Biography 

Elsie (she/her) is a registered social worker and a doctoral candidate at the at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

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Awarded as a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow (2025-2027) and IWH Fellow (2024), Elsie has been recognized for her academic achievement and her demonstrated scholarly potential as an emerging public health researcher. She is committed to Black feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial praxis-centered approaches, and uses critical qualitative and arts-based research methodologies to explore the ways structural, intersecting oppressions impact Black women’s health.

Engaging a Black feminist and Fat Studies’ lens, Elsie’s doctoral research is an endarkened narrative inquiry (McClish-Boyd & Bhattacharya, 2024) study that uses body mapping to examine the embodied experiences of Black women who utilize bariatric surgery (commonly referred to as weight loss surgery) in Canada.