The Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health & Sustainable Care is pleased to announce the recipients of our 2025 call for Graduate Fellowships: Temerty Foundation Awards in Climate, Health and Sustainable Care.
Five exceptional PhD students, bringing expertise from nursing, pharmacy, medicine (nutritional science), and public health, have been awarded graduate fellowships for the 2025–2026 academic year, with generous support from the Temerty Foundation.
The Collaborative Centre’s graduate fellowships support Student Training Program alumni and current students. The experience helps deepen their knowledge and expertise on sustainability in health — spanning topics such as climate and health, planetary health, One Health, ecohealth, political ecology of health, sustainable healthcare, and climate resilient health systems — as it relates to their doctoral research.
We warmly welcome Yasmin Aboelzahab, Antonia Di Castri, Aden Fisher, Sarah Jarvis, and Navisha Weerasinghe as they join the Collaborative Centre’s interdisciplinary community dedicated to advancing climate and sustainability action for health and health systems.
Meet our new graduate fellows:
Yasmin Aboelzahab, MSc
Yasmin is a PhD student at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. Her research explores the role of pharmacists in supporting newcomer international students as they transition to the Canadian healthcare system. Yasmin’s research also investigates the use of virtual care as a flexible, accessible, and scalable approach to raise awareness and provide health-related knowledge to international students. Her previous research explored decreasing psychological stress associated with the recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
Antonia Di Castri, MSc, RN
Antonia is a PhD student in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her doctoral dissertation looks critically at public health approaches to preventing tick-borne diseases using more-than-human theories of health rooted in epistemic, social and ecological justice. Her previous research has been in the areas of social and behavioural vaccinology looking at issues of access, consent, trust, healthcare professional culture, (mis/dis)information and vaccine policy.
Aden Fisher, MSc
Aden is a PhD student in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division. His doctoral research focuses on the implications of a health-supporting food system on dietary transitions and cultural food within the context of the climate crisis. His previous research focused on the relationship between youth food-climate activists and the City of Toronto as part of the Youth Climate Action in Toronto project partnership.
Sarah Jarvis, MSc
Sarah is a PhD student in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, Department of Nutritional Sciences. Her doctoral research examines human nutrition and dietary patterns at the intersection of population and planetary health, and tools to support evidence-based dietary guidance. Sarah is developing a comprehensive database to assess the health and environmental impacts of foods in the Canadian context using a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach.
Navisha Weerasinghe, MN, RN
Navisha is a PhD student in the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing. Her doctoral research critically examines the historical, policy, material, socioeconomic and environmental conditions that shape the use of gloves in hospitals settings. This includes understanding tensions between patient safety, hospital-based infection control and the medical device industry, as well as examining the decision-making processes that are mobilized to promote or discourage glove use in practice. Her previous research looked at mapping the existing evidence on the role and impact of plastics in health products and their packaging.