Speakers

Dr. Janna MacLachlan, PhD, OT Reg. (Ont.) (she/her)

Dr. Janna MacLachlan is an occupational therapist and a public health scholar who was born and raised in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. She lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut, with her partner and their daughter. Janna completed her occupational therapy training in 2006 at Western University and her PhD in Public Health Sciences in 2022 at the University of Toronto. She was awarded a two-year Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2023, through which she is working with the Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre on the Ikajurniq Project, a program focused on reconnecting Inuit women and children affected by violence with Inuit knowledge. As an occupational therapist, Janna has worked in acute care, school-based practice, generalist community-based practice and in global health. As a researcher, Janna’s primary focus has been on supporting Inuit knowledge to be foregrounded in health and social services offered to Inuit. This work takes shape through action-oriented and community-based approaches, critical examination of Eurocentrism in mainstream service delivery and delivering education about anti-oppressive practice.

Giovanna Boniface, Reg. OT (BC), MRSc., B.Sc. OT, B.Sc., CCLCP (she/her/elle)

Giovanna is an occupational therapist with nearly 30 years of experience spanning clinical practice, policy leadership, and national advocacy. She is a triple graduate from UBC, graduating from UBC’s Occupational Therapy program in 1997. She built her early career in private practice, specializing in spinal cord injury, brain injury, and complex orthopaedics.

She’s held leadership roles at WorkSafeBC (as a provincial OT advisor) and the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists—first as Managing Director of CAOT-BC, then as National Director of Professional Affairs, and most recently as President from 2020 to 2022.

Currently, Giovanna is the Chief Commercial Officer at the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. There, she leads climate action initiatives within the architecture sector and works to bring cross-sector sustainability knowledge into health care and occupational therapy. She is also the co-founder of the OT-Climate Action Network, a global grassroots initiative that promotes climate leadership and sustainability within occupational therapy.

Dr. Elly Park, PhD, Reg. OT (BC), (she/her)

Elly Park is an Assistant Professor of Teaching with the OSOT department, and Academic Site Lead in Prince George supporting the MOT Northern cohort. She received her PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences in 2015 from the University of Alberta, where she taught occupational therapy for 6 years before coming to UBC in 2021. She is passionate about learning with and from students, drawing on a teaching philosophy based on relational pedagogy and relational ethics theories. She has pursued opportunities for educational scholarship with a social justice lens, and she is currently engaged in research around inequities within distributed learning education, specifically looking at student engagement, student assessments, and sense of community across distributed sites.