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Catherine Slavik

Assistant Professor Legacy for Airway Health Chair in Health Communications

Health Sciences

Catherine Slavik

Assistant Professor, Legacy for Airway Health Chair in Health Communications

Health Sciences

Areas of interest

Health communication and education; risk perception; behavioural science; occupational and environmental health; environmental justice; health equity; decision making; knowledge mobilization; air quality; climate change adaptation and resilience

Education

  • BSc (Hons), University of Toronto
  • MPH, University of Toronto
  • PhD, McMaster University
  • Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Oregon
  • Impact Canada Fellowship, Impact Canada, Health Canada

Biography

Dr. Cathy Slavik joined the Faculty of Health Sciences in January 2026 as an Assistant Professor and as the Legacy for Airway Health Chair in Health Communication. She is also a researcher at the Legacy for Airway Health at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. Previously, she was a Behavioural Science Research Fellow at Impact Canada and Health Canada’s Tobacco Control Directorate, studying ways to help Canadians quit tobacco through improved services and resources. Prior to that, she held the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oregon’s Center for Science Communication Research, where she developed and tested health education tools aimed at increasing public awareness of environmental and health risks, such as wildfire smoke and radon. She received her PhD from the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University and her Master’s of Public Health in Occupational and Environmental Health from the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Dr. Slavik also spent several years as a researcher at the Occupational Cancer Research Centre based at Ontario Health, where she investigated spatial patterns in industrial pollutants and trends in occupational exposures and related disease.

Research Interests

Dr. Slavik’s research examines how social and environmental risk factors shape health and how health risks can be communicated to support informed decision-making and behaviour change. She is an interdisciplinary, highly applied researcher who draws on training in the health sciences, social sciences, and environmental science to develop, test, and refine evidence-based health communication tools. Her work uses mixed-methods approaches (e.g, surveys, experimental and quasi-experimental designs) to evaluate communication strategies and interventions aimed at improving risk comprehension, addressing health misperceptions and misinformation, and encouraging behaviour change. She is particularly interested in developing communications that are equitable and culturally responsive across diverse populations. Dr. Slavik is deeply committed to integrated knowledge translation and regularly collaborates with knowledge translators, brokers, practitioners, policymakers, and community partners to co-produce, implement, and scale communication tools that inform policy and real-world practice.

Publications

You can find Dr. Slavik's publications on Google Scholar.