2022 Support Staff Awards of Excellence Winners
Congratulations to the winners!
Service Excellence – Individual Award
Christina Sardella – Supervisor, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine
With a continuous improvement mindset, strong critical thinking skills, and a commitment to success and innovation within our Faculty, Christina consistently provides exceptional service. Staff and faculty members have expressed gratitude for her efforts, noting her professionalism, willingness to assist and her positive approach to all requests for help. Christina demonstrates innovation and solution-oriented service, planning and initiating solutions in all situations regardless of complexity. Her efforts supersede all expectations as she works to improve efficiencies at the Faculty.
Service Excellence – Individual Award
Tara Routh –Coordinator, Medical Staff HR, Department of Medicine
Tara has been contributing to the Department of Medicine’s academic mission, and by extension the Faculty’s mission, for close to 28 years. She serves and supports more than 500 clinical and research faculty, and she seamlessly coordinates close to 200 academic appointments each year, going above and beyond to work through challenges in search of solutions. Tara oversees the entire promotion process for the Department; this past year, her expertise, tools and fortitude guided 24 physicians through the arduous process of applying for promotion; all were granted promotion, a testament to how her efforts enrich the experiences of our faculty members.
Professionalism – Individual Award
Michelle Read – Writer, Marketing and Communications Office
Michelle is a very skilled, collaborative, and dedicated team member who is always happy to help her colleagues, even despite her busy role. She has an unwaveringly strong work ethic and strives for excellence, which energizes her to go the extra mile. With remarkable writing skills, if someone asks Michelle to review text, she’ll make time to do it (despite her other tasks), and the document will always benefit from her review. Michelle is also keen to share her learnings and insight with others, and often takes the initiative to share tips and guides for various tasks, helping our whole team. Michelle can be relied upon for her thoughtful consideration to provide ideas and solutions to problems. She’s organized, reliable, and doesn’t let things fall through the cracks. She carefully considers clients’ requests and needs, while still providing quick and helpful responses. Finally, Michelle has a kind and professional demeanour, representing our office and Faculty in a positive way.
Professionalism – Individual Award
Andrea Rawley – Faculty Affairs Coordinator, Department of Family Medicine
Andrea supports the Department and its people with integrity and dedication. She plays an integral role in promoting and championing the work of its faculty members, and is consistently thoughtful, receptive, and respectful in her support of them. She strives for excellence and to strengthen the department with a skillful attention to detail, positive attitude and collaborative approach. Smiling and helpful, she is a proven key lead and “go-to” team player. Andrea embodies the department’s core professionalism values and is a deeply respected member of the department.
Innovation – Individual Award
Marc Brigden – MPH Program, Educational Officer, School of Epidemiology and Public Health
Marc is highly committed to the Master of Public Health program, displaying innovation in ensuring the success of the program and its practicum process. He has strived to improve all program-related administrative processes to be simple, easy to follow and well organized. On meeting a challenge, Marc quickly takes action to seek solutions and develop backup plans. He developed relationships with more than 45 partner organizations in Ottawa and beyond, many through cold calls, that now offer practicum opportunities for students. A highly organized, hard-working team player, his efforts have helped the program grow from 25 to 40 students.
Innovation – Individual Award
Jeffrey Puncher – Director of Strategic Planning and Financial Services, Department of Family Medicine
Under Jeffrey’s direction, the Department of Family Medicine is at the forefront of innovation, seizing opportunities crucial to its development over the next decade. His vision and ability to develop and market innovative offerings has expanded the department’s capacity to establish and strengthen collaboration across Canadian universities and advance strategic industry partnerships. He has received multiple grants, established partnerships, and addressed long-standing curriculum gaps, as well as introduced emerging specialized technologies to the uOttawa community to improve students’ mental health. His innovations have strengthened the department, attracting top-level faculty, researchers, learners, and administrative staff.
Education – Individual Award
Dr. Elizabeth Williams – Laboratory technician, Translational and Molecular Medicine (TMM)
Elizabeth is driven by her passion to provide TMM undergraduate learners the experience and excitement of authentic discovery research. Placing students’ needs first, she shares her patient mentorship and technical skills and takes great pleasure in the youthful exuberance of students realizing their interest and skill in scientific research. Her organizational wizardry and attention to detail keep the laboratory functioning smoothly, including supply inventory, computers, lab equipment and reagent preparation for the over 100 students using the lab during the term. She has surpassed the expectations for her position, becoming an indispensable part of the team who deliver the suite of TMM laboratory courses.
