The RECOVER19 research team consists of the nominated principal investigator, 5 co-principal investigators, 9 co-applicants, 13 Canadian and 10 international collaborators, as well as 10-15 research assistants and research associates. Some of the team members’ biographies are provided below.
Co-Principal Investigators
Claus Rinner (Nominated Principal Investigator)
Dr. Claus Rinner is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Based on his degrees in applied mathematics, systems sciences, and geography, along with his interdisciplinary expertise in geospatial data analytics and decision support systems, Claus developed a critical perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic response since March 2020. He has written peer-reviewed publications, newspaper commentaries, and blog posts about misleading public health data and visualizations, elements of propaganda in the dominant narratives, and the lack of critical engagement among academics. Claus coordinates the RECOVER19 project and is most interested in the pandemic report cards, governance, and language case studies.
Claudia Chaufan
Dr. Claudia Chaufan is an Associate Professor of Health Policy at York University and past Fulbright Scholar. Based on her former medical career (Argentina) and later degrees in sociology and philosophy (USA), she became critical of the pandemic response around the launch of the global vaccination campaign. Claudia has since joined research groups examining clinical, sociological, geopolitical, and ideological aspects of this response. She has written about the framing of dissenting expert opinions as misinformation and the recent disregard for informed consent. As co-investigator, she is actively involved in case studies on governance in academia and on vaccine injuries.
Candice Chow
Dr. Candice Chow is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University. Before joining academia full-time, Candice was an industry veteran with over 25 years of progressive senior leadership positions in the area of strategic management. As a Chartered Director and a strategy scholar / practitioner, Candice’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of governance, leadership and strategic foresight. The COVID-19 crisis has brought to the fore issues around leadership, ethics and governance protocols. The lack of decision transparency and accountability in policy-making in organizations along with the growing influence of global institutions and corporate interests have become a major concern for Candice.
Cristian Rangel
Dr. Cristian Rangel is a Medical Sociologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Innovation in Medical Education at the University of Ottawa. His research maps the ways in which medical education actors and institutions engage with material, political and cultural forces – from individual encounters in clinics and learning institutions to interactions with groups of patients, communities, populations, public and private institutions, and the state. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cristian has written critically about the sustainability and equity of social control measures; the situation in long-term care homes; and the need to include the social determinants of health in modeling and decision-making.
Elaine Wiersma
Dr. Elaine Wiersma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences and a researcher with the Centre for Education and Research on Aging & Health (CERAH), Lakehead University. Her primary area of research is with older people and people with dementia who were significantly impacted by the pandemic and the pandemic response. She has also done work in public health ethics, and became concerned by the lack of a fulsome discussion of the ethics of the pandemic response in Canada, and specifically Ontario, as well as the collateral harms on a number of vulnerable populations.
Y. Yvon Wang
Dr. Yvon Wang is an Associate Professor in the University of Toronto’s History Department. Born in Beijing and raised in the southern U.S., they were an early critic of the authoritarian, technocratic elements of the global COVID-19 response. In addition to moderating online spaces for critiques of pandemic policies, they are an associate with the UK-based nonprofit Collateral Global. Their research interests include the histories of gender and sexuality, media, censorship, and law enforcement’s impacts on everyday lives. They are working on case studies related to narratives of SARS-CoV2 in the press in Chinese- and English-speaking areas, as well as on the impacts of pandemic policy on particular communities: students, artists/musicians, and queer/trans people.
Co-applicants
Joe Aversa
Dr. Joe Aversa is an Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ted Rogers School of Retail Management in Toronto, Canada. His current research interests include retail location decision-making, big data analytics, retail planning and location strategy. He received his PhD from Wilfrid Laurier University, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies.
Daphene Francis
Ari Gandsman
Jan Klakurka
Jan Klakurka is co-founder and principal of Elevae Strategic Advisory focussing on foresight & futures, governance and strategy. Jan remains a tenured Associate Professor and Past Chair (2015-2021) of Management and Organizational Studies at Huron University College, Western University, and has taught for nineteen years at the University of Toronto. Jan holds several professional designations including a C. Dir., CPA, CA, CMC, and is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists. Jan’s professional background spans over thirty years in industry, professional services and academia. His research is directed toward the intersection of strategic planning, lucid foresight and governance, with recent work including a paper in the journal Foresight on the future of higher education, a keynote covering consulting by academics, book chapters on values and foresight-infused governance and outcome evaluation, and as expert for development of an open course on managing complexity for the 21st century.
Laurie Manwell
Dr. Laurie Manwell is a contract faculty member at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph teaching and conducting research with a cell-to-society approach. Her expertise spans the natural and social sciences, including learning and behaviour, cellular and molecular biology, comparative neuroanatomy and physiology, psychopharmacology, and several areas of psychology including clinical, social, cognitive, and political psychology. Since March 2020, Laurie’s work has focused on the impact of the pandemic restrictions on cognitive-behavioural brain reserve. She recently published a model in the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience that demonstrates that excessive screen time on smartphones and laptops increases the risk of learning and memory deficits and mental illnesses including addiction, all of which are known predictors of mild cognitive impairment and dementias later in life. Within RECOVER19, Laurie is also actively involved in research on the pandemic report cards, governance, and vaccine injuries.
