Amandeep Bassi
Amandeep Bassi is a Ph.D. candidate in experimental psychology at the University of Ottawa. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Psychology from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her research interest is aligned with understanding community-living for persons with co-occuring mental illness and substance abuse disorders. She has gained direct experience with working on program evaluations in the areas of youth intensive case management and a multiagency evaluation of supportive housing in Ottawa, Ontario.
Katherine Bendell
Dr. Katie Bendell, C. Psych. (Supervised Practice) earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Ottawa. She provides psychological services to individuals with a wide variety of issues, including depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance use, relationship problems, and adjustment to life transitions. Dr. Bendell has a particular clinical interest in providing trauma-focused treatment to adults and older adults with lived experiences of trauma. In her work with The Royal's Operational Stress Injury (OSI) Clinic, Dr. Bendell provides psychological services to Veterans who are experiencing psychological distress as a result of operational trauma. Her research interests focus on using participatory action research methods to understand experiences of living in supportive housing with serious and persistent mental illness.
Lorraine Bentley
Lorraine Bentley has a Masters degree in Urban Planning from the University of Waterloo and has extensive experience in housing and social planning. She has both Canadian and international experience in researching, planning and implementing housing and community support services for the most vulnerable populations. She is the Executive Director of Options Bytown Non-Profit Housing Corporation, in Ottawa, an organization that provides housing and support services to people with a history of homelessness, addictions and mental illness.
As the Chairperson of Housing Plus: The Ottawa Supportive Housing Network, she is an advocate for supportive and affordable housing solutions to help end homelessness.
Joanne Bretherton
Joanne Bretherton joined the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York in 2005. Her research interests centre on evaluation, evidenced-based policy and comparative research. Her particular focus is on homelessness and housing poverty. Joanne is Co-Director of the Women's Homelessness in Europe Network (WHEN), which includes leading academics in the fields of homelessness and housing poverty from 12 European countries. A Japanese speaker, her comparative homelessness research has included a visiting scholarship to Japan. Joanne has directed and worked on multiple research projects on homelessness and Housing First in the UK and she has also led homelessness research in Ireland.
Rachel Caplan
Rachel Caplan received her M.A. in Early Childhood Studies from Ryerson University, and is currently a Ph.D. student in Community Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research interests are in child, family, and community mental health and homelessness, as well as early childhood education, health, and equitable access to high quality social services.
Rebecca Cherner
Rebecca Cherner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on the mental health, physical health, and housing of vulnerable populations, particularly individuals who are homeless or at-risk of homelessness. She is also involved in program evaluation with community organizations.
Susan Eckerle Curwood
Susan Eckerle Curwood has a PhD in community psychology and has led research studies on poverty reduction, housing and mental health, and youth homelessness. She is currently a knowledge broker at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
Henri Dorvil
Henri Dorvil, Ph.D., is a Full Professor in the School of Social Work at the l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). In 2014, He was named Emeritus member of l'Ordre des travailleurs sociaux et des thérapeutes conjugaux et familiaux du Québec. For over 20 years, he was researcher with the Groupe de recherche sur les aspects sociaux de la santé et de la prévention (GRASP-FCAR) at l'Université de Montréal and is currently an adjunct researcher with the social psychiatry division of the Centre de recherche de l'Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal (IUSMM).
John Ecker
John Ecker, PhD, recently graduated from the experimental psychology program at the University of Ottawa. His doctoral research focused on community integration among homeless and vulnerably housed adults. He is currently a research associate at the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include homelessness, housing, mental health, and the LGBTQ community.
Benjamin F. Henwood
Benjamin Henwood, PhD, is a licensed clinical social worker whose practice and research has focused on adults who have experienced homelessness and serious health conditions, including mental illness, physical disease, and addiction. Dr. Henwood served as the clinical director of a Housing First agency in Philadelphia and has conducted research on front-line provider perspectives. Dr. Henwood is currently an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California.
Jonathan Jette
Jonathan Jette is a PhD Candidate in the clinical psychology program at the University of Ottawa. His doctoral research is focus on the cost and cost efficacy of a Housing First intervention targeting homeless people with substance use disorder. He is currently doing a clinical internship at the University of Manitoba. His research interests include program evaluation, cost of services, homelessness, housing, mental health, and rural community.
Nick Kerman
Nick Kerman is a PhD student in clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa and formerly worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto as a research analyst. His areas of research focus on homelessness and housing, mental health, and support services.
Timothy MacLeod
Timothy MacLeod is a Phd Student in Community Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research is on Housing First and community integration for adults who have psychiatric disabilities.
Philip Mangano
Philip F. Mangano is Founder and President of the American Round Table to Abolish Homelessness. Prior to his work with the Round Table, Mr. Mangano was appointed by President George W. Bush to be the Executive Director of the White House United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. In that role, he shaped and led the national strategy to prevent and end homelessness from 2002-2009, including in the transitional phase of the Obama Administration. During that time, the first documented decrease in homelessness, a 37% decrease in street and chronic homelessness, was achieved.
