2023 Jarislowsky Fellows: Dr. Mohab Elnashar, Dr. Courtney Howard and Shruti Sharma

Dr. Mohab Elnashar is an Engineering Manager for the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), a crown corporation responsible for operating the electricity market and directing the operation of the bulk electrical system in the province of Ontario, Canada. In this role, he leads a group of engineers to perform operational and planning studies, perform engineering analysis to assure transmission and generation systems are in compliance with North American Standards, assess performance of conventional and renewable generators.

Elnashar has over 20 years of experience in electric power engineering, renewable generation, plant commissioning, power system planning and operation. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Alexandria University in Alexandria, Egypt and later earned his PhD in Electric and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. He is a registered professional engineer.

Dr. Courtney Howard is an Emergency Physician in Yellowknife, in Canada’s subarctic, and a Clinical Associate Professor in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. She is a nationally- and globally-recognized expert on the impacts of climate change on health, and in the broader field of planetary health.

For Dr. Howard, grounding her work in planetary health started a decade ago motivated by two experiences at the opposite ends of the earth: In Canada’s North she heard her mostly Indigenous patients relate how the rapidly-changing landscape was impacting their food security and physical safety on the land, and read that malnutrition is likely to be the most severe health impact of climate change this century. She then worked with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières on a children’s malnutrition project in Djibouti and was devastated as severely malnourished infants died under her care. Upon returning home, she realized that given Canada’s high per-capita carbon footprint, the highest-impact way to promote a healthy future for patients both at home and globally is to work at the intersection of climate change and health.

Shruti Sharma is a senior policy advisor based in India for the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). Shruti’s role includes managing research projects focused on energy subsidy reform in India. Her research focuses on understanding household energy transitions involving various fuels- electricity, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking and solar irrigation. These projects focus on analyzing fuel subsidy policies to provide recommendations to national and state governments. Her recent work has examined how well electricity subsidies target poor households and farmers in states like Jharkhand and Haryana; gender-disaggregated impacts of subsidy reform, LPG subsidy policies and renewable energy swaps.