Third annual ‘Immigrant Women of Inspiration’ picks five brilliant women from academia

In recognition of International Women’s Day, March 8, Canadian Immigrant presents our third annual “Immigrant Women of Inspiration” special — for 2016, we chose the theme of immigrant women in academia. More than just professors, we picked five women from across the country who are pushing boundaries in education, in their passionate pursuit of knowledge, ideas and change.
These brilliant PhDs have different areas of study, but they all have inspirational stories and much wisdom to share: Ananya Mukerjee-Reed,Shalina Ousman, Parin Dossa, Leonie Sandercock and Purnima Tyagi.

Indian-born Ananya Mukerjee-Reed is dean of Toronto-based York University’s faculty of liberal arts and professional studies
Ananya Mukerjee-Reed
Dean in pursuit of justice
There aren’t too many immigrant women heading up university faculties in Canada, so it’s a notable achievement for Indian-born Ananya Mukerjee-Reed, who was appointed dean of Toronto-based York University’s faculty of liberal arts and professional studies last summer.
Mukerjee-Reed holds a bachelor of arts and master of arts in economics from Jadavpur University in Kolkata and a PhD in political economy and public policy from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She joined York University’s department of political science in 1995 as an assistant professor and later served as the department’s chair from 2011 to 2014.
Academia, you could say, is in her blood. Back home in Kolkata, her mother was also an academic and her grandfather, who retired from a senior position with the Indian government, built a school in a rural village, instilling in Mukerjee-Reed the importance of education for everyone.
“Kolkata is very well known for its academics. It’s a very culturally, politically and intellectually active city,” says Mukerjee-Reed. Growing up surrounded by the traditions of theatre, poetry and literature, Mukerjee-Reed was constantly engaged with political issues. “We were always taught to ask questions, not take anything at face value,” she says.
Serving others was also part of Mukerjee-Reed’s education. “My parents drilled into me that we were not only here to have a career and be successful, but to do something that served others,” she says.
“I went to an all-girls’ school, what we would probably now call a feminist school, but the message that we got is that we must develop an identity of our own. They very much encouraged us to have an identity, a sense of who we are, a great self-awareness so we could always have our feet firmly on the ground. And so no one can bully you into something you don’t want to do,” she says.
That strong sense of identity helped Mukerjee-Reed overcome the many challenges of being an immigrant in a new country where one’s identity is constantly being thrown into question. “I remained who I was in Kolkata, and that’s helped me through my journey,” she says.
Her strong feminist background also later shaped her studies in her chosen field of public policy. While on a sabbatical, after receiving her PhD, she went back to India and worked with one of the largest women’s movements in Asia. “It had around four million members who are women mostly from households below the poverty line,” explains Mukerjee-Reed.
This began a whole new field of study for Mukerjee-Reed on gender issues, social change, justice and sustainability. She became focused on investigating how political and institutional changes affected ordinary people, which then led her to co-found a research network at York called the International Secretariat for Human Development, a network that allows universities to pursue knowledge with the input and experiences of grassroots communities.
Some of the study areas she has focused on include justice for garment workers internationally, and its connection to policy gaps in countries like Canada, food justice and women’s solidarity movements in India, and women and patriarchy. “My teaching and research focus primarily on the theme of human development, broadly defined. The theme that dominates my current work is justice, particularly gender justice,” she notes.
Although Mukerjee-Reed has been successful as an academic, publishing two books and dozens of academic papers, she says she defines her success through the students whose lives she’s impacted. “When I hear students say, ‘I never thought I could do this,’ and I have some small part to play in them doing that, that is what gives me satisfaction,” she says.
Now, as York’s dean of the faculty of liberal arts and professional studies, Mukerjee-Reed looks forward to having the ability to provide students with a sense of empowerment, giving back what she gained as a young girl growing up in Kolkata. “I want students to be able to know for themselves that the four years that they’re spending here is a transformative experience and by getting an education they feel they can take on the world.”

