Melina Albanese, PhD

About Melina

Biography:

Melina is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, where she is co-supervised by Dr. Tim Oberlander and Dr. Gillian Hanley. Melina’s program of research uses population-based health administrative data to examine the health of pregnant individuals with autism and their children.

Melina completed a PhD in Public Health Sciences (University of Toronto, 2025), supervised by Dr. Hilary K Brown. Her research used Ontario health administrative datasets accessed at ICES (formerly: Institute for Clinical and Evaluative Sciences) to examine “Migraine, Comorbidity, and Maternal and Neonatal Outcomes.” Melina obtained >$100,000 CAD in research funding support during her PhD. Melina’s PhD research was funded by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), the Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology (QEII-GSST), the GROWW Program Scholarship, and the University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute’s Data Access Grant. Melina also received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute Community Support (ICS) program to present her third dissertation objective at the 2025 Society for Epidemiologic Research (SER) conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

As a PhD candidate, Melina was also involved in several extracurricular activities, including being Co-Editor in Chief of The University of Toronto Journal of Public Health (UTJPH) and Online Co-Editor of The Public Health Corner (affiliated with UTJPH). During her time at UTJPH, she additionally helped conceive and execute a special issue on women’s health, which is under production as of Nov 2025. She was co-chair of the Research and Practice committee for the 2022 DLSPH Student-Led Conference: What’s Next for Public Health. Melina has also participated as a mentor in the Research EXperience Program (REX) in three academic years (total number of undergraduate mentees: 8) during her MSc and PhD programs, with the undergraduate students she has supervised all having successfully presented their research project at the Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Conference (MURC), held annually at the University of British Columbia.

Before starting her PhD, Melina previously studied at the University of British Columbia, where she completed her BSc in Biology (2018) and MSc in Population and Public Health (2021). Her MSc dissertation is titled “The association between organized activity participation and emotional wellbeing among immigrant-origin and non-immigrant children.”

Melina has over 8 years’ of research experience, having previously worked as a research assistant at the ARC (Advancing Reproductive Health Across the Life Course) Lab at the University of Toronto Scarborough (2021-2025) as well as the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research (2019-2021), the Human Early Learning Partnership (2018 and 2021), and the Rieseberg Lab (2017), based at the University of British Columbia.

Research interests: Epidemiology, chronic disease, comorbidity, mental health, women’s health, disability, health equity, knowledge synthesis.

Current affiliations:

Past affiliations: