Their hard work and contributions to their respective fields have earned Sondarjee and Edwards the Early Career Researcher of the Year Award, presented by uOttawa’s Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation.
Jodi Edwards, Faculty of Medicine
Jodi Edwards, associate professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health, leads research on the connection between the brain and the heart. Her work focuses on identifying novel heart-related markers to predict the risk of stroke and dementia. She’s working on improving early detection of strokes and developing screening tools for neurological disorders in heart failure patients. Her research is creating new insights for the Brain-Heart Interconnectome program to turn data into real-world health-care solutions.
Scientist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Edwards is one of the world’s leading experts in the use of non-invasive brain stimulation with magnetic fields to help stroke recovery. She’s also a principal investigator on the Canadian Platform for Trials in Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (CanStim). By developing and testing new predictive tools and algorithms, she’s making groundbreaking progress that has a direct impact on health-care policy and practice.
“My research focuses on identifying early predictors of risk to extend the window of prevention before life-altering health events arise.”
Jodi Edwards
— Associate Professor, School of Epidemiology and Public Health
“I’m passionate about this research because brain and heart health impacts the lives of all Canadians,” she says. “My research focuses on identifying early predictors of risk to extend the window of prevention before life-altering health events arise, in order to improve brain and heart health across the lifespan for all Canadians.”
Since joining the Faculty of Medicine in 2018, Professor Edwards has been a role model for women in science, technology, engineering and math. She prioritizes equity, diversity, inclusivity and accessibility (EDIA) principles in her clinical trials and research. She’s the nominated principal investigator on StrokeCog, a national training platform that seeks new approaches to training on stroke clinical trials — approaches that directly embed EDIA at every stage. This will create sustainable change in the systems surrounding how clinical trials are designed and run in Canada.
Her work also focuses on how the role of sex, gender and social factors influence health. She aims to address the gap in understandings of women’s unique risk factors for cardiovascular disease. This includes unrecognized sex-specific risk factors, such as high blood pressure disorders during pregnancy. These conditions can make women more likely to develop atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can raise the risk of stroke and complications, heart disease and poor outcomes for mothers who have had a stroke.
Given that women’s health has historically been overlooked in research, she emphasizes the importance of women advocating for their own health and for participation in medical research. As an executive committee member with the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Alliance, she’s committed to improving women’s cardiovascular health and reducing health disparities.
Sharing her research and discoveries with the public is a top priority for her. She has published 72 peer-reviewed manuscripts, with over 4,088 citations. Her commitment also shines through in her mentorship of supervised students and her pan-Canadian collaborations.
Maïka Sondarjee, Faculty of Social Sciences
Maïka Sondarjee has been a professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies since 2020. She explores power dynamics in development through a feminist and decolonial lens. International development is often seen as a process of working to improve living conditions around the world, but power relations between countries are also at play in these efforts.
Professor Sondarjee’s research examines the intersection of issues related to equity, diversity and inclusion; gender; and social justice. Her work is based on four major themes: how organizations such as the World Bank operate, how some voices are wrongly overlooked in international relations and organizations, how inequalities manifest themselves in international co-operation and how white saviourism influences international development. By white saviourism, she means a tendency for Western development initiatives to be imposed on communities in the Global South, without consideration of these communities’ knowledge and needs.
“Understanding the world and all the inequalities that have been perpetuated in it gives us better tools to create a better world.”
Maïka Sondarjee
— Associate Professor, International Development and Global Studies
“I’m passionate about this research for two reasons,” she says. “First, I try to get a better understanding of the world, in all its complexity. Second, understanding the world and all the inequalities that have been perpetuated in it gives us better tools to create a better world.”
Sondarjee is committed to democratizing knowledge and breaking down barriers between academics and laypeople to pave the way for major social change. To fuel that change, she applies a critical analysis framework to power relations and global inequalities. Discourse and content analysis methods allow her to gain insight into the dynamics of international co-operation and racial and gender inequalities. Sharing her findings in five books, nine scholarly articles and eight book chapters published in both official languages, she promotes more accessible and inclusive knowledge to spread those findings as far as possible.
Sondarjee is very active in the public sphere, having written over 60 opinion pieces and done hundreds of media interviews. Organizations and government departments alike seek her out for her analysis of race-, gender- and development-related issues. She also shares her expertise internationally via conferences and collaborations. As another way of fulfilling her commitment to knowledge transmission, she mentors students as well.
