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Faculty of Health

Research Spotlight with Farah Mawani

September 17, 2025

Farah Mawani
Farah Mawani

Farah Mawani’s research is rooted in her lived experience and expertise as a social and psychiatric epidemiologist with more than 20 years of global, national and local experience in research and solutions. Before her appointment as an assistant professor in UVic’s School of Public Health and Social Policy, Mawani chose to spend years gaining community-engaged research, policy and practice experience to strengthen her research impact. In our first Research Spotlight Q&A, Mawani talks about her long career in public health and two major research projects she is undertaking to address social and mental health inequities.

Congratulations on becoming a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar! Can you tell us about your research program?

The overall goal of my research program is advancing an anti-racist approach to implementation research to reduce social and mental health inequities. I’m focusing on two key projects. One of the projects involves adapting, scaling, evaluating and sustaining Building Roads Together, an intergenerational, trauma-informed, peer walking/rolling program I designed to address social exclusion and mental health inequities experienced by racialized migrants in low-income urban neighbourhoods. I co-designed, implemented, and evaluated it in Regent Park, a Toronto neighbourhood with a high proportion of immigrants and refugees, undergoing a transformation from Canada’s first social housing development to a mixed-income community. The evaluation results were so powerful there was considerable demand to scale the program to other cities both within Canada and globally. We’re starting by scaling Building Roads Together in Victoria.

The second key project is the CIHR Health System Impact (HSI) Training Platform, applying a $2.4 million CIHR grant to developing and implementing training for CIHR Health System Impact doctoral fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and early career researchers.  I’m co-principal investigator and BC regional lead. I’ve also recently been designated equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility (EDIA) co-lead for the platform. This aligns with the central component of my research program to build capacity in anti-racist implementation science, and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognition of training and mentorship as valuable research output.

I understand you’re an alumna of the HSI program. Can you tell us more about your experience?

I was in the inaugural cohort as a postdoctoral fellow and received two fellowships back-to-back. For my first fellowship, I was embedded in a global health organization called Dignitas International and worked with health system leaders in Canada, Uganda, and Brazil conducting research on equity and inclusion in non-communicable disease strategies and policies.

For my second fellowship, I was based at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto (UHT), and affiliated with the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. During that time, I served on Unity Health Toronto’s Patient and Community Engagement in Research Committee (PCERC), advancing UHT’s approaches to community-engaged research, and collaborated with colleagues to develop a patient- and community-engaged research curriculum. Both of my mentors and institutions provided me with exceptional mentorship and support that continues to this day

Throughout both fellowships I also built strong, collaborative relationships with my cohort. We built on our experience collaborating on writing publications and grant applications to write our successful CIHR Health System Impact Training Platform grant. Our strong relationships are enabling our innovative and equity-focused training platform design and implementation.

I understand you were at St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. What was that like?

I’m an epidemiologist, so it was a strange combination of working in a hospital and immediately getting sucked into a state of emergency and becoming essential staff, who could be redeployed to frontline positions at a moment’s notice, having my expertise as an epidemiologist needed more than ever, and living with the intense challenges of the pandemic that everyone was. I ended up being needed for urgent COVID research, so very quickly pivoted to that.

For example, I was asked by the CIHR Institute for Population and Public Health to lead a rapid review to inform the United Nations Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery. We were asked to complete a review that would typically take at least a year in three weeks. Colleagues and I also designed and implemented community-engaged research to respond to urgent needs of communities most impacted by COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, I was also flooded with media requests to speak to dramatic inequities in COVID-19 incidence and impacts in Toronto, across the country, and globally.

You’ve had so many interesting experiences. How have these contributed to the place you find yourself now?

I took a long road to this academic position—driven by my lived experience of systemic racism, social and health inequities. Because of my lived experience, my main goal has always been to have an impact on reducing social and health inequities. To do that, you have to have an impact on policy change, health system change, or community change. I’ve always felt that the best way to understand these environments where I want to have an impact is to be embedded in them. So, I’ve chosen to spend years leading research embedded in global, national, and local policy, health system, and community environments. I bring the wealth of expertise and relationships I’ve built through those experiences to my research, teaching, and service at the University of Victoria.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Designing and conducting anti-racist research is an uphill battle, especially as a racialized, immigrant, Muslim woman experiencing racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia in my institutions, the academic ecosystem, and society as a whole. I do it, despite the risks, because systemic racism kills. Dismantling it is urgent and necessary and requires all of us to play a role to make it happen.