Dean’s Welcome: Newest DLSPH Faculty Members
September 15/2025
The following message was sent to the DLSPH community announcing the hiring of our new faculty members, Aasthaa Bansal and Alexis Reeves.
Dear DLSPH Community,
I am pleased to share that we have two new faculty members joining DLSPH this fall. Associate Professor Aasthaa Bansal holds an appointment with the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME), and Assistant Professor Alexis Reeves holds a joint appointment with the Public Health Sciences (PHS) and IHPME. Both come to us with exceptional backgrounds in research, teaching and mentorship.
Associate Professor Aasthaa Bansal
Aasthaa has been named the Edwin S.H. Leong Chair in Data Science for Child Health at IHPME. In this position, she will lead innovative data science research in collaboration with researchers at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children, a child health equity research centre at U of T and The Hospital for Sick Children.
Aasthaa earned her PhD in Biostatistics at the University of Washington in 2011. Prior to joining U of T, she was a Professor at the Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy and Economics Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle and a Joint Associate Professor in the Division of Public Health Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. She was also a Visiting Scientist at Child Health Evaluative Sciences at The Hospital for Sick Children from 2023- 2024.
Her research focuses on advancing data-driven decision-making for health policy and clinical care, with a focus on equity. Her research interests include prediction modeling for sequential decision making, comparative effectiveness and outcomes research using large healthcare databases, addressing missingness and bias in longitudinal patient data due to intermittent follow-up, and addressing algorithmic fairness to reduce disparities in healthcare decision-making. She also has extensive experience with health services research focusing on survival, costs, resource utilization, and financial toxicity among cancer patients, as well as investigating disparities in treatment and outcomes.
Assistant Professor Alexis Reeves
Alexis has been named to the Association of Volunteers – Maureen & Philip Green Chair in Health Equity (joint between the University of Toronto and Women’s College Hospital) for a five-year, renewable term.
She earned her MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from UC Berkeley, PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan in 2021 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health.
Her research focuses on the “causes and consequences of early health deterioration and aging for minoritized populations, integrating women’s specific health risks, and utilizing the methods required to tackle bias, to advance health equity and support minoritized populations to thrive as they age.” Alexis was a lecturer for classes such as “Introduction to Race/Ethnicity and Health,” “Introduction to Epidemiology” and “Life Course Theories for Epidemiology” at University of Michigan, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.
Please join me in welcoming the newest additions to our DLSPH community.
Sincerely,
Adalsteinn Brown
Professor and Dean
Dalla Lana School of Public Health | University of Toronto