Research Team

Research Team

Research Team (Shelter Sector)

Photo above: (L - R) Linda Ense, Kate Wiggins, Michele Hansen and Clare Freeman.

 

Research Team

Research Team (University Sector)

Photo above: (L - R) Marilyn Ford- Gilboe, Nadine Wathen and Nataliya Avakova.
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Michele Hansen, BA (team leader) is the Executive Director of Women’s Shelter, Second Stage Housing and Counselling Services of Huron, an agency serving women and children in the County of Huron in Southwestern Ontario. Michele has been working since 1988 to end violence against women, first as a front line crisis counselor, then as a children’s advocate and, for the past 16 years, in her current position. Michele has been an activist, community leader and innovator, founding many committees dedicated to improving services for women in her local community. Michele co-founded, in 1992, the first Domestic Assault Review Team in Canada. She continues to work in her community and on provincial initiatives to improve services for abused women and their children.

Linda Ense was born and raised on Six Nations near Brantford. She belongs to the Onondaga Nation, Wolf Clan. Linda is the Executive Director of the Native Women’s Centre in Hamilton, and sits on a number of community committees focusing on issues related to violence against women. She is working towards an Aboriginal Adult Education Certificate and has conducted research on Aboriginal peoples’ history in that program. Linda has been a member of the Board of Directors for the Ontario Native Women’s Association (ONWA) including serving as Secretary. She is the official liaison between ONWA which represents both on reserve and off reserve shelters, and the current research initiative.

Clare Freeman, BA, CYW, MSW is the Executive Director of Interval House of Hamilton and is currently involved with two provincial research projects on the health sector’s responses to and education on domestic violence. In addition, she continues to provide community training and workshops to many sectors, including the police, social work, health care, child and youth workers, and business. Clare is a strong community advocate for the development and implementation of prevention education and high quality responsive service provision to women, children and the community who are exposed to violence. Her approach incorporates a gender and diversity analysis to the issues of violence against women.

Kate Wiggins, BA, MSW, MPA is the Executive Director of Women’s Community House in London, Ontario. Women’s Community House provides safe places and services for abused women and their children. Kate has been with WCH for over six years, shepherding the organization through a period of growth and change. Kate is also a member and past Chair of the London Coordinating Committee to End Woman Abuse, a collaborative association of agencies committed to ending woman abuse. Kate is the current President of the board at Changing Ways.

Barb MacQuarrie is the Community Director at The Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children. She promotes community-academic partnerships, working from an intersectional perspective that examines how gender interacts with factors such as racial identity, disability, age, class and other perceived differences to create and maintain oppressive structures. She has been an advocate for survivors of violence and has worked on diverse fronts to give voice to their experiences of violence as well as their experiences in the systems that are intended to respond to this violence. Currently she manages the provincial Neighbours, Friends and Families public education campaign and the Respect-at-Work training program. She chairs the Muslim Family Support Service in London.

Roma Harris. PhD is a Professor of Information Studies at The University of Western Ontario (UWO). She is the author (with P. Dewdney) of the book, Barriers to Information: How Formal Help Systems Fail Battered Women and co-author of one of the few Canadian shelter impact studies, Knowing What We Do Best: Evaluating Shelter Services from the Perspective of Abused Women. Roma was a founding board member of the London Second Stage Housing project, London’s Battered Women’s Advocacy Clinic, and the Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children. She was Chair of the Board of Family Services London and Secretary to the Board of the Sexual Assault Centre of London.

Marilyn Ford-Gilboe, RN, PhD is a Professor and T.R. Meighen Family Foundation Community Nursing Professor in the School of Nursing, UWO. Her research program focuses on understanding the strengths and challenges of vulnerable populations, particularly women and children who have experienced abuse. She is involved in many projects related to trauma/violence, health and health care. Among these, she leads a national interdisciplinary research team, funded through CIHR to study the health and economic costs of intimate partner violence in the early years after women leave an abusive partner and to examine the efficacy of a collaborative health advocacy intervention on women’s health and quality of life post-leaving. She brings expertise in diverse research methods and community health nursing practice.

Nadine Wathen, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UWO and holds a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award. Her research examines women’s health decision-making, including intervention research in the area of violence against women; a randomized controlled trial of the effectiveness of screening for VAW in health settings; and projects on how women living in rural areas seek and use health information. Nadine has expertise in research methods, knowledge translation, and is the lead on CIHR and SSHRC-funded research to develop and evaluate knowledge translation strategies to transfer VAW research to policy and practice.