Winner of the prestigious 2023 CIHR Trailblazer Award, Kate Storey has been named to Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100

Kate Storey, one of Canada's Most Powerful Women.

Kate Storey has been named one of Canada’s Most Powerful Women, joining an impressive list of extraordinary women who have received The Women’s Executive Network (WXN) Top 100 awards since its formation in 2012. The award recognizes women from across the country who make a transformational difference in their fields and actively shape a more inclusive future, especially in underrepresented areas.

The theme of this year’s award is “Like a Legend.” And Kate Storey’s career is certainly legendary. 

Earlier this year, Storey won the prestigious CIHR Institute of Population and Public Health (IPPH) mid-career Trailblazer Award, which recognizes exceptional contributions to population and public health research through leadership, mentorship, innovation and impact on policy and practice. And in 2022,  she ran down Mount Everest to raise funds for the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation. 

Storey is an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)/Public Health Agency of Canada applied public health chair and a Stollery Science Lab Distinguished Researcher. She is a member of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute and a scientist with the Centre for Healthy Communities where she leads the Settings-based Intervention Research through Changes in Lifestyles & Environments (SIRCLE) research lab.

After leading numerous studies on what it takes to create a healthy school community, Storey and her team at SIRCLE established the essential conditions for comprehensive school health — transforming the culture of schools, promoting healthy behaviours for students and improving academic outcomes. These essential conditions have been adopted into Canadian policy and practice as the Canadian Healthy School Standards. 

Storey and her team are empowering and inspiring youth to create pathways to holistic wellness.

“Facilitating a healthy lifestyle is much more than telling people: eat healthy, be active, stop smoking, get enough sleep, or be mindful. We need to create a culture of wellness for kids, their families and communities, and that requires systems-level change,” says Storey, who feels strongly that empowering youth and listening to their voices with an open heart is the pathway to health and health equity. 

Speaking about one of SIRCLE’s programs, Storey adds, “When a school principal said that the Indigenous Youth Mentorship Program is ‘the heartbeat of what reconciliation should be,’ I have never been more certain this is the future we need for our children and youth. And the future is now.”

Excerpts of this article were first published on July 13, 2023.