Meet Our Team
The Art of Creation Team is a team from individuals from various walks of life. While we live all across the globe, we are all connected through our interest in exploring how we can share scientific concepts with the public, specifically through art.
Mary Barker
University of Southampton, England, United Kingdom
Mary Barker is Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Science, University of Southampton UK and co-leads the Behavioural Science theme for the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre. Her research entails understanding and supporting behaviour change, primarily to improve nutritional status of young people before conception and during pregnancy and so address the public health implications of the developmental origins of health and disease. Mary runs a programme of work in both the UK and in LMICs aiming to engage young people in improving their diets and physical activity habits, combining social activism, one-to-one support and digital sources including smartphone games. She is adjunct professor at the University of Agder, Norway, and has honorary appointments at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and University College London.
Jordan Chin
McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
Jordan is currently completing her Masters of Public Health. Her thesis investigates how art-based methods can facilitate the uptake of Early Origins concepts and create community dialogue surrounding this topic. Jordan graduated from McMaster University in 2021 with a Bachelor of Health Sciences (Hons). She is passionate about interdisciplinary discussion and improving the public's accessibility to research. As a researcher, she has explored the use of art to teach empathy and the development of programs to improve teenagers and emerging adults' mental health during COVID-19. She has also fostered an information exchange between researchers and students as the Chair of the McMaster Child Health Conference from 2019-2021. In her spare time, she can be found drawing, planning her next travel adventure, or baking (probably something chocolate). Jordan is the project coordinator for the Art of Creation.
Gursimran Deol
McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
Gursimram graduated from McMaster University in 2022 with a Bachelor of Life Sciences. She completed her undergraduate thesis in the Sloboda lab investigating the impact of paternal obesity on placental growth and development and what happens when you intervene with taurine. She is currently completing her Masters in Health Science Education.
Sara Dickinson
Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sara Dickinson is the Manager of Education Outreach at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Director of AGH: In-Class, an innovative arts education program that partners teachers with Hamilton Artists to create and facilitate dynamic arts-based lessons that bring to life core curricular subjects like Math, Language, Science and Social Studies through Music, Visual art, Rap, Spoken Word, Drama and Dance. Sara was a principal artist at the Royal Conservatory of Music in the Learning Through the Arts program for over 15 years before moving to Hamilton to manage the program in South Central Ontario. She was very excited to join the AGH in 2018 and has grown the program to reach over 5000 students in Hamilton in 2019/20.
Stephan Dombrowski
University of New Brunswick, New Brunswick, Canada
Stephan is a Health Psychologist. He is interested in the development, testing and application of behaviour change theory and interventions for health, particularly in relation to aspects concerning behaviour change maintenance, and the use of evidence based behaviour change techniques. His research to date covers a range of health behaviours (e.g. diet, physical activity, health service use) and populations (e.g. members of the public, individuals with risk factors for health, or health care professionals). In his empirical work Stephan uses qualitative, quantitative as well as mixed methodologies.
Sophie Hogan
Sophie Hogan Photography, Ontario, Canada
As an artist, I take social issues and create photography based projects. Merging my photographs of subjects and their words generates an assortment of ideas about one subject. Water as a public right, body image, teens in rural areas are all subjects I have broached with the hopes that reflecting these ideas back to the community can somehow generate change.
The Water Protectors campaign was a direct response to the corporatization of water in my community. To see the campaign, please see the images below. You can click on the photo to enlarge it!
Luseadra McKerracher
Aarhus University of Advanced Studies, Denmark
Luseadra McKerracher currently works as a Junior Research Fellow at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced studies at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she leads a project called “Supporting Pregnancy fOOd and Nutrition Security (SPOONS) in marginalized Danish neighbourhoods”. SPOONS focuses on: documenting and measuring inter-neighbourhood variability in food as well as housing security of Danish neighbourhoods; exploring how neighbourhood and household food and housing (in)security in Denmark influence pregnancy health and health experiences; and identifying ways to support the health of pregnant people living in Denmark who face intersecting challenges related to socio-economic marginalization, racialization, and food and housing insecurity.
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Broadly, McKerracher’s research interests include biocultural and health equity approaches to understanding sexual and/or reproductive health, with a particular focus on nutrition during pregnancy. Beyond her role as an advisor and collaborator on the Art of Creation (AoC) project, she is running In addition to SPOONS and AoC, McKerracher, with collaborators in Canada, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, the UK, and the US, works or has worked on studies related to: pregnancy nutrition in Indigenous Fijians; infant feeding in Indigenous Maya-speakers from Guatemala; vulnerabilities in pregnant people and in teens in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; fertility patterns in Chile; and reproductive health in LGBTQ+ people in the US and Canada. You can read her latest academic publications here.
Tina Moffat
McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
Dr. Moffat's area of interest is nutrition and food insecurity as it relates to the social, cultural, and physical environment. Her research perspectives are grounded in biocultural and political-economic approaches. She is currently involved in research about knowledge translation and support for pregnant women regarding Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) as it relates to maternal diet and child health outcomes. This is a community study based in Hamilton called "Mothers to Babies" (M2B). As well, Dr. Moffat currently hold a SSHRC Research Engage Grant (2019-2020) to do research and evaluation of youth food programming at the Hamilton Community Food Centre (HCFC), part of a growing movement of Food Centres across Canada that move beyond charity models of food banks to support food insecure populations to access nutritious food in a dignified manner. Another recent project is about food security and dietary change among immigrants and refugees in Canada, based on a CIHR-funded research project called Changing Homes, Changing Food (2012-2015).
Beth Murray-Davis
McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
Beth is a midwife , educator and researcher interested in collaborative, person-centred care for complicated pregnancies, behaviour change related to nutrition and exercise during pregnancy, evaluation of alternative models of practice for midwives and gender affirming reproductive care. She is dedicated to research capacity building, mentoring midwives, conducting and disseminating research. She has worked as a midwife in Hamilton for almost 20 years.
Kym Rae
Mater Research Institute - University of Queensland, Australia
Associate Professor Kym Rae is the Principal Research Fellow in Indigenous Health at Mater Research Institute (appointed in 2020), collaborating with the Queensland Family Cohort team. Her outstanding track record in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research allows her to partner with co-design research projects which focus primarily on development programs that understand the origins of, and reduce chronic diseases which afflict Aboriginal people more commonly. Kym works collaboratively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to develop research programs using longitudinal cohort approaches. She has significant expertise in ArtsHealth and has delivered over 100,000 hours of health education using arts, and in collaboration with Aboriginal Elders, cultural activities.
Her work is multidisciplinary in nature, and she is internationally recognised for her extensive expertise in successfully developing cohorts with Indigenous community members. She is currently focused on developing strong relationships with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in QLD to form the foundation for successful research relationships for QLD families. Kym has received over $5.2 million dollars in grants towards her work researching with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. She is a Mid-Career Researcher, and is currently collaborating with researchers from South Africa, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Deborah Sloboda
McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
Dr. Deborah Sloboda is a Professor and the Associate Chair of Research in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, Canada She holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Perinatal Programming. Dr. Sloboda investigates how early life adversity impacts the risk of non-communicable disease later in life and in other studies, she works with expectant mothers and services that support pregnant women to improve diet, and body composition of women before and after conception. Dr. Sloboda leads the Art of Creation study.
Our team also includes:
Nicole Acupinpin, Cornelia Peckart, and Amy Thompson