Profile

Paola Ardiles Gamboa (she/her) is a Latinx practitioner scholar focusing on building innovative, collaborative, and inter-sectoral approaches in health promotion policy, practice, research and education. Her passion is to co-create decolonial futures, develop partnerships and facilitate dialogue to foster sustainable and creative upstream solutions to tackle complex public health challenges. She is the co-founder of Bridge for Heath co-operative focusing on equity centered approaches in youth engagement and wellbeing in the workplace.

Since 2015, Paola has been developing and teaching participatory and community-based experiential courses at SFU, including the co-design of the Health Change Lab, in collaboration with SFU RADIUS and the Beedie School of Business, City of Surrey, Fraser Health and many community-based organizations. The Health Change Lab is an experiential program to help students identify community health challenges and co-design innovative and entrepreneurial solutions. In 2021, she co-designed the new Capstone course of the Master of Public Health; where interdisciplinary student teams work with community partners to address complex and pressing public health challenges.

Paola has led and collaborated on various knowledge mobilization and research initiatives related to health promotion, education, policy and social innovation. She is co-principal investigator of an arts-based community-based research project Art on the Go to promote newcomer youth engagement in policy making related to improving road safety in Surrey. Paola is also the co-principal investigator of a community-based study understanding experiences of exclusion for foreign trained health professionals.

Paola’s educational research spans from studies aimed to strengthen democratic practices in teaching and learning at SFU, by understanding systems level policies and practices impacting student learning; to peer reviewed studies assessing student experiences of educational innovations she has co-designed such as the Health Change Lab and the Surrey CityLab, working alongside diverse community partners in Surrey.