Education – Individual Award
Jean-Michel Bouchard – Lead, Department of Medicine Research Plus Program
Jean-Michel was instrumental in developing and setting up the Program, leading it since its inception. He has proven an incredible leader and an invaluable contributor to education in the Department. The Program supports residents’ plans to embrace research as an academic career, and Jean-Michel embodies it with his bilingualism, high-level knowledge of multiple aspects of biomedical research, and solid grasp of the challenges faced by trainees and the importance of mentorship. He goes above and beyond to meet residents to discuss their progress and challenges, ensuring ensure the Program meets their needs. Trainees unanimously recognize his kindness, enthusiasm, responsiveness and great sense of responsibility.
Education – Individual Award
Melanie McCallum – Program Coordinator, UGME, DoM, Department of Medicine
Melanie supports 600-plus medical students per year during their clinical placement and has undoubtedly improved their experience. Her student evaluations are glowing, highlighting her commitment beyond her immediate role, her managerial skills and outstanding job ensuring a well-organized rotation. She has taken the lead in ensuring student wellness is a focus during clinical placements and initiated a Kudos program to increase med student/resident/staff engagement and recognize the contributions of clinician teachers to undergraduate medical education. She has sought additional training in her own time to incorporate innovative ways to deliver medical education in this interdisciplinary environment.
Education – Individual Award
Julie Ghatalia - Residency Program Administrator, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine
Described as the backbone of the Anesthesia Residency Program, Julie manages a multitude of tasks and portfolios to ensure its smooth functioning. Organized and well prepared, she juggles multiple tasks seamlessly with a calm, quiet force. She fields a multitude of requests and challenges on a daily basis; pulled in multiple directions, she remains friendly, professional and approachable. She is the contact person for scheduling issues among the residents, who find her welcoming, accessible and extraordinarily resourceful. Julie demonstrates excellent problem solving and creative solutions and is indispensable to the program.
Francophonie and Francophilie – Individual Award
Diana-Lynn Fox - Clinical Research Associate, School of Epidemiology and Public Health (SEPH)
Diana led the project to migrate SEPH’s web pages to uOttawa’s new format website. As nearly all teaching and research activities at SEPH had been in English, most pages were unilingually English, thus the priority of ensuring the availability of all 154 pages in both official languages. Diana completed initial translations, and with the support of various Faculty offices, ensured all pages were properly translated and migrated. She created a reference document of over 870 terms, in both French and English, commonly used in epidemiology and public health teaching and research, to help ensure consistency across all newly created web pages, faculty profiles and official communications from SEPH.
Research – Individual Award
Evin Sezer-Hepcanli – Manager, Academic and Corporate Affairs, HR
Evin has shown exemplary leadership and creativity in building the framework to take the university’s international public–private research and open possibilities for future opportunities. Working with numerous stakeholders, including internal and external legal teams and Innovation Support Services, she created the framework to allow a researcher to engage with a private US company while being employed by uOttawa and keep the CRC. The result is a collaborative research environment for all parties (researcher, uOttawa, Faculty and private company), as a secondment agreement was structured to ensure the researcher can dedicate time and attention to research commitments and contribute to the advancement of emerging research priorities at the Faculty. The approach is the first of its kind at uOttawa and will result in revenue opportunity through total cost recovery for the Faculty.
Research – Individual Award
Dr. Maddie Venables – Academic Research Advisor, Department of Family Medicine
Dr. Venable supports the Faculty’s research goals in numerous ways. As a recent recipient of the Staff Project Award, she will build on our current research strengths by using research findings from an Indigenous anti-racism assessment tool to assess anti-racism teaching material, in support of integrating Indigenous knowledge into curricula and reducing Indigenous health inequities and racism in health care. She is also advancing our emerging research priorities, having created an app to help patients in need find a family doctor. She supports faculty in the preparation of grant submissions, and provides stellar support and guidance to residents and faculty for PGY2s’ mandatory research projects.
