From program to School
Karen Phillips, one of the first four professors to be a member of the newly formed Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, recalls that the School was quite popular right from the start.
Professor Phillips, who today is vice-dean, governance and secretary of the Faculty of Health Sciences, explains that the program was created in response to a major change, namely that the undergraduate degrees in rehabilitation sciences (audiology, physiotherapy, speech language pathology and occupational therapy) became professional programs offered exclusively at the master's level. Therefore, a general, bilingual undergraduate program was needed to train students seeking to apply for admission to these new master’s programs.
The program was so successful that it quickly became independent. In 2009, Linda Garcia, the program’s second director, instituted the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, an academic unit with its own governance and administrative structure.
Starting in 2012, Professor Garcia, who worked for 30 years at the Faculty of Health Sciences, also helped create the graduate programs at the School, with the goal of training researchers with an innovative perspective: interdisciplinarity.
“In contrast with multidisciplinarity, an approach in which several disciplines work side by side without being combined, interdisciplinarity involves interaction between disciplines, which influences the way we understand the world,” explained the one who recently took a well-deserved retirement.
The Faculty’s Dean, Lucie Thibault, further noted that “the interdisciplinary program in health sciences is a vibrant example of the positive impact of interdisciplinarity in training health-care professionals.” From its modest beginnings in 2003 to its current status as an independent school, it has “trained a new generation of leaders who are capable of understanding and taking on the complex challenges of health-care from a variety of angles.”
Where are our alumni today?
The alumni of this School have gone on to enjoy a variety of careers. Thanks to its interdisciplinary approach, the program allows students to pursue not only further studies in rehabilitation, medicine, pharmacy or dentistry, but also careers in public or private health agencies, or in community health programs.
For example, Max Lê, a 2018 alum of the Honours Bachelor of Health Sciences program, currently works in strategic communications for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). In 2021, he founded Lê & Co. Health Communication Santé, a bilingual communications agency that helps research teams in hospital and intervention settings better communicate with their audiences. In his opinion, the program “provides students with knowledge and skills that are flexible and applicable to several fields, whether in the pure sciences, social sciences or humanities.” He notes that the courses set him apart from others wanting to work in this field because the program provides “a general understanding of individual, community and global health.”
Samuel Ileka-Priouzeau, who graduated from the program in 2010, manages a team involved in policy analysis, biostatistics and epidemiology at the Public Health Agency of Canada. This position has seen him travel to Western Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo in support of the United Nations response to Ebola virus outbreaks. He states that the “combination of clinical and public health approaches offered through an undergraduate interdisciplinary degree in health sciences” allowed him to “gain a global and holistic vision of health care” that was vital to his career progression.
A program crowned with success
The Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences has evolved greatly over the past 20 years. It currently offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and a doctoral degree in population health. Since 2023, it has also offered accelerated double degree programs that allow students to complete both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in just five years. Today the School boasts some 20 regular professors and takes pride in having trained 3,600 undergraduate degree alumni since 2003.
It also has the highest enrolment among the five schools within the Faculty of Health Sciences. For Lucie Thibault, “these numbers prove that this program is popular and that its students are successful and thriving.”