Shalina Ousman runs a research lab associated with the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. Photo by Jose Soriano
Shalina Ousman
Researcher looking for answers
Shalina Ousman has a fascination with the unknown. As a scientist, she is constantly searching for answers. “Being the discoverer, finding out something for the first time that we never knew, is very thrilling to me,” says Ousman, who runs a research lab associated with the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. Her focus is on multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system that affects 100,000 Canadians.
Ousman immigrated to Canada from Guyana as a teenager in pursuit of a quality university education. “My parents were very education oriented and in the Caribbean we really didn’t have too many great options for university,” she says. Ousman attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for her undergraduate and master’s degrees, then McGill University in Montreal for her PhD, before landing at the University of Calgary.
Her interest in studying the disease known as MS started as a graduate student when she discovered there was a high incidence of the disease in temperate regions, but not in tropical regions. “Coming from the Caribbean, I was wondering why this would happen; why there was this difference geographically,” she says.
Asking questions like this is what Ousman loves most, and it’s why she knew she wanted to pursue a career in academia. “Intellectually I have complete freedom on the ideas that we think of and setting up these experiments, asking these questions that we don’t know the answer to,” she says. Doing innovative research that contributes new knowledge to society is the most rewarding part of Ousman’s work, and what keeps her motivated.
“You need to have a certain personality to do this,” she says. “I think you have to be very self-driven. You have to be competitive when it comes to funding. You have to work hard. And there’s a little bit of obsessiveness with it. I never stop thinking about science.”
As a woman in academia, Ousman admits she has struggled to balance her career and family. Although she hired a nanny to help care for her three-year-old daughter, scheduling can be a challenge. “Before she was born, I would be in the lab 11 hours a day and on the weekends also, but I can’t do that now otherwise I would never see her,” she says. Ousman keeps her lab hours to eight during the weekday and often works from home after putting her daughter to bed. “Basically I have no time for myself!” she says with a chuckle.
But the rewards have been numerous. Ousman is making great strides toward developing a new therapy to help MS patients. Recently, her research has focused on a protein called alphaB-crystallin. This protein is part of the body’s natural healing mechanism and exists in higher levels in MS patients, but for some reason isn’t able to fight the disease. The belief is that MS patients are generating antibodies that attack this protein, thus making it ineffective.
Ousman has experimented with injecting additional amounts of alphaB-crystallin into animals with an autoimmune disease and found the symptoms were reversed in these animals. The next step in her research is to work with humans to see if the process will have similar results.
Although Ousman is unsure whether injecting alphaB-crystallin will be used as a therapy for MS, she hopes that her work helps shed light on the disease. “I want to know that I’ve contributed in some way that benefits humankind; whether in providing knowledge that advances further research or actually discovering a therapy that can benefit MS patients,” she says.

SFU professor Parin Dossa acknowledges her mothers’ influence, Nabat –”As part of the pioneering migrant women, she has been the source of inspiration, wisdom and a pillar of strength throughout the course of my life.”
Parin Dossa
Anthropologist seeking social justice and equality
Parin Dossa’s immigration journey as part of the 1972 exodus of South Asians from Uganda has certainly informed her academic career in anthropology — broadly speaking the study of humanity. That refugee crisis was a time in humanity’s history that exemplifies the type of injustice that Dossa fights against as a professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University and associate member in the department of gender, sexuality and women’s studies.
“Being a third-generation Ugandan, it was very difficult for my family to leave our homeland. Our situation was rendered more difficult because our joint family was split: my sister, grandparents and I were granted Canadian visas. My parents and younger brother were sent to a refugee camp in England.  This is how we started our lives: separated and with challenges,” she says.
“The first few years were difficult as we sought to become acquainted with and adapt to a new environment,” adds Dossa, who came to Canada with a bachelor’s degree in English and history from Makerere University, Uganda, and a master’s degree in Islamic history from Edinburgh University. “I had planned to study further and I was fortunate as my husband motivated me to pursue a doctoral program at UBC,” she adds.