David Speicher
Dr. David Speicher is a molecular virologist who has conducted research on a range of infectious diseases in Australia, India, Kenya, Cambodia, and Canada. He has a passion for translational research and several international collaborations surrounding the accurate diagnostics and surveillance of infectious diseases. His research expertise has touched on saliva as a diagnostic fluid, oral cancers, sexually transmitted diseases, as well as C. difficile infection and faecal transplants. Most recently, David has confirmed the adulteration of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 modRNA vaccines by showing the high level of plasmid DNA in both Pfizer and Moderna products and the presence of SV40 promoter and enhancer in the Pfizer vaccine. This work has been mentioned worldwide, including the USA senate and European parliament. Follow David on Substack: https://substack.com/@drdavidspeicher
Andrea C. Valente
Dr. Andrea Valente is a contract lecturer in the Faculty of Education at York University and sessional instructor at OCAD University teaching undergraduate courses in writing and composition, philosophy of education, intercultural pedagogy, educational psychology, and research methods. Dr. Valente’s post-graduate studies in Brazil and Canada allowed her to pursue interdisciplinary research in the field of the humanities and social sciences, from which she developed her expertise in rhetoric and discourse studies, media and popular culture, teaching and learning theories, and neuro-humanities. Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Valente has been interested in the symbolic meaning and the perlocutionary effects of wearing face masks as shown in public health campaigns from Brazil such as #mascarasalva. Within RECOVER19, Dr. Valente is involved in further investigating the representation of face mask wearing in children’s games and pandemic literature not only grounded in rhetorical and discourse methodologies, but also by utilizing theoretical frameworks that involve moral education, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and ethics of care.
Don Welsh
Jens Zimmermann
Collaborators
Douglas Allen
Alexander Andrée
Rafael Gomez
David Haskell
Anna Koné Pefoyo
Toula Kourgiantakis
Agnes MacDonald
Mary Sharpe
Dr. Mary Sharpe is an associate professor and past director (2010-2015) at the Midwifery Education Program at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is a registered midwife in Ontario with over 30 years clinical experience. Her respect for the physiological processes of pregnancy, birth and lactation, the strength of natural immunity, the benefits of preventative measures and harm reduction strategies has guided her activism and research around midwifery models, the caregiver-client relationship, home birth, and informed choice aligned with evidence-informed practice. Throughout her career Mary has witnessed under-researched ‘medical’ advice that has significantly undermined the immediate and long-term health and safety of pregnant women and their infants. As a collaborator on this project, she brings her deep concerns about the effect of the official response to the “Covid 19 event”, especially in these populations.
Dan Smilek
Travis Smith
Shahzia Teja
International collaborators
Yuri Biondi
Dr. Yuri Biondi is senior tenured research fellow of the CNRS, the National Centre for Scientific Research of France, in the IRISSO institute at University Paris Dauphine PSL. Graduate of the Bocconi University of Milan (DES), the University of Lyon (DEA, PhD), the University of Brescia (PhD) and the University of Paris I Sorbonne (HDR), he is founding editor of the Journal “Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium” and convener of the SASE Research Network devoted to “Accounting Economics and Law.” Yuri also serves as chairman of the Special Interest Group (SIG) devoted to ‘Business and Financial Law’ and former Council Member of the European Law Institute (ELI). His research program focuses on the relationship between quantification instruments, management and regulation.
Wallace Bulimo
Christine Clarke
Joshua Guetzkow
Oliver Hirsch
Dr. Oliver Hirsch is a Professor at FOM University of Applied Sciences, Siegen, Germany. Based on his degrees in psychology, along with his interdisciplinary expertise in data analysis and research methods, he developed a critical perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic response since March 2020. He has written peer-reviewed publications, newspaper commentaries, and blog posts during the COVID-19 pandemic response about non-evidence based non-pharmaceutical interventions, misleading public health data, elements of propaganda in the dominant narratives, and the silencing of critical academics.
Nada Kakabadse
Thirusha Naidu
Simon Rüegg
Adam Szymanski
Adam Szymanski holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism: Depression and the Politics of Existence (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). As a critic of medical power with an awareness about the long history of abuses of medical power, Adam took a stand against the 2020-2023 state of exception with essays such as “On the Scapegoating of the Unvaccinated” and “Existential Health in an Age of Medical Totalitarianism.”
David Thunder
Research staff
Onyinyechi Duru
Bela Georgiev
Bela is an applied microeconometrician specializing in development and Indigenous economics. Her research focuses on food subsidy programs and their impacts on traditional harvesting activities in remote northern communities in Canada. She also explores the integration of machine learning with econometric methods to better understand complex social and economic issues. As a Research Assistant within RECOVER19, Bela leads a study on misinformation governance and the development of an observatory for post-publication review of Covid-related articles.
Mariko Uda
With a passion for the natural world, health and community, Dr. Mariko Uda has a broad background in biology and chemistry (Honours B.Sc., University of Waterloo 1996), architecture (certificate, Toronto Metropolitan University 2006), and civil engineering (B.A.Sc. and Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2004 & 2016). Her Ph.D. research focused on how to design cities for resilience to shocks and stresses and gave her an appreciation of the behaviour of complex systems. Mariko has worked in laboratories and in utilities (Ontario Power Generation), architecture (Stevens Burgess Architects) and engineering (Rivercourt Engineering) firms and has volunteered in various grassroots initiatives. She is also the author/illustrator of an all-ages picture book called “Where does it all come from? Where does it all go?” about Toronto’s water, energy and waste flows, which helps democratize knowledge and foster local connection (www.ecomariko.com). Mariko is part of RECOVER19 because she feels it is critical to review and discuss the world’s response to COVID-19 for a more healthy and resilient society.
RECOVER19 