Two exceptional Lassonde scholars awarded Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholarships

This story originally appeared in YFile.

Two scholars at the Lassonde School of Engineering will advance York University’s growing global health research community as recipients of the 2024-25 Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholarships.

This scholarship program was created to attract exceptional incoming and continuing domestic and international graduate research students to the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. Each year the scholarship is granted to those who demonstrate outstanding academic achievement in global health research and supports research and related scholarly and creative activities in line with the three themes of the Institute – planetary health, global health and humanitarianism, and global health foresighting.

This year’s master’s-level recipients at Lassonde are:

Caroline Duncan – Optimizing Drinking Water Safety in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut using Participatory System Dynamics

Duncan is a PhD candidate in Civil Engineering, focusing on optimizing drinking water in the Arctic using participatory approaches to system dynamics modelling. Under the guidance of Professor Stephanie Gora, her research seeks to understand the complex factors that affect the quality and accessibility of drinking water in the Arctic using an interdisciplinary approach. She has been working closely with the Municipality of Cambridge Bay, and collaborating with community members, government and non-governmental organization stakeholders involved with drinking water from source to tap. Through this collaboration, a model will be developed to test treatment and policy interventions to optimize drinking water safety.

Michael De Santi – Optimizing Water Safety in Humanitarian Response Settings using Machine Learning and Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment

As a PhD candidate in Civil Engineering, De Santi is working on the Safe Water Optimization Tool (SWOT) project at the Dahdaleh Institute, where he is developing new modelling tools to predict water quality and waterborne illness risk in refugee and internally displaced person settlements. Prior to joining the SWOT team, he obtained a bachelor of applied science in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto and worked for several years as a water design specialist. His current research focuses on developing holistic tools for assessing water safety risk in humanitarian response settings.

Read the full story and learn about all York recipients of the Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholarship on YFile.