From: Trevor Young, Vice-President & Provost
Susan McCahan, Vice-Provost, Innovations in Undergraduate Education
Date: April 17, 2026
Re: 2025-26 Recipients of the Cheryl Regehr Early Career Teaching Award (PDAD&C #33)
We are delighted to announce the recipients of the 2025-26 Cheryl Regehr Early Career Teaching Award. In addition to congratulating this year’s recipients, we would like to thank the nominators for their work in preparing submissions. We would also like to thank the members of the selection committee for their dedication to recognizing excellence in teaching at the University of Toronto.
Cheryl Regehr Early Career Teaching Award, 2025-26
This award recognizes faculty members who demonstrate an exceptional commitment to student learning, pedagogical engagement and teaching innovation. This year the committee granted six awards of $3,000.
Gwendolyn Eadie
Assistant Professor
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics / Department of Statistical Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Science
Professor Gwendolyn Eadie is an outstanding early-career educator whose teaching has had a transformative impact on statistics and astronomy education at the University of Toronto and internationally. Appointed as the University’s first joint faculty member between Statistical Sciences and Astronomy & Astrophysics, Professor Eadie has pioneered interdisciplinary teaching in the emerging field of astrostatistics. She has combined excellent teaching, robust mentorship, and pedagogical scholarship to help create a community of engaged educators across both of her home departments.
Leveraging her certificates in undergraduate teaching, Professor Eadie has developed new courses that provide mixed cohorts of statisticians and astronomers with the skills to tackle hard problems in the field of Big Data. She created JAS1101: Introduction to Astrostatistics, which integrates peer instruction, active learning, and engagement with real data. The course has consistently received student evaluation scores exceeding 90% and continues to grow in enrollment. Her pedagogical scholarship is cited internationally and has led to multiple invitations for her to teach at and eventually lead international summer schools at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada. At the University of Toronto, she co-founded Starfish School, a bootcamp in computing, statistics, and scholarship that now forms part of the core graduate curriculum, and leads the Astrostatistics Research Team, fostering mentorship and interdisciplinary collaboration within and beyond the university. Through sustained innovation, scholarly rigor, and deep commitment to student learning, Professor Eadie exemplifies excellence in early-career teaching.
Certina Ho
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy / Department of Psychiatry, Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Dr. Certina Ho is an exceptional early-career educator whose teaching, innovation, and scholarly leadership have made a transformative impact across the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and Temerty Faculty of Medicine. Her work is defined by a deep commitment to inclusive, evidence-informed pedagogy and to creating learning environments that prepare future health professionals to improve patient care. As an Assistant Professor in Pharmacy and Psychiatry, Dr. Ho leads high-impact teaching in patient safety, medication-incident analysis, continuous quality improvement, and program evaluation. She designs accessible, practice-grounded courses guided by Universal Design for Learning and evaluates them rigorously. Her decade-long assessment of PHM322 demonstrated measurable gains in students’ knowledge, confidence, and readiness to lead patient-safety and CQI initiatives, which is testament to the effectiveness of her applied, learner-centred approach. Students consistently praise her passion, mentorship, and genuine investment in their success. Dr. Ho is a leading innovator in gamified learning, developing scalable educational tools funded through multiple institutional grants and disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and international conferences. She has also helped to establish impactful mentorship structures, including the Clinician Scholar Program and the Department of Psychiatry Mentorship Program, both of which are grounded in scholarly evaluation and have significantly expanded opportunities for resident and faculty development. As an education scholar, Dr. Ho has secured more than 30 grants and contributed to a robust body of peer-reviewed work advancing health professions education. Her leadership, scholarly rigour, and unwavering dedication to learner growth exemplify the qualities recognized by this award.
Michael Liut
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of Toronto Mississauga
Professor Michael Liut integrates evidence-informed instruction, mentorship, and education research into a coherent “learning ecosystem” that emphasizes frequent practice, timely feedback, and inclusive learning environments. He frequently innovates in his course, using his research in education to increase student engagement, demand, and learning outcomes, with students consistently describing his teaching as accessible, motivating, and highly effective. Professor Liut is also an internationally recognized scholar of teaching and learning. He is the first teaching-stream faculty member in Canada to receive an NSERC Discovery Grant, has secured over $1.3M in funding, and has published extensively in top computing education venues, often with student co-authors. He has also supervised over 85 undergraduate and 5 graduate students, founded the Computer Science Student Community to support peer learning and leadership, and is widely recognized for his approachability and mentorship.
