On March 8, 2024, the University of Alberta will join the world in celebrating International Women's Day. This global day of recognition celebrates the achievements of all women and girls, raises awareness against bias and encourages people around the world to take action toward a more equitable global community.
To celebrate this year’s theme, Invest in women: Accelerate progress, we are revisiting the stories and achievements of eight of the many women who are always seeking, always challenging and innovating in their fields.
Linda Gorim
Linda Gorim is an agronomist and the Western Grains Research Foundation Chair in Cropping Systems. She is working to solve the complex issues facing our crop producers. Looking at how past students learned agronomy from textbooks or lectures, she saw a need for experiential learning. These days, she is ensuring students get field experience and is bringing agronomists and farmers into the classroom. Linda is currently working with Miles Dyke on a project looking at fertilizer recommendations for crops following drought.
Sherilee Harper
Sherilee Harper is the Canada Research Chair in Climate Change and Health and Canada’s only representative on the United Nations’ 34-member Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bureau. Her research investigates associations between weather, environment and health equity in the context of climate change. She collaborates with partners across sectors to prioritize climate-related health actions, planning, interventions and research.
Lindsay LeBlanc
Lindsay LeBlanc is a physicist who leads a national collaboration exploring both fundamental research and practical applications of next-generation quantum computing networks. Lindsay is the Canada Research Chair in Ultracold Gases for Quantum Simulation.
Jasmine Maghera
Jasmine Maghera is a PhD student in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry using her skills as a researcher, advocate and artist to build a better future for people like her who live with Type 1 diabetes.
Faith Majekolagbe
Faith Majekolagbe’s wide-ranging interests include advocating for stronger international human rights law to prevent health inequities caused by vaccine distribution worldwide, to giving her students real-world experience in offering free legal advice to emerging businesses and non-profits. Faith is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at U of A and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Zahra Nazari
After fleeing her home country of Afghanistan in 2021, Zahra Nazari is now an ambassador for a global movement to narrow the digital gender gap for women. Zahra is a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Engineering, working on applying machine learning techniques to the energy sector, particularly for charging electric vehicles. The rest of her day is spent working on a project closest to her heart: helping Afghani women continue their education in STEM fields and find remote work online.
Violet Okemaw
Violet Okemaw is the curriculum director of the Supporting Indigenous Language Revitalization (SILR) project and an Anishinaabemowin/Ojibwe speaker. Amongst many educational work experiences in Manitoba and Alberta for the past 39 years, Violet graduated with a PhD degree in 2019 from the University of Alberta.
Jennifer Yip
Jennifer Yip is an undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering. She served as a mission specialist for Mission SpaceWalker, a team that flew their robotics experiment as part of the Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment held by Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) on the National Research Council's Falcon 20 aircraft.