New Fellows and Associates 2024

As outstanding academics within the University of Toronto community, Trinity’s Fellows and Associates play an active role in the life of the College. Enhancing the student experience and enriching the College’s intellectual community, these newly appointed members of our community will make valuable contributions through their participation at events, programs and activities. Congratulations to our new Fellow and Associates – we are grateful for their commitment to Trinity and look forward to their ongoing engagement in the life of the College and with our students.

• Appointed Fellows of the College (bios below): Ben Akrigg, Nouman Ashraf, Alexander Hampton, Andres Kasekamp, Rupert Kaul, Kim Strong and Mark Taylor
  
• Appointed Associates of the College (two-year term – bios below): Ahmed Allahwala, Anita Benoit, Robert Owen, Mark Rempel and Andrew Stark
  
• Re-appointed Associates of the College (one-year term): Aisha Ahmad, Urvashi Chakravarty, Mairi Cowan, Nilima Gulrajani, Joshna Maharaj, Andrea Most, Kier Moulton, Daniel Opperwall, Mariana Prado, Jayeeta Sharma, Jastaran Singh, Anna Su and Matthew Walton
  
• Re-appointed Associates of the College (two-year term): Simon Appolloni, Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Julie Audet, Michael Classens, Heather Darling Pigat, Rick Eckley, Maria Edilova, Colin Furness, Alexandra Rahr, Sophie Rousseaux, Avery Slater and Shauna Sweeney

Appointments were approved by the Trinity College Board of Trustees on April 18, 2024, and effective July 1, 2024.

Fellows:

Ben Akrigg: Ben Akrigg is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics. His principal research interest is in the economic and social history of archaic and classical Greece. He is the author of Population and Economy in Classical Athens and the co-editor (with Professor Rob Tordoff of York University) of Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greek Comic Drama. His current major project is on the relationship between environmental change and economic development in ancient Greece.

Nouman Ashraf: Nouman Ashraf is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream within the Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management area at the Rotman School of Management. He possesses a broad range of professional, academic and research interests, with a specialized focus on enabling innovative and inclusive practices within organization life. For the last decade and a half, he has held progressively senior roles at the University of Toronto. He is a recognized thought leader in governance, and has taught thousands of directors in the national Rotman program on Not for Profit Governance in partnership with the Institute for Corporate Directors since its inception in 2007.

Alexander Hampton: Alexander Hampton is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion. His areas of interest include Religion and the Environment, Religion and Literature and the Arts and History of the Philosophy of Religion. His current research examines how changes in metaphysics and traditional ecological knowledge have shaped how human beings understand and interact with nature, and how aesthetics has formed a language for expressing nature spirituality both within and without traditions. He works with materials from antiquity to the present, with the belief that understanding the history of the human-nature relationship can help us to address the environmental crisis. Alex has developed strong ties to Trinity, teaching in the First Year Foundations program, and brings an intersection between religion and environmental studies.

Andres Kasekamp: Andres Kasekamp is currently a Full Professor in the Department of History and Chair of Estonian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Before being recruited by the University of Toronto, Andres was Professor of Baltic Politics at the University of Tartu in Estonia and Director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute. His research interests include populist radical right parties, memory politics, European foreign and security policy, and cooperation and conflict in the Baltic Sea region. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies, and is currently the President-Elect of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. He has appeared as an expert in the foreign affairs committee of the parliaments of Canada, Estonia, Finland and the European Union, as well as the Baltic Assembly. Andres has strong connections to Trinity, working in an area of great relevance to the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History and the International Relations Program.

Rupert Kaul: Rupert Kaul is a senior scientist at the Toronto General Research Institute at the University Health Network of Canada and a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Immunology at the University of Toronto. He completed his clinical Infectious Disease training at the University of Toronto, followed by a research fellowship in HIV/STDs at the University of Nairobi (Kenya) and a PhD at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford (UK). He was head of the clinical Division of Infectious Disease at the University of Toronto and at UHN/Sinai from 2013-2023. Dr. Kaul’s lab studies the mucosal underpinning of HIV susceptibility and progression, with a focus on the mucosal immunology and microbiome of the female genital tract, foreskin, and rectum. This work is based on participant cohorts from Canada, Kenya and Uganda.