Daniel Aureliano Newman
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Science
Daniel Aureliano Newman is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department of English and the Director of Graduate Writing Support in the Faculty of Arts and Science. A scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century British fiction with expertise in narrative theory, his publications include a book on experimental novels and their relation to evolutionary theory, as well as articles on the interplay between literature and science. In writing studies, his research focuses on the role of social writing practices and the perennial problem of giving students effective writing feedback. Renowned for his innovative classroom techniques, he brings the study of textual material to life by pairing it with other media: graphs and charts, visual art, even his own guitar-playing. As Director of Graduate Writing Support, Professor Newman has reached thousands (that’s no exaggeration: thousands) of students across a wide range of graduate programs in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. He communicates a deep understanding of academic genres and, by organizing social writing opportunities, provides inspiration and accountability in equal measure. Participants in his Dissertation Working Groups find them nothing less than transformative: “a turning point for my work as graduate student”; “the best thing that could have happened to my dissertation.” Passionate and knowledgeable, devoted and skillful, Professor Newman is the kind of teacher students aspire to learn from and colleagues aspire to become.
Zahra Shakeri
Assistant Professor
Institute of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Dr. Zahra Shakeri, Assistant Professor of Health Informatics and Information Visualization at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is an extraordinary early-career educator whose innovative teaching has transformed student learning and elevated health data science education at the University of Toronto. She has developed high-impact graduate courses -Applied Machine Learning for Health Data, Health Data Visualization, and Special Topics in Artificial Intelligence. These courses address critical curricular gaps and consistently earn exceptional evaluations, reflecting her ability to engage, challenge, and support learners from diverse technical backgrounds. A hallmark of Dr. Shakeri’s teaching is her commitment to accessible, practice-focused learning. She has built interactive platforms, reproducible computational workflows, and datathon-style assessments that simulate real-world analytic environments. Her structured mentorship model enables students to produce high-quality scholarly and public-facing outputs by emphasizing iterative feedback, teamwork, and clear milestones. Remarkably, nine course-based projects have resulted in peer-reviewed publications, an exceptional achievement in graduate coursework. Her pedagogical influence extends nationally through her leadership in the AI for Public Health training program and widely attended workshops on data visualization, AI literacy, and evidence-based communication. Colleagues describe her as a generous mentor whose methods are shaping departmental teaching practices. Students consistently characterize her courses as transformative, citing direct impacts on their research productivity, practica opportunities, and career trajectories. Through her creativity, rigor, and unwavering commitment to student growth, Dr. Shakeri exemplifies the spirit of the Cheryl Regehr Early Career Teaching Award and stands as a model of educational excellence and impact.
Naomi Steenhof
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy
Dr. Naomi Steenhof is recognized for exceptional early‑career contributions that are transforming student learning at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning across the health professions. Grounded in her research on adaptive expertise and productive struggle, she designs evidence‑informed learning experiences that promote reflective practice, innovation, and flexibility, capacities essential in today’s complex healthcare environments.
Dr. Steenhof’s impact extends well beyond the classroom. Her rigorous education scholarship has expanded theoretical understanding of adaptive expertise through publications and invited presentations spanning pharmacy education, health professions education, and broader education science. She is increasingly sought after nationally and internationally, including invitations to present at MedEd on the Edge and leadership as Chair of the Connecting Health Professions around Education track at the AMEE Conference, where she creates platforms that elevate educational innovation across disciplines.
At the University of Toronto, Dr. Steenhof has played a pivotal role in transformational curricular change, co-leading the development of Canada’s first accelerated three-year PharmD program, where her work on adaptive expertise helped shape course and curricular design and supported extensive faculty development. She is also deeply committed to student-faculty engagement, mentoring learners in clinical settings and maintaining a strong presence in co-curricular student life.
As a Scientist at the Wilson Centre for Research in Education, Dr. Steenhof strengthens the culture of teaching and learning through mentorship, serving on PhD advisory committees, guiding research fellows, and leading mentorship initiatives.