Steering Committee

Click on the links below to access Member Bios, current and archived Newsletters, upcoming meeting information, and past meeting agendas and notes.

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Evan Villeneuve, MSW

Evan Villeneuve is a macro social worker whose praxis includes housing advocacy, community organizing, social services, and social policy. He holds an MSW from the University of Michigan and currently serves his community as a program manager at a community-based nonprofit in Detroit, Michigan, focused on healthy homes initiatives.

Kimberly Strain, BA (Music)

Kimberly Strain lives in British Columbia, Canada, and has been a patient partner in a variety of initiatives since 2012 including committees, a patient research partner, a member of Patient Voices Network, and a co-author of the Patients Included charters. She also is on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada and will soon be completing her term as co-chair for the Solutions for Kids in Pain (SKIP) Patient and Caregiver Advisory Committee. In her spare time, Kimberly has a passion for photography and the arts.

Carrie Leach, PhD.

Carrie Leach, Ph.D. is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute of Gerontology, Co-Director of Community Engagement at the Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors (CURES), and Associate Center Director for Community Inclusion at the Center for Health Equity and Community Knowledge in Urban Populations (CHECK-UP) at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. Leach has expertise in health communication, participatory and action research, digital and health literacy, and community-based and aging services delivery and communication.

Carmel McGrath, PhD

Carmel McGrath is a Research Fellow in Public Involvement at NIHR ARC West and NIHR HPRU BSE. Carmel’s PhD was funded by the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre and University of Southampton. Her doctoral research focussed on exploring how public involvement creates long-term impacts on research outcomes. She collaborated with NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre Patient Experience Research Centre to develop logic models as a framework to capture these impacts. Since completing her PhD, Carmel has been involved in developing ways to better understand research priorities that are important to the wider community including the award- winning Health Research Ambassador programme and World Café events. Carmel has also been involved in supporting researchers with their evaluation of public involvement through impact logs, logic models and the cube evaluation framework approach.