Our People

Karen Edwards

Director

Karen Edwards brings over 21 years of experience in community-based research, organizational management, partnership development, and knowledge mobilization. She has held senior coordination positions where she facilitated responsive research partnerships across communities in northern Canada, Alberta, British Columbia, Atlantic Canada, and internationally. She fostered Canadian engagement and leadership in an international polar science program, coordinated provincial involvement in a national research capacity-building program for Indigenous health, and worked with provincial and regional organizations on indoor air quality issues in schools. Karen is committed to collaborative and impactful change. She prioritizes working directly with community partners to understand issues and co-generate new knowledge that drives real-world solutions.

Rebecca Gokiert

Associate Director

Rebecca Gokiert is a Professor in the School of Public Health, Associate Director of the CUP, and the Director of the Evaluation Capacity Network (ECN). CUP and the ECN bridge community-university evaluation gaps, serving as a hub for students, researchers, government, and community organizations to share and access evaluation expertise, resources, and educational opportunities.

She is a scientist-clinician who has devoted her career to interdisciplinary inquiry in early childhood development, partnership and collaboration, community-based participatory research, and measurement and evaluation within cross-cultural contexts. Rebecca is a registered psychologist in the province of Alberta and specializes in assessment and intervention in school-based settings.

Maria Mayan

Associate Director

Maria Mayan is a Professor, and Vice Dean, and an Associate Director of CUP. She is an engaged scholar who situates her work at the intersection of government, not-for-profits, industry, government, and structurally disadvantaged. She grounds her work in the policy environment and focuses on how we can work together on complex health and social issues. Her work focuses on the causes of marginalization and how to mobilize against systems of inequity, using primarily qualitative and community-engaged research in rigorous and creative ways.

As a qualitative methodologist, she has studied, written about, and conducted qualitative research since the early 1990s. She spent over ten years at the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology learning and teaching qualitative inquiry locally and internationally. She has been invited to teach qualitative inquiry by government, not-for-profits, the private sector, and the academic community worldwide. Her qualitative expertise has culminated into a book, Essentials of Qualitative Inquiry (second edition by Routledge).

One of her most valued activities is joining with colleagues and graduate students to use both conventional and unconventional qualitative and community-based methods to explore intriguing and pressing health research issues.

Her current research program is embedded in community economic development in Drayton Valley, Alberta.