Our team

Research Chair and Lab Director

Kate Zinser, PhD

Kate Zinszer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the Université de Montréal and a researcher with the Centre de Recherche en Santé Publique at the Universite of Montreal. Her main research focus is on vector-borne diseases using a variety of tools to untangle the causes, forecast future burdens, and evaluate intervention effectiveness of vector-borne diseases. Prior to joining UdeM in 2017, she obtained her PhD in Epidemiology at McGill University with David Buckeridge in the Surveillance Lab as her supervisor. Her postdoctorate training was at Harvard Medical School with the Computational Epidemiology Group, with John Brownstein as her supervisor. Dr Zinszer has also worked in Canada as a communicable disease epidemiologist and Field Epidemiologist.

Students

  • Geneviève Fortin

    PhD Candidate

  • Marie-Catherine Gagnon-Dufresne

    PhD Candidate

  • Claudia Robayo

    PhD Candidate

  • Danny Saroz

    PhD Candidate

  • Angélique Ingabire

    PhD Candidate

Research staff

  • Laura Pierce

    Principal Research Coordinator

  • Margot Barbosa Da Torre

    Research Coordinator

  • Adrien Saucier

    Data Analyst

  • Katia Charland

    Senior Biostatistician

Team member biographies

Geneviève Fortin

Geneviève is a PhD candidate in public health (global health) and holds a Master’s degree in global health and a Bachelor’s degree in biology. She is interested in the structural determinants of adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights (ASRHR) and passionate about social justice and solidarity. Her doctoral project is taking place in Bangladesh and she is using mixed methods and a participatory approach involving youth to identify priorities for action to improve their ASRHR. Learn more about Geneviève’s project, the Together Project here.

Marie-Catherine Gagnon-Dufresne

Marie-Catherine is a PhD candidate in Global health at the School of Public Health of the Université de Montréal. Her doctoral project aims at understanding the factors influencing community participation in public and global health research, by contextualizing knowledge from the scientific literature in the views of local stakeholders in Dhaka (Bangladesh). Drawing on her experience with Indigenous communities, her research will be anchored in decolonizing and participatory methods. Intersectional feminist with a passion for social justice, Marie-Catherine is committed to conducting health research that is more equitable, inclusive and responsive to community needs. Supervised by Dr Zinszer, she has worked on various projects with the Global Public Health Lab, including HoSPiCOVID and COESA.

Claudia Robayo

A medical doctor from Military University (Colombia) with a Master's degree in Toxicology from the National University (Colombia). With experience and training in managing patients with infectious diseases at urban to rural levels.

The research has been carried out in the quantitative area with studies on chronic diseases and in the qualitative area with education studies as a principal researcher or tutor for family physicians. It has also developed skills in teaching as a professor of undergraduate medical students and short research courses for non-researchers. Currently, he works on research related to vector-borne infectious diseases.

Danny Saroz

TBD

Angélique Ingabire

TBD

Laura Pierce

Laura Pierce has a MSc in Public Health at McGill University. She coordinates the studies on dengue and other arboviruses in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as contributing to the climate change research projects in Montréal. She previously coordinated the EnCORE study, a longitudinal SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence study among children and adolescents in Montréal.

Margot Barbosa Da Torre (she/her)

Margot holds a Master’s degree in public health and a Bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences. She previously coordinated the EnCORE immune sub-study, and currently works on the climate change research projects in Montréal and the GRIP in Uganda study.

Adrien Saucier

Adrien Saucier holds an M.Sc. in epidemiology and a Master’s degree in philosophy. His interest lies in the role of social and environmental determinants of health. His current research focuses on COVID-19 in Montreal’s schoolchildren population, notably by examining the effect that non-representative sampling and selection bias may have on estimating the distribution of the disease in that population. Adrien currently works as an analyst in our research laboratory.

Katia Charland

Katia Charland holds a PhD in Biostatistics from McGill University and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. She is a senior biostatistician and research associate specializing in modeling spatially and temporally correlated data and has expertise in developing advanced statistical models related to infectious disease epidemiology.