Dr. Katherine Rudzinski is a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)- funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Work, University of Windsor. She has a Master of Arts in Criminology, specializing in addictions, and a doctorate in public health sciences from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She was a Mitacs Elevate Postdoctoral Fellow jointly with the Casey House Foundation and held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Katherine has 16 years of experience working with and for people who use drugs on community-based research projects, including as research coordinator at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). She has been a Co-I on projects funded by the Ontario HIV Treatment Network (OHTN), SSHRC, and CIHR. Katherine is currently PI on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant examining women’s experiences of safer supply programs (SSPs) in Ontario using an arts-based and theoretically-informed approach to understand how these programs may potentially impact the victimization and criminalization of women. She is also Co-PI on an OHTN-funded project exploring the key factors for developing a gender responsive model for supervised consumption services (SCS). Katherine has expertise in social theory, resilience, harm reduction, gender, and mixed-methods research. Her current research focuses on using arts-based approaches (e.g., photovoice, cellphilm) to engage women and gender diverse individuals to share their experiences with safer supply programs.