Osgoode Professor Dayna Scott named director of NNEWH

York Professor Dayna Scott (LLB ’01, MES ’01, PhD ’06) has been appointed director of the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health (NNEWH), a Centre of Excellence established through funding by Health Canada and located at York.

A professor at York’s Osgoode Hall Law School, Scott will lead a team that, through various research projects, will look at how environments produce and reproduce conditions that create disparities in women’s health.

The NNEWH has an advisory board consisting of 10 to 12 scholars, community leaders and policy experts in the area of women’s health and environments.

Left: Dayna Scott

In addition to her appointment, Scott has obtained funding for a new graduate fellowship in environments and women’s health to be housed in York’s Institute for Health Research. The Fellow, who will be chosen on the basis of an open competition, will assist with a gender-based analysis of the government’s proposed new legislation on consumer product safety, and will also look at the government’s recent policy changes in the area of chemicals management as they relate to maternal and fetal health.

Cross-appointed with the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES), Scott will teach Administrative Law next year at Osgoode Hall Law School, and Environmental Law & Justice at FES. She will also continue as a member of the federal government’s Chemicals Advisory Panel and Ontario’s Environmental Review Tribunal.

"Scott’s considerable expertise in the areas of environmental and public law is obviously in great demand and we are fortunate to have her on our faculty," said Patrick Monahan, dean of Osgoode Hall Law School. "Scott and her team will act as a national platform, producing excellent research and knowledge to improve the lives of Canadian women."

A recipient of Fulbright and SSHRC Fellowships, and the Law Commission of Canada’s Audacity of Imagination Prize, Scott is interested in public law, environmental law and urban planning, especially questions regarding environmental regulation and governance from an interdisciplinary perspective. She is also interested in work that interrogates the interaction between local and global modes of governing and ways of knowing.

Scott joined Osgoode Hall Law School’s faculty in 2006 after completing a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at McGill University’s Faculty of Law. She is also a Legal Research Fellow with McGill’s Centre for International Sustainable Development Law.