Temerty Faculty of Medicine Staff Impact Awards

I am pleased to announce that Julia Tausch is one of two recipients of this year's Fostering an Inclusive Environment Award. Julia was honored with this award at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine's Staff Impact Awards Ceremony on November 20. Julia joined the Department of Physiology in June of 2019 as our first Program Coordinator for the Professional Master’s in Medical Physiology Program. Julia has far exceeded what was expected of her in that role, taking on additional duties related to communications, outreach, and inclusion. She has demonstrated her passion for fostering inclusion by researching inclusive practices, volunteering for equity-focused committees and working groups, and providing allyship and leadership for various initiatives. 

Because of her initiative, passion, and exceptional writing skill, we asked Julia to add communications to her role. She quickly learned the key principles of communications from colleagues in other departments and has used those skills and her exceptional judgment to develop web content and marketing materials that are inclusive and compliant with AODA standards. Julia created and, keeps up to date, the EDI pages of our departmental website. She has also made important contributions to recent dialogues concerning bias in our admissions processes and works hard to ensure that our departmental community has access to online resources that support all our efforts to maintain inclusive learning and working environments.

Julia served as a co-lead for the Department of Physiology’s EDI committee for 2021-2024. In that role, Julia co-led an initiative to develop a comprehensive departmental Guideline and Checklist for Inclusive Faculty Recruitment, which has been used as a guide for academic searches conducted by the department since 2021. Julia served as our first EDI representative on an academic search and created a reporting tool that other EDI representatives could use for recording their observations and making notes for sharing with the departmental EDI committee and the Department Chair. The reporting tool has been very useful in organizing feedback and generating dialogue about academic searches. Julia also applied her talents to organizing the department's first Physiology and Black Health Symposium earlier this year, which took place on March 15. 

As a member of the TFoM’s Excellence Through Equity working group on academic recruitment, Julia helped develop the TFoM Guidelines for Excellence Through Equity—Appointments of Faculty and Academic Administrators document. Julia later worked in partnership with one of the co-chairs of the Excellence Through Equity working group on graduate admissions to promote a proposal for integrating EDI principles into graduate admissions processes. As a result of that hard work, the proposal was excepted by TFoM leadership, and a project manager has been recruited to operationalize key recommendations in the proposal. In addition to her exceptional work on the departmental EDI committee and the Excellence Through Equity working group, Julia represents our professional and research-based graduate programs at graduate fairs across southern Ontario, where she has been effective at reaching out to students from a variety of backgrounds, building networks and contact lists, and developing relationships with prospective students from underrepresented groups.

There is so much more that could be said about Julia’s commitment to fostering an inclusive environment and I believe she is most deserving of this honor. Please join me in congratulating Julia on her achievement!