Mangano has been recognized for his strategic leadership in applying business principles and practices to the issue of homelessness, including the application of cost benefit analysis to policy considerations. He has been recognized for his work with numerous awards ands honors from a variety of public and private sector entities, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, TIME magazine, International Downtown Association, the first International Homelessness Research Conference, and state and local organizations.
Over the past three decades, he has forwarded the cause of the abolition of homelessness across the world, invited to speak in Canada, England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and Denmark, at United Nations and European Union sponsored events at national meetings in a number of countries, and at Harvard, Oxford, and a number of university campuses in the United States and abroad.
Scott McCullough
Scott McCullough MCP is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Urban Studies (IUS), the University of Winnipeg. Scott's work at the IUS covers a wide range of housing and urban issues including housing and housing market dynamics, neighbourhood analysis, Aboriginal community development, urban core change, immigration settlement needs, and urban poverty. Recent work has focused on best practices in eviction prevention for those at risk of homelessness, and helping to coordinate Winnipeg's first Street Census of people experiencing homelessness.
Shannon McDermott
Shannon McDermott has ten years of experience working on applied and theoretical research projects in the fields of mental health, homelessness and ageing. Her research aims to understand how policy and practice can be structured to deliver the best care for people in the community. Shannon began her career as a social worker with Meals on Wheels in San Francisco before completing her PhD at UNSW Australia in 2007. She worked at UNSW Australia as a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences before joining the Cognitive Decline Partnership Centre at the University of Sydney as a Research Fellow.
Patricia O'Campo
Dr. Patricia O'Campo is Professor of Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and an adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and holds the Chair of Intersectoral Solutions to Urban Health Problems. She is co-lead on the University of Toronto's Healthier Cities Hub, a research and education unit dedicated to work in partnership with community organizations to improve the health of those residing in urban settings. As a social epidemiologist she has been conducting research on the social determinants of health and health inequalities for over 25 years. Dr. O'Campo's research focuses on upstream determinants of health, quantifying the impacts of structural issues and social programs, and working to propose concrete solutions.
Nicholas Pleace
Nicholas Pleace has been based at the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York since 1991. Since 2010, he has been part of the European Observatory on Homelessness, operating under the auspices of FEANTSA, the European Federation of Homelessness Organisations. He has written widely on homelessness and directed homelessness research for the Finnish, French and UK governments, along with multiple projects for homelessness charities in the UK, Ireland and France and work for the European Commission and OECD. With Joanne Bretherton, Nicholas undertook some of the initial research on Housing First in the UK and he has led systematic reviews on the use of Housing First models in the European contexts. He is the author of the forthcoming pan-EU guidance on Housing First, entitled Housing First Europe.
Jennifer Rae
Jennifer Rae is a PhD student in Experimental Psychology at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include community mental health and homelessness. Her doctoral research is focused on an outcome evaluation of a community-based intervention program for marginalized youth.
Reena Sirohi
Reena Sirohi is a registered social worker with an MSW who works at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto in community engagement, education, and research focusing on housing, homelessness, poverty, and their intersectionality with mental health.
Emmy Tiderington
Emmy Tiderington, PhD, is a licensed social worker with over a decade of direct practice experience in housing and case management services for individuals with serious mental illness. Her research examines "street level" implementation of best practices in mental health and housing services. Dr. Tiderington is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
John Trainor
John Trainor was a Program Director at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and worked in the areas of housing, income, and work. He retired in 2013. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and in 2015 was appointed as Chairman of the Ontario Mental Health Foundation. He is active internationally in the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and chairs the Advisory Committee of the Mental Health Initiative and is a member of the Global Health Advisory Committee for OSF.
Ken Wireman
Ken Wireman, MSW is the founding Executive Director of Main Street Housing, Inc. He received his Masters in Social Work from the University of Maryland, and has worked in the mental health field in various capacities for over twenty-five years. With a long history of providing and overseeing mental health services in many different capacities, he has a well-rounded perspective on Public Mental Health Services Delivery Systems and the needs of the people which it serves.
Ken has been a landlord at various times in his life since the age of sixteen, and has an understanding of the mission and goals of affordable housing systems. Main Street Housing, Inc. interacts with both housing and mental health administrations in order to acquire properties and help folks with mental illness successfully. Ken also serves as an adjunct professor for the University of Southern New Hampshire.
Stephanie Yamin
Stephanie Yamin, PhD, is an assistant professor at Saint Paul University in the Counselling program. She graduated from the clinical psychology program at the University of Ottawa. She worked for two years as a research associate at the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services at the University of Ottawa where she developed an interest in program evaluation. Her main research interests include vulnerable populations (i.e., homelessness and the older adult population) and examining specific programs that aim to increase quality of life and wellbeing.