Internationalization, Global Health and Social Accountability – Individual Award
Chantal Renaud – UGME Admissions Officer, Undergraduate Medical Education
Chantal is recognized for her significant contribution to the new Inuit medical student stream at the Faculty. While many of the accolades have been directed elsewhere, it is Chantal’s wealth of knowledge, commitment to meeting month after month, and consistently professional demeanor that have made this stream possible. She has been the face of the Faculty with the Government of Nunavut, Nunavut Tunngavik, and now the potential applicants. She brings great integrity to her work and thus to this initiative, in which building relationships and trust are so important. The Faculty is grateful for her dedication to advancing the Faculty’s social accountability mandate.
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion – Individual Award
Asiya Rolston – Manager of Faculty Affairs and Faculty Development, Department of Family Medicine
Asiya has made impactful contributions to EDI initiatives within the Department and Faculty. She was a member of the uOttawa steering committee on anti-racism and inclusion, sought out to give valuable input into 2022’s Final Report on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence. Her contributions led to an invitation to lead and participate in the expert panel, “Why family medicine faculty cannot be ‘colour-blind’: Starting the journey to becoming anti-racist,” part of a faculty development event last year to guide crucial conversations around racism within medical education. Asiya promotes EDI principles daily by connecting with others, candidly sharing her own stories and experiences, consciously ensuring diversity within the team, and celebrating the individuality and professional growth of those around her.
Team Awards
Service Excellence – Team Award
Postgraduate Medical Education Office
Heather Summers, Peter Hall, Lynn Prud'homme, Rasha Shahrouri, Naomi Dussah, Michelle Centen, Andrea Bailie, Callie Luckovitch, Olivier Roth, Yvonne Williams, Laura Zywicki, Benjamin Surmachynski
The PGME team is dedicated to ensuring the best possible support and service; their leadership, insight, and hard work clearly demonstrate their commitment to excellence. The team of 12 serves over 1,300 residents and fellows (medical trainees) across 80+ programs, supporting 150 program administrators and over 100 program and fellowship directors who work in clinical environments. They have established fantastic relationships and collaborate very well with all Faculty service providers, as well as with partner hospital coordinators. A recent external accreditation reviewer expressed high praise and admiration for the team, and for the comments he received around the Faculty on the team’s stellar service.
Service Excellence – Team Award
Project Management Office, Department of Family Medicine
Jeffrey Puncher, Marisa Duval, Ali El Achkar, Oksana Sasovska, Pavel Martchenkov, Kendra Stapleton, Ryan Morrison, Osama Alghamyan
The Project Management Team consistently and effectively supports the Faculty and University community. With COVID shutdowns, the team facilitated remote learning by providing employment to many co-op students. They build service solutions by working collaboratively and forming multidisciplinary teams, such as partnering with uOttawa programs to develop tools for students to teach work/life balance, resiliency and burn-out prevention for family doctors. The team has enriched the curriculum and student experience by participating in uOttawa’s 2022 Discovery Day in Health Sciences, introducing the family medicine program to high school students and allowing the Department to continually leverage opportunities, address obstacles and advance family medicine teaching and learning methods.
Professionalism – Team Award
Office of Strategic Planning and Implementation
Gillian Lord, Catherine Dumoulin, Carissa Grondin, Martine Desaulniers, Lisa Abel, Christine Matthews
In April 2022, the Office of Social Accountability was shaken by the sudden passing of their program manager. Despite their own grief, the Strategic Planning Team pulled together to provide human resources (and human-centric) support to the social accountability team. Their professionalism contributed to a culture of collaborative teamwork that was integral to ensuring the SA team could carry out their important community-oriented activities. Each demonstrated compassion, levity, competence and emotional intelligence; despite extraordinarily full plates, they dove right in to provide support. As we strive to be a faculty of kindness, the concrete actions of such colleagues set the tone for a healthy and vibrant work environment.
Francophonie and Francophilie – Team Award
Medical Education Team, Institut du Savoir Montfort
Louise Martin, France Simonyi, Géraldine Gauthier, Marijke Cowick, Melanie Desmarais, Renelle Trépanier, Émilie Contant, Véronik Desjardins
The Montfort’s support in medical education team works in a Francophone environment to help our Francophone learners and to coordinate clinical placements in French, often in minority settings. The team works together to ensure proper support, in French, to our preceptors, and students. Always innovative in their approaches and their emphasis on French-language education, this team emphasizes the importance of Francophonie, and is a symbol of excellence in their work for the future generation of Francophone physicians.
