Panelists (in order of appearance)

Margaret Heckel

is the author of the bestseller So regiert die Kanzlerin. In her reportage on Angela Merkel, she drew on her many years of experience as a political and business journalist, most recently as head of politics at Welt, Welt am Sonntag and Financial Times Deutschland. Since 2009, Heckel has focused on solutions for demographic change and the changing world of work. In 2012, she published Die Midlife-Boomer: Why it was never more exciting to get older, followed a year later by Aus Erfahrung gut. How Older People Are Innovating the World of Work.

Janice Stein

is the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. Janice Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the co-author, with Eugene Lang, of the prize-winning work, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar; her most recent book is Diplomacy in the Digital Age.

Susy Hota

is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Toronto and the Medical Director of Infection Prevention and Control at University Health Network in Toronto, Canada. Her academic interests include emergency preparedness for infectious diseases, management of Clostridioides difficile infection and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Hota has played pivotal roles in regional and provincial pandemic response and has been frequently featured on national media.

Carolyn Abraham

is a journalist, author and public speaker. She was the senior medical reporter for The Globe and Mail for 14 years and won three National Newspaper Awards for her work on diagnosing bipolar disorder in children, cancer research and ethical issues in genetics. Her books include Possessing Genius: The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein’s Brain and The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes that Bind Us. Both were finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. Carolyn continues to write on the ethical implications of scientific advances, and most recently on the social impacts of COVID.

Daniel Müller

is Head of the Pharmacogenetics Research Clinic at the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH, and Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Dr. Daniel Mueller’s overarching goal is to improve drug treatment of psychiatric disorders. Dr. Mueller is a member of the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium, which is developing guidelines to use genetic information for psychiatric drug treatment.

Ellen Gute

received her PhD in 2020 in Physical and Environmental Sciences from the University of Toronto where she investigated ice forming processes in clouds. Prior to her graduate studies in Canada, she did her bachelor and master level studies at the University of Mainz in Germany where she graduated in Meteorology. Following her PhD research, Ellen began a Canadian Science Policy Fellowship.

The symposium is coordinated and co-presented by the 2021/22 William Southam Journalism Felllows at Massey College

Wency Leung

is a Toronto-based health reporter for The Globe and Mail, and is part of a team of journalists currently covering the COVID-19 pandemic. She has a special interest in reporting on brain health, including how various aspects of the pandemic have affected people’s mood, senses and cognition. She is particularly drawn to stories about families and individuals living with dementia, substance use and addiction, and loneliness – and about the scientists and clinicians striving to help them. Prior to joining The Globe, she worked at The Prague Post, The Vancouver Sun, The Cambodia Daily, and the Reuters news agency (now Thomson Reuters).

Michael Barclay

is the author of the acclaimed 2018 national bestseller The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, and co-author of Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-95 (2001; rev. 2011). He was chief copy editor at Maclean’s from 2008-2017, associate producer at CBC Radio Two’s Brave New Waves (2003-06), and a freelance writer for the Globe and Mail, New York Times, Exclaim, Eye Weekly and others. For almost 20 years, he had a weekly column in the Waterloo Region Record. His new book, Hearts on Fire: Five Years That Changed Canadian Music 2000-05, is due in spring 2022. He plays accordion and saxophone in rock, folk, wedding and klezmer bands.

Jon Montpetit

is an award-winning digital journalist at CBC Montreal. He has spent the last several years reporting on Quebec politics, and has written extensively about the province’s “new nationalism,” its secularism debates, and the rise and fall of far-right groups. Before joining CBC, he worked for The Canadian Press, covering the war in Afghanistan and the earthquake in Haiti. He holds graduate degrees in political science from the London School of Economics and McGill University.

on rise of far-right.

Rebecca Collard

is a Canadian broadcast journalist and writer based in Beirut, who has covered the Middle East for more than a decade. She reports regularly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), filing news and features for radio and television. Her analysis and long-form narrative work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Time Magazine, The New York Times, among other outlets. She has covered the Arab Spring and its regional repercussions, the rise and fall of ISIS, and the mass migration spurred by the resulting conflicts.

Patrick Egwu

is a Nigerian freelance investigative journalist. His work on human rights, social justice, migration, and global health in sub-Saharan Africa has been published by Foreign Policy, NPR, Daily Maverick, Christian Century, America Magazine and elsewhere. Patrick recently completed an Open Society Foundation fellowship on Investigative Reporting at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He also has master’s and bachelors degrees from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In February, he won the 2021 International Center for Journalists’ Global Health Crisis Award for Covid-19 reporting.