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Denise Gastaldo appointed director of the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research

June 25/2014

On July 1, 2014, Professor Denise Gastaldo will begin her term as director of the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research (CQ), a joint centre led by the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Bloomberg Nursing. With more than 800 members, 18 academic fellows, and connections with several countries, CQ is a unique hub for researchers and graduate students dedicated to developing and teaching qualitative methodologies applied to the health sciences.

Gastaldo served as CQ associate director since 2009, has taught hundreds of health sciences graduate students in methodology since 1999 and has supervised more than a dozen PhD students. She is an associate professor at the Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and cross-appointed to the DLSPH. Her research focuses on the health consequences of social inequity and examines how discourses, power relations and economic circumstances shape people’s health promotion opportunities.

For the last 20 years, Gastaldo has worked internationally to build capacity for health research and to develop critical, equitable approaches to produce transformative knowledge to achieve health for all. In the last few years, she has studied undocumented workers’ health, focusing on the demand for a cheap and highly mobile work force in high-income countries, such as Canada, which has created a large mass of residents without rights to health promotion or access to health care.