Lisa McCune and Trevor Dummer

Meet SPPH REDI Leaders: Lisa McCune and Trevor Dummer

In this REDI Leader spotlight, we speak with Lisa McCune, Senior Education Manager and Dr. Trevor Dummer, Professor and Associate Director of Education at the School of Population and Public Health.

Tell us about your team.

We are Lisa McCune, Senior Education Manager and Trevor Dummer, Associate Director for Education. We lead the education team supporting the School’s educational programming. We facilitate faculty professional development and program planning for the graduate and residency programs at SPPH. We collaborate with a team of six program directors and eight staff to support delivery of the school’s educational mission focused on population and public health.

What motivates your team to engage in REDI work?

We believe that REDI is fundamental to educational programming. We engage in REDI-related activities because we want to ensure all members of SPPH can fulfill their potential and that SPPH students can be REDI champions as they develop in their careers to ensure healthier lives for all. To effectively serve all Canadians, health researchers and leaders must understand the health and social challenges facing all populations.

Future leaders will need to think creatively and develop opportunities to address the impacts of colonization and marginalization to improve the health of underserved groups. A critical first step is ensuring that diversity in perspectives and lived experience is reflected in our student body, as well as in our approaches to teaching, learning and curriculum development.

Can you share a project or research your team have been involved in that promotes REDI?

A long-term project is to address equity, diversity and inclusion in the program admissions processes. In the past few years, we have developed and refined admissions questions that give applicants a chance to explain how they will bring understanding, knowledge, and experiences of equity, diversity, and inclusion to SPPH. We also ask how prospective students plan to address equity, diversity and inclusion in their research and learning. Prospective students are given opportunities to describe and how they may have been able to challenge systematic bias, or other EDI-related issues, in their past activities. Through these efforts we have been able to recruit increasingly diverse cohorts in all SPPH programs.

To complement this admissions work, we also support faculty to address EDI considerations in their courses. For example, in addition, in 2023 and 2024 we hosted forums for faculty to explore ways of incorporating Indigenous content and teaching approaches into their own courses. The recently developed SPPH Guidelines for Indigenous Guest Speakers ensures that Indigenous speakers are fairly compensated for their guest teaching.

We have also developed a process for hearing about and acting on student concerns related to equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching and supervision.

What role do you see your team playing in improving REDI in population and public health?

We commit to continue to address REDI topics at SPPH through the admissions process and faculty forums. We commit to promoting opportunities for students and faculty to further their training through UBC resources, such as CTLT’s Indigenous Initiatives team and Effective Mentorship of Racialized Graduate Students, an initiative of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. We welcome hearing from students, faculty and staff about REDI-related concerns or initiatives and with ideas for educational development that our team can support.