Pat Armstrong is co-author or editor of such books on health care as Exposing Privatization: Women and Health Care Reform in Canada; Caring For/Caring About: Women, Home Care and Unpaid Caregiving; Heal Thyself: Managing Health Care Reform; Wasting Away: The Undermining of Canadian Health Care; Universal Health Care: What the United States Can Learn From Canada; Vital Signs: Nursing in Transition; and Take Care: Warning Signals for Canada’s Health System. She has co-edited books on the political economy of health and on feminism. She has also published on a wide variety of issues related to women’s work and to social policy.She has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology at York University and Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. She is a partner in the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health and chairs a working group on health reform that crosses the Centres of Excellence for Women’s Health. She is also a site director for the Ontario Training Centre in Health Services and Policy Research. Her current SSHRC-funded research looks at how women define quality health care. In addition, she has a CIHR-funded project that compares conditions in Canada’s long-term care facilities with those in Nordic countries. Like most of her past research, this project relies primarily on the perspectives of those who actually provide or manage care within the system.She is involved as well in large collaborative research projects. One looks at the hidden costs and contributions in homecare; another explores health information technology and a third looks at precarious employment in health care. The latter project is connected to the development of the gender and work database, a project of the Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy. Pat’s most recent funding supports research into cutbacks in women’s health services in Toronto.In addition to these national and international research projects, Pat Armstrong is involved in a number of civil society organizations. She is a Board member of the Canadian Health Coalition, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Skyworks Foundation.For over twenty years, Madeline Boscoe worked as a RN in health education and advocacy at the Women’s Health Clinic in Winnipeg. Her leadership and activism on such issues as hormone replacement therapy, Depo Provera, silicone breast implants, the legalization of midwifery, and many other women’s health concerns has ensured that the Clinic remains a leader in women’s health and were instrumental in the 1997 Commonwealth Award for Excellence in Women’s Health for the Clinic.Madeline is a founding member of the Canadian Women’s Health Network (CWHN), and has been the Executive Director of the CWHN since 1995. Boscoe’s vision, tenacity and diplomacy have helped make the CWHN one of the foremost knowledge brokers in the health arena today, developing it as a critical bridge between and among researchers, clinicians, decision-makers, media, women’s community groups, and the public. She has worked hard to make the CWHN a major leader in supporting gender-based analyses of programs and policies that are fully respectful of diversity, and of the role of structural determinants of health, such as poverty, on health status.Barbara Clow is Executive Director of the Atlantic Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health.Dr. Karen R. Grant is a sociologist at the University of Manitoba, and is currently Vice-Provost (Academic Affairs). Her current research concerns the impact of health care reform on women carers and the relationship between evidence and policy. Over the last several years, Dr. Grant has focussed a great deal of her attention (in teaching, research, and analysis) on the question of methodological pluralism and measurement, and interdisciplinarity in health research. In addition to several articles and book chapters, she is co-editor of Exposing Privatization: Women and Health Care Reform in Canada, and Caring For/Caring About: Women, Home Care and Unpaid Caregiving. Through her work with The National Coordinating Group on Health Care Reform and Women, she has sought to disseminate research to audiences beyond the academy. Much of this research group’s work has been widely distributed throughout the world in print and electronic format.In addition to her studies on health care, Dr. Grant has a long-standing interest in post-secondary education. She co-edited a special issue of The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology in 2002 on “The University in the 21st Century.” She is currently studying how the Canada Research Chairs program is contributing to the restructuring of the academy.Since 2000, Dr. Grant has served as a member of Health Canada’s Science Advisory Board, and earlier this year, she was appointed to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Dr. Grant has been invited to speak at national and international conferences, and has been recognized with both merit and outreach awards for her service.Beth Jackson works for the Public Health Agency of Canada, Margaret Howorth-Brockman is Executive Director of the Prairie Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health.Ann Pederson is the Director of Research at the BC Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health and Morgan Seeley is a doctoral candidate at York University.Jane Springer is a writer, editor and consultant in international development, whose clients include UNICEF, CIDA and various Canadian book publishers. She lived and worked overseas for 11 years, in Mozambique and India. She is the author of Listen to Us: The World’s Working Children and translator of the Portuguese-language books Nest Egg and Tales from the Amazon. She has a BA in English from the University of British Columbia and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto.
