“The PSIF Resident Research Grant was the first project funding that I ever received, and it allowed me to answer a question from my clinical work with people who were incarcerated. Through that project, I learned about prison health research in Canada, and I developed relationships with people working in this field. I am now building on this foundation to develop a program of research focused on improving the health and health care of people who are incarcerated in Canada.”
In 2008, Dr. Fiona Kouyoumdjian received a Resident Research Grant for $18,000 for her study “The prevalence of gonorrhoea and chlamydia in male inmates in a provincial correctional facility in Ontario.” This project was supervised by Dr. Cheryl Main at McMaster University. Dr. Kouyoumdjian has published three papers in peer-reviewed journals based on this project in the International Journal of STD & AIDS and the Canadian Journal of Public Health. The third is in press (citation: F. G. Kouyoumdjian, L. M. Calzavara, L. Kiefer, C. Main, S.J. Bondy. Drug use prior to incarceration and associated socio-behavioural factors in males in a provincial correctional facility in Ontario, Canada. Canadian Journal of Public Health. In press). Dr. Kouyoumdjian presented her research as a poster presentation at the 2014 PSI Annual General Meeting.
Dr. Kouyoumdjian completed medical school at Dalhousie University, a Master of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and residency in Public Health and Preventive Medicine and a PhD in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, with Dr. Stephen Hwang as her supervisor, and she works as a Family Physician at a provincial correctional facility. She has a CIHR Fellowship from 2013 to 2016.
