Brenda T. Poon, Ph.D. focused her masters and doctoral studies on services and supports for children with special needs then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in population and public health at the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) through the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She is a faculty member in the University of British Columbia’s School of Population & Public Health (SPPH) and also Research Division Lead at the Wavefront Centre for Communication Accessibility, a community-based charitable organization that supports Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing people to feel and be included, participate, and interact freely in society without communication barriers. Her academic-community partnerships focus on understanding ways that 1) community capacity and cohesion, intersectoral collaboration, and coordinated models of service delivery influence health and health inequalities, and 2) community-based knowledge creation can be applied to support best practices/policy and have meaningful impacts that address community priority issues and needs. Her research lab, the Community Research & Engagement Lab (CoRE-LAB), works closely with collaborators through participatory community-based knowledge-to-action research on community-level determinants of health and inequities and barriers to accessing services and supports. Her research lab has partnered extensively with the provincial government, regional health authorities, and diverse community and social service agencies to support provincial and community-based planning, implementation, and evaluation initiatives.
Learn more about Brenda and her research in this special profile.