Biography:

Dr. Shahin Kassam is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia, School of Nursing, Capacity Research Unit under the mentorship of Dr. Vicky Bungay. Shahin’s emerging program of research centres on women living with the impacts and health sequelae of forced migration including gender-based violence, racial discrimination, and chronic health disease.

Framed by critical feminist approaches including intersectionality and post-colonialism, Shahin works toward inclusion of women living within intersections of race, class, gender, and migrant status. Her analytical lens locates and addresses broader interrelated structural violators including racism, classism, and sexism which shape women’s health and contribute to diminished timely access to health and social services.

Shahin engages in community-based research approaches that collaboratively generate meaningful research processes and findings informed by women’s experiences. Through advancing community engagement between health and migration sectors, Shahin’s research also advances migration health sciences through pushing antiquated discourse and policy boundaries that perpetuate women’s health inequity.

As a Health Research BC Trainee Award recipient, Shahin’s overarching research goals include developing a multi-pronged program of research that informs at least two domains of health and social services with women’s lived and living experiences: (i) program development and service delivery, and (ii) intersecting networks of local, national, and international policies where broad structural violators exist and perpetuate health inequity among women impacted by forced migration.