Farah Mawani

Brief Biography

Dr. Farah N. Mawani is a community-engaged scholar who focuses on systemic racism and discrimination as drivers of global, national, and local social and mental health inequities.
She specializes in social epidemiology, implementation science, and global, national, and local social and health equity solutions. Her global research program is shaped by insight from her lived experience of migrating to Canada from Kenya as a child combined with years of experience leading community-based participatory research while embedded in applied research, policy, community, and clinical environments.

She applies a life course approach to designing, implementing, and evaluating program and policy interventions to promote mental health, prevent mental illness, and support recovery among racialized immigrant and refugee children and youth, their families, and their communities. She has adapted her research program to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly widening social and mental health inequities. Her global research and teaching experience span Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Pakistan, India, China, Brazil, Colombia, United States, and Switzerland.
Her recent, current, and developing research projects include:

• Principal Investigator of a rapid review COVID-19 Economic Response and Recovery to inform the United Nations’ Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery in guiding the UN, governments, research funding agencies, and research institutions on increasing social and health equity in COVID-19 recovery.
• Principal Investigator of the Building Roads Together-Global Solutions Network (BRT-G), a community-health system-university partnership scaling, evaluating, and sustaining the Building Roads Together© (BRT) peer walking/rolling group program in Victoria, BC; Surrey, BC; Toronto, ON; and Bogotá, Colombia.
• Co-investigator of the CIHR-funded COVID-19 and Precarious Employment (COPE) mixed-methods research study examining whether the relationship between precarious employment and mental health differs for subgroups experiencing intersecting racism and discrimination based on age, migration status, gender, disability, and/or experience with incarceration.
• Principal Applicant of Brazilian Community Health Agents as COVID Recovery Agents of Change

She is currently on the PLOS Global Public Health Editorial Board as Academic Editor, Global Mental Health.

Research interests and supervision fields

Lived experience, community-led, community-embedded, trauma-informed, and decolonizing research approaches; knowledge synthesis; interdisciplinary quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research; implementation science; social and mental health inequities; macro-, community-, and family-level social determinants of mental health and well-being; systemic racism and discrimination as trauma; community responses to systemic racism and discrimination; migration and mental health; work environments and mental health; green space/blue space and mental health; walking peer support groups; intergenerational programs.

Sample Publications

Mawani FN, O’Campo P, Smith P. (2021) Opportunity costs: Underemployment, a determinant of mental health inequities between immigrant and Canadian-born labour force participants. Journal of International Immigration and Integration. Published Online: September 25 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-021-00896-0

Mawani FN, Gunn V, O’Campo P, Anagnostou M, Muntaner C, Wanigaratne S, Perri M, Ziegler C, An A. (2021). COVID-19 Economic Response and Recovery: A Rapid scoping review. International Journal of Health Services. 51(2): 247-260.

Mawani FN, Ibrahim S. 2020. Building Roads Together: A Community-based Walking and Rolling Peer Support Program for Inclusion and Mental Health. Canadian Journal of Public Health. 112(1): 142-151.

Wanigaratne S, Mawani FN (co-principal author), O'Campo P, Cole D, Ibrahim S, Muntaner C. 2020. A commentary in response to ‘characterizing risk of homicide in a population-based cohort’ (O’Neill et al, 2019). Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. 74(12): 977-978.

Flicker F., Mawani FN, Dellavilla, M. 2019. Reflections on Teaching, Learning and Doing Participatory Research. Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, vol 13.3: 293-302

Blanchette M-A, Lai J, Saari M, Aubrecht K, Bailey C, Cheng I, Embrett M, Ghandour EK, Haw J, Koval A, Liu R, Manhas K, Mawani FN, McConnell-Nzunga J, Petricca K, Syrowatka A, Sim M. Singal D. 2019. Making Contributions and Defining Success: an eDelphi Study of the Inaugural Cohort of CIHR Health System Impact Fellows, Host Supervisors, and Academic Supervisors. Healthcare Policy. Special Issue Training for Impact: Modernizing Health Services and Policy Research Training. Oct. 

Mawani FN, Gilmour, H. 2010. Validation of self-rated mental health.  Health Reports. 21(3): 1-15.