Kenneth Chen

Kenneth is an Honours Bachelor of Health Sciences student at McMaster University undertaking an interdisciplinary minor in community engagement. Through his interests in health policy, community engagement, global affairs, and sustainability, Kenneth hopes to leverage community engagement to inform policies that address the social and environmental determinants of health. As a research assistant and office lead with the ForumLab, Kenneth helps to maintain McMaster Health Forum databases including Health Systems Evidence, Social Systems Evidence, and COVID-END inventory of evidence syntheses. At the same time, Kenneth works with the Forum’s synthesis team to prepare evidence products including rapid syntheses and rapid evidence profiles for various governmental stakeholders.

Kenneth is a current research student at the Full Scope Generalist Medical Education Research Lab where he is working on a project with the Yale School of Public Health to examine how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks used in investment analysis capture the commercial determinants of health. Outside of his studies, Kenneth engages various local and global communities through his extracurricular pursuits. He is a teaching assistant with the Bachelor of Health Sciences (Honours) program’s longitudinal Praxis Pathways curriculum which facilitates student personal and professional development. He chairs the External Committee on the McMaster Bachelor of Health Sciences Society, serves as Co-President of McMaster Students in Support of the UNHCR, and co-leads the McMaster Students for Bike Share Working Group where he helped to create Canada’s most affordable pricing option for student access to a bike share system.

As a Global Skills Opportunity (GSO) awardee Kenneth will be travelling to Australia to work with the Prevention Research Collaboration at the University of Sydney School of Public Health and the Implementation Science Academy with Sydney Health Partners. During his time as a visiting research student, he hopes to hone his skills in research and gain deeper insights into its nexus to health policy and decision-making processes. Through this experience, Kenneth aspires to harness his refined global lens through which to engage his graduate studies as a prospective policy leader in a global context.