Dr Amanda Sim
Future Leaders Executive Team Representative
Dr Amanda Sim is the 2023-2024 Future Leaders Executive Team Representative. She is a Co-Principal Investigator on the Parenting on the Thailand/Myanmar Border Study, and a Global Mental Health researcher and Implementation Scientist at The Offord Centre for Child Studies and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University. She brings 14 years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating parenting and mental health interventions with conflict-affected communities in low- and middle-income countries including Thailand, Liberia, and Lebanon.
Her research focuses on understanding risk and resilience processes influencing the mental health and well-being of displaced children and families so as to develop and test scalable and culturally responsive interventions. She previously led a UNICEF-funded evaluation of the International Rescue Committee’s parenting intervention for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and provided technical support to the UNICEF Middle East and North Africa Regional Office’s parenting strategy. She currently leads a study to develop and evaluate universal and targeted parenting and mental health interventions for displaced families from Myanmar and is also Principal Investigator of a multi-agency study to assess the mental health needs of refugees and newcomer children and families in Canada.
Dr Sim previously worked in the International Rescue Committee's research and evaluation technical unit and holds a Doctoral degree in Evidence-Based Social Intervention from the University of Oxford and a Master’s degree from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