She chose anthropology as her area of study, with a focus on issues of social justice. “My own and my family’s experiences of displacement brought about by colonialism and ongoing imperialism has motivated me to explore issue of social justice and equality,” she says. Specifically, she has focused much of her work on Muslim women, migration, aging, health, and violence in war and peace.
“In today’s world of violence and militant global capitalism, we need to explore the life worlds and narratives of disenfranchised populations such as racialized minority women, older persons, persons with disabilities and others who have been socially marginalized,” she explains. “And, based on our research findings, we need to put forward alternative ways of being for progressive change.”
She has brought forward such knowledge not only in the classroom, but at more than 30 conferences, and in several published articles, videos and books, including Afghanistan Remembers: Gendered Narrations of Violence and Culinary Practices and Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: Storied Lives of Immigrant Muslim Women. She has also worked with an international organization training and mentoring researchers on issues of disenfranchisement and social justice in countries including Syria, Iran, Tanzania, Afghanistan and Pakistan. All her writings and teaching are geared toward effecting progressive social change, and she encourages her students to do the same, starting within their own communities.
“I encourage my students to work toward peace, equality and social justice. And our starting point must always be our immediate realities. We need to recognize the interconnection between the local and the global … how the impact of global issues are felt locally in the context of our everyday lives” she says. “It is in this context that we can explore avenues for a just world.”
Dossa adds that her sub-discipline of feminist anthropology is committed to advocacy and activist work, which requires working collaboratively with people at the grassroots level as well as with stakeholders. “In my work, I seek to open spaces for conversations and dialogue.”
In so doing, she has given a voice to the stories of so many who would normally go unheard.

UBC’s Leonie Sandercock is a champion of community-based action research using media like film to tell stories.
Leonie Sandercock
Academic pursuing research through stories
It had never occurred to Leonie Sandercock that she would one day move to Canada to teach at the University of British Columbia in the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP). Frankly, the Australian-born Sandercock didn’t even believe that academia was for her. “My first goal was to be a phys. ed. teacher,” she says with a laugh. “I lived for sport.”
But once she started studies at the University of Adelaide — the first person in her working class family to do so — she says, “I got excited about learning and finding out about the world. Sandercock earned a coveted first-class honours degree in history and was expected to apply to Oxford, but didn’t. “I didn’t see the use in a PhD. I wanted to do something useful.”
But her mentor convinced her to pursue a PhD anyway, but in Australia and in the emerging research field of urban planning. “He made the argument that one of the problems of cities is that decisions about their urban development were being made by engineers, architects and surveyors. Instead, it is people with a more humanist education that should go into urban planning,” she says.
Her post-doctoral goal then became to work in government to make a real difference on land policy in Australia. But while she was completing her dissertation, the labour government that was open to such ideas was deposed, along with the potential for her dream job.
She turned to an academic position and eventually became head of graduate urban studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, but still felt there was something more for her beyond the halls of academia. “I realized that as academics, we were only speaking to each other, but there was nothing applied [about my work],” she says. “I left like I was in an academic straightjacket.”
Fast forward to today, and Sandercock is a champion of what she calls community-based action research at UBC, where her academic research is applied or developed in the real world, using creative strategies like storytelling and multimedia.
So how did she get to this point? It started when the bright lights of Hollywood beckoned.
In fact, she had fallen in love with an urban planning academic from UCLA, John Friedmann, and followed him to California, where she became an instructor herself. She also took a master’s of fine arts in screenwriting, interested in sharing her ideas through the medium of film.
She had some success in Hollywood, found an agent and even sold some scripts, one of which was made into a popular TV movie, Captive. “I was convinced I was done with university!” says Sandercock. But she soon realized that the type of meaningful stories she wanted to write about weren’t high on Hollywood producers’ lists. “I realized I’m in another straightjacket here.”
