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Patient and Community Engagement Research

Teaching Team

Teaching Team


Project Instructor and Co-Leader: Dr. Nancy Marlett

Nancy Marlett is part of the Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies program, the first interdisciplinary disability studies program in North America. Prior to this, her career was in Mental Health and as a private consultant for Health and Welfare Canada, Secretary of State, Canada Manpower, Public Guardians and national disability groups such as the Canadian Mental Health Association partnership strategy, and the Independent Living Movement. Nancy initiated a senior-led research project at Kerby Centre when members felt they wanted to learn how to do research so they could challenge the “negative press about aging” of more traditional research. Seniors chose to research resilience using techniques that were developed as part of a Federal Health Institute grant. The book Grey Matters, which is used in this course, was written by the Kerby Seniors, Nancy Marlett and Claudia Emes, and it was launched at the Kerby Centre with the University of Calgary Press Open Access in 2011.

E-mail: marlett@ucalgary.ca

Project Coordinator: Dr. Svetlana Shklarov

I am a physician by training. I received my MD in Moscow, Russia, and practiced as a pediatrician in Russia and Israel. After I relocated to Calgary in 1995, I focused on community work, including reaching out to immigrant seniors and Holocaust survivors with Jewish Family Service Calgary. I earned my Ph.D. degree from the University of Calgary for my research on life histories and resilience in Soviet Jewish child survivors of the Holocaust. My dissertation focused on resilience in later life with respect to the memories of severe early trauma. With Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, I coordinated a ten-year series of teaching and program development projects together with the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry. The project aimed at service system change, and included the engagement of service users. We developed courses for large, mixed groups of mental health professionals in nearly twenty-five cities throughout Russia. I am teaching for the Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies Program since 2006.

Email: Shklarov@ucalgary.ca

Participant Mentor: Dr. Mary Sheridan

With an M.A in English Literature from The University of Western Ontario my first career was in education as a post-secondary English instructor first at the University of Calgary, then at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and later the Alberta College of Art and Design. Beyond the classroom I provided leadership during the transition to Board governance at S.A.I.T. as a staff advisor on the Minister’s Advisory Committee. When ACAD entered into transition to Board governance, I became the coordinator of the first Humanities Department. I also assisted the Board of ACAD with their transition to Board governance acting again as a staff advisor. A second career after completion of a Ph.D. in Education in 1993 provided opportunities to manage staff and budgets within both the non-profit and for-profit sector in Calgary across an array of organizations focusing on career development, immigrant services and seniors’ services. With skills developed through two careers I have successfully managed large budgets and worked effectively with Boards, owners and a wide range of staff including nursing and office staff, teachers and instructors, therapists and clients. Now approaching seventy I have a deep capacity for resilience and am able to help others to draw on their resilience to live and work creatively and fully.

Email: mesher@shaw.ca