Research Community

Dr. Lin Li completed her PhD in Nursing at McMaster University in 2024. In July 2024, she joined Bloomberg Nursing as a CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Cleverley (primary supervisor) and Dr. Yona Lunsky (co-supervisor, Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre, CAMH, & Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto). Her doctoral work utilized qualitative methods to explore family experiences with the transition to adult care for youth with medical complexity. In her postdoctoral work, Dr. Li aims to apply mixed methods to understand care experiences and longitudinal outcomes of youth with neurodevelopmental disorders who are aging out of child and adolescent mental health services.

Dr. Jordana McMurray completed her PhD from the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto in 2025. Her research is centered at the intersection of sleep and mental health in youth populations. Her doctoral thesis examined actigraphic and self-reported sleep outcomes and relationships to anxiety and depression symptoms in adolescents and young adults with and without cystic fibrosis. Her postdoctoral fellowship began in 2025 under the supervision of Dean Robyn Stremler (primary supervisor) and Dr. Kristin Cleverly (co-supervisor). Dr. McMurray’s postdoctoral research is focused on conducting a randomized controlled trial using wearable sleep trackers to test an app-based sleep promotion intervention to improve sleep duration and mental health outcomes in adolescents. As she moves forward in her career, she is committed to advancing a research program focused on enhancing sleep, mental health, and well-being for young people.

Dr. Sandy Rao’s work is driven by a commitment to understanding how mental health systems recognize need and how those decisions shape people’s lives over time. She focuses on equity-deserving young adults and studies how institutional definitions, governance practices, and everyday system routines influence access to care, participation, and wellbeing. An Eyes High Doctoral Scholar and Killam Laureate, Dr. Rao completed her PhD in Social Work at the University of Calgary in 2025. That same year, she started her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Cleverley. Her research is informed by her dual formation as a practicing clinician and her experience as former Director of Mental Health and Addictions at Ontario Health, where she worked with system-level planning, accountability, and policy implementation across provincial services. Across her research, Dr. Rao is concerned with how institutions learn, how trust is built and sustained within systems, and how accountability is practiced in ways that honour complexity and human dignity, how knowledge is produced and taken up within institutions, and how lived and living experience contributes to collective understanding. Her work reflects a social work commitment to care, justice, and relational responsibility, and to building systems that remain attentive to the people they are meant to serve.