When her husband retired from UCLA, they moved back to Australia so she could take an academic position there. It was also during this time when Sandercock published one of her defining books, Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities. But changing politics and funding saw her department dismantled, and she quit. “I realized I had to go back to North America.”
She was invited to do a speaking tour on her Cosmopolis book at several Canadian universities, which quickly led to a job offer from UBC. Although “Canada was not on my radar,” she was impressed by the university and what she calls its “enlightened” conversation around urban planning.
So she moved to Canada and was finally able to pursue academics in the practical way she had always wanted. She used her filmmaking skills to create an acclaimed film on the topic of immigration settlement called Where Strangers Become Neighbours.
“That led to the next film project; in a serendipitous way, a woman from Burns Lake [in northern B.C.] known as the anti-racism lady, was given a copy and she asked if I’d be interested in making a film about their [Aboriginal] community,” she says.
Sandercock was astonished to learn about the history and dispossession of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. “I couldn’t believe my eyes that this was happening in 21st-century Canada. It was a life transforming experience for me.”
And it brought about a change of direction in her work. In addition to working with First Nations’ communities on telling their stories through film, she has also developed curriculum for a new specialization at SCARP on indigenous community planning, done in collaboration with Aboriginal communities. “We’re now in the fourth year of our program. I’m really proud of it.”
Her next project is a dramatic film on the Haida Nation. “We are ready to go into pre-production and will be filming this summer.”
While Sandercock admits such community-based action research is not the easiest path in academia, “it is the most rewarding,” she says.

Purnima Tyagi is part of part of the Applied Research and Innovation Centre at Centennial College. Photo by Alessandro Shinoda
Purnima Tyagi
Entrepreneurial researcher innovates
Indian-born Purnima Tyagi is a PhD who has found an innovative role that crosses academia, business and science, as part of the Applied Research and Innovation Centre (ARIC) at Centennial College in Toronto. As the centre’s innovation program manager, Tyagi is focused on helping small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the health sector innovate their products through applied research and bring these products to market.
“More than 90 per cent of Canadian companies are SMEs and they don’t have facilities to do research in-house. We support companies, specifically those developing products and technologies in the wearable, interactive and mobile technology sector in health care.”
Tyagi inherited her love for science and research from her father, a civil engineer who dedicated his career to bring water to the arid Thar Desert in the western Indian state of Rajasthan. She keenly followed the role of scientific research in developing better, drought-resistant plants that could withstand the desert heat to feed India’s growing population.
After completing her doctoral studies in biotechnology at the University of Rajasthan, where she established a molecular research lab, Tyagi became a research associate with the reputed Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India’s largest research and development agency. For her research work in biodiversity and large-scale production of endangered plant species, Tyagi earned the Young Scientist Award from the Indian Botanical Society and the nation’s Women Scientist Award.
When she immigrated to Canada in 2009, she was determined to pursue her career as a researcher, and not lose the great momentum and reputation she had achieved in India. “When you come here you are just an immigrant. Some of the main challenges faced by an immigrant are cultural shock and initial entry in the work force, among other things,” she says.
Tyagi quickly enrolled in a post-graduate program in research commercialization and innovation at George Brown College and, upon graduation, was immediately offered a position in the college’s research department. She grabbed the opportunity.
There she developed research proposals and managed the work related to applied research commercialization, helping small businesses develop their ideas into marketable products and services. She was also a skilled writer of grant applications, further solidifying her profile in Canada’s innovation sector.
In 2012, Tyagi joined Centennial’s ARIC. “One of our key objectives was to serve the community’s SMEs to help them improve their productivity, open new markets and innovate products to enhance their prosperity and success,” she explains.
Tyagi says it’s an exciting time in applied research, especially for the public college system. Research has traditionally been the domain of the universities, but businesses are learning that colleges can do the same work quicker and more adroitly, she says.
“Ontario’s colleges are going the extra mile to support students and ensure they are ready for the job. The work we do here in ARIC helps students understand the role of applied research and how it promotes economic activity.”