About

Tina Malti is a child psychologist, registered clinical psychologist, and author. She is the Mary Ainsworth Distinguished Professor of Child Development at the University of Toronto, a registered clinical psychologist, and founding director of the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She currently holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship of Early Child Development and Health at Leipzig University, where she is the Founding Director of the Humboldt Science Center for Child Development. You can learn more about Tina and her work here.

Chanel Tsang has worked with children and families for more than 20 years in schools and community programs. She is a part-time PhD student studying adult education and community development at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include caregiver learning and family co-learning, community wellbeing, and knowledge mobilization. Currently, she oversees operations and community engagement at the Centre for Child Development, Mental Health, and Policy (CCDMP) at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Chanel is also the lead for the Centre’s arts-based knowledge translation project. 

A trained yoga teacher highly interested in mindfulness meditation, Chanel created the Peace Out Podcast, a children’s mindfulness podcast in 2017 as a resource for parents and educators to promote social-emotional learning and introduce yoga and mindfulness to children. It has been downloaded more than 5 million times and mentioned in multiple outlets including the New York Times, School Library Journal, and BBC’s Podcast Radio Hour. 

Chanel has served on the Board of Directors at the Family Supports Institute Ontario (2017–2022), an organization dedicated to advancing the sector of family supports in Ontario. She is grateful to have this opportunity to continue working to support child and family wellbeing with Raising HumanKIND! 

Ruth Speidel is a Developmental Psychologist whose research interests focus on investigating the mechanisms that shape early social-emotional capacities (e.g, emotion regulation, empathy) in children. Her research explores how early family processes such as emotion socialization during parent-child interactions, impact children’s social-emotional development, including in adverse environments. She is also interested in applying research and community-based approaches to develop interventions that aim to improve developmental outcomes for children and families. Ruth currently serves as the Managing Director of the Centre for Child Development Mental Health and Policy. She earned her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Notre Dame. 

Bio here

Marie-Claude Martin is a Canadian economist specialized in public health. She was Director of Global Initiatives at the Alliance for Human Development (AHD) at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute of the Sinai Health System in Toronto, Canada from 2016 to 2024 where she  contributed to its strategic direction and conducted intervention research aimed at supporting the healthy development of children in low- and middle-income countries. Previously she was Associate Director and then Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Office of Research – Innocenti in Florence, Italy, where she led the development of a UNICEF-wide research agenda and knowledge management practice to apply research findings to policy development, advocacy and programming. Before that, she served in a number of senior positions at Canada’s International Development Research Centre where she developed and led a portfolio of global research initiatives including heading the Think Tank Initiative, a ten-year, $100 million, multi-donor funded global program.  Marie-Claude serves on the Board of the African Economic Research Consortium and also served on the Board of Partnership for Economic Policy and chaired its finance and audit committee from 2012 to 2019.

Her areas of research include early childhood development, child well-being, poverty analysis, health equity and determinants of population health. Marie-Claude holds an M.A. in development economics and a Ph.D. in public health.