profits and healthcare. She is passionate about demystifying systems thinking, and creating bridges from bold ideas to action.She is passionate about community engagement and fostering important conversations around equity, fairness, wellness and gender through curated public installations and events.Fran recently completed her Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University of which she will be presenting the outcomes her research on designing more inclusive death and grief practices in western culture. In her free time Fran loves to dance, is an avid cyclist, and is an aspiring DJ. |
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Karen Oikonen As an Innovation Designer with The Moment, Karen is most interested in understanding the complexities of our human experience, within environments, systems, networks, and communities, as a catalyst for positive change. Equal parts designer and researcher, Karen has led projects in design research, service design and participatory design. Her work in end of life is motivated by a personal experience of loss and focuses on creating participatory experiences to explore death and dying. Karen collaborated with Kate Wilkes to host, Constellations: Exploring the Family Experience of End of Life at DesignTO in January 2019. Karen has a Bachelor of Interior Design from the University of Manitoba and a Masters of Design in Strategic Foresight & Innovation from OCAD University. She teaches design research and innovation at OCAD University and design research in the YSDN Bachelor of Design program at Sheridan College. Her blog Death, Dying and Design looks at death and dying through the lens of design. |
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