Kim Strong: Kim Strong is currently Chair of the Department of Physics, and before that was Director of the School of the Environment. Her research intersects Physics and Environmental Science using atmospheric remote sounding from ground-based, balloon-borne and satellite instruments to measure the concentrations of trace gases for studies of ozone chemistry, climate and air quality. Her research interests include urban, Arctic and planetary atmospheric science, long-term measurements of stratospheric and tropospheric trace gases, satellite validation and laboratory spectroscopy. This area of research gives insight into fundamental atmospheric physics and chemistry, and also has relevance to our interaction with the environment. Kim’s interests in Environmental Science strengthens the Trinity College sustainability program.

Mark Taylor: Mark Taylor is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry where he is currently Associate Chair, Graduate Studies. His research takes place at the interface between the fields of organic synthesis and supramolecular chemistry. He is interested in exploring connections between the fields of molecular recognition and catalysis with research aimed at gaining fundamental insight into noncovalent or reversible covalent interactions, and using this information to design new chemical sensors or catalysts.

Associates:

Ahmed Allahwala: Ahmed Allahwala is an Associate Professor (Teaching Stream) in the City Studies program at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His work focuses on urban social policy, neighbourhood well-being and community development within the context of contemporary state and economic restructuring in North America and Western Europe. As a community-engaged scholar, he has worked in research and teaching partnerships with non-profits across Toronto, including the Boys and Girls Club of East Scarborough, the East Scarborough Storefront, the Malvern Family Resource Centre, TAIBU Community Health Centre and the Toronto District School Board. He has taught a wide variety of courses in Germany and Canada on topics including welfare state restructuring, immigration and settlement, city politics, community-based research and urban planning. He was the recipient of the Government of Canada Award and is a teaching fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin. He is currently a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Community Partnerships (University of Toronto).

Anita Benoit: Anita Benoit is Mi’kmaw and French Acadian with family living in Esgenoopetitj First Nation and Brantville, New Brunswick. She received her PhD from the University of Ottawa and her MSc from Dalhousie University, both in Microbiology and Immunology. Anita also obtained a MSc from the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation in Health Services Research at the University of Toronto while conducting her postdoctoral fellowship. Anita is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Health & Society (Scarborough Campus) and is cross-appointed at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (St. George Campus) in the Social & Behavioural Health Sciences Division. She is an Adjunct Scientist at Women’s College Research Institute, Women’s College Hospital. Her research interests include Indigenous women’s health, HIV pathogenesis, intervention research, health service outcomes and evaluation, chronic stress and mental health, harm reduction and determinants of health.

Robert Owen: Robert Owen has recently been recruited to the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. A senior faculty member, Robert has been Professor of Economics at the University of Nantes since 1991 and is now Emeritus there. He earned a BA from Swarthmore College (1974) and a PhD from Princeton University (1981). Subsequent academic appointments have been at institutions in Europe, Japan, North America and Southeast Asia, including at Cornell, Cambridge, the European Institute of Public Administration, the International University of Japan, Yale, Ottawa, Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown. In addition, he has been a consultant and/or visiting scholar at the OECD, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Bank of Japan, Development Bank of Japan and at Harvard. His principal fields of research include international economics and finance, industrial organization, as well as the interrelation between microeconomics and macroeconomics. In addition to other professional associations, he is a member of the Editorial Board of the Review of International Economics.

Mark Rempel: Mark Rempel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. He has a joint PhD in Economics and Finance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His primary research agenda examines various frictions associated with intangible assets and how they shape firm dynamics and economic aggregates. Recent applications include studies on the interaction of inter-firm patent litigation activity and aggregate innovation, public CEO compensation, firm cash holdings and IPO decisions. Other on-going research includes work on interbank markets, monetary policy implementation and frictions in housing markets.

Andrew Stark: Andrew Stark is a Professor of Strategic Management in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, with cross-appointments to the Strategic Management area at the Rotman School of Management and the Department of Political Science. Andrew draws on normative theory – political, moral and legal theory – to analyze controversial issues of public policy. He is the author of: Conflict of Interest in American Public Life (Harvard University Press, 2000), The Limits of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Drawing the Line: Public and Private in America (Brookings Institution Press, 2010) and The Consolations of Mortality (Yale University Press, 2016). His academic articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Harvard Business Review, Ethics, among others. He has written op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post; his essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and other periodicals.

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