DLSPH Professor Receives 2024 CIC Mid-Career Award
December 16/2024
Shaza Fadel received the 2024 CIC Mid-career Award in recognition of her work in immunization access and global health, and her strong focus on equity.
By Ishani Nath
Shaza Fadel accepting the Mid-Career Award at the 2024 Canadian Immunization Conference (CIC in Ottawa(Photo: Pierre-Philippe Piché-Renaud)
Assistant Professor Shaza Fadel has no shortage of accomplishments. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She served as the Director of Operations for the Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases (CVPD) from 2021 to 2023. And most recently, she was named the faculty lead for the Centre for Global Health at DLSPH. But if you ask Fadel what she is most proud of, it’s the relationships, partnerships and collaborations she’s built along the way.
“It’s really a privilege to be able to be in an academic platform and connect funding so that community voices can be included,” says Fadel, an epidemiologist, immunologist and public health professional.
Fadel’s focus on equity and community advocacy was recently recognized at the 2024 Canadian Immunization Conference (CIC) where she received the Mid-career Award. This award recognizes mid-career individuals who have made a significant vaccination-related contribution to public health research, policies, programs or advocacy.
“Prof. Shaza Fadel is so deserving of this honour,” say DLSPH’s Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Nazia Peer, Acting Director of Immunization Services for the Region of Peel, who nominated Fadel for the award. “She is an inspiring community-engaged scholar who invests in building sustainable collaborations to improve vaccine confidence among faith-based and minoritized communities.”
Prof. Shaza Fadel
Fadel has spent years cultivating and maintaining relationships with community and faith leaders and says this award is particularly meaningful because it recognizes those efforts. Having worked in research and community advocacy prior to moving into academia, she views herself as someone who is able to bring community health advocates and research teams at DLSPH together. As a leader for the CVPD, she organized events to connect researchers, policy makers and community health advocates. She has developed relationships and collaborations across U of T and internationally. And she is leading research to better understand the experiences of faith-based and community leaders during vaccine outreach programs.
Throughout her career, Fadel continues to ask critical questions. “Whether you work globally or locally, how do you prioritize the needs of the population? My community hat is always on when we do the research.”
Fadel accepted the Mid-career Award on stage at CIC 2024 in Ottawa on November 27. In her acceptance speech, she focused on the impact community service has had on her research and career – and the gaps she has witnessed.
“I could not walk away feeling success in vaccination clinics based on the number of doses as I met more of my own neighbours who are struggling with food insecurity or refugees still trying to navigate the health system,” said Fadel. As the faculty lead for the Centre for Global Health and Research, she also applied this approach on a global scale.
“As a global health scholar, I cannot talk walk away without talking about vaccine inequity, or the selectivity in the choices when vaccination is made available,” she said at CIC. “How is it centering the needs of children in Gaza, for example, to prioritize polio vaccination between airstrikes that kill them, their caregivers and the health workers that try to vaccinate them. So, will you be OK to share only the number of doses? So, I’m here just hoping to amplify in solidarity with those who have come from this platform, and those who are maybe out there doing similar work for decades.”
Going forward, Fadel says social justice and community advocacy will continue to drive her work. Whether she is doing research, outreach or developing new programs, her guiding principle is “living what we talk about in the sense of equity and centering equity in our lives and in the way we deal with our peers, and in our collaborations, partnerships and with community.”