Melissa Milkie
Principal Investigator
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga
Chair of the Graduate Department, University of Toronto
Melissa Milkie is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Graduate Department. Melissa’s research focuses on structural and cultural changes in gender, work and family life over recent decades and how work-family configurations are linked to mental health and well-being. Recently, she has examined time allocations of and time pressures on parents; work-family conflicts and health; and cultural contestations of family in media. Currently she is examining some key parental strains, including time strains, parenting stressors in the 2020 pandemic, and challenges in integrating children in new communities following migration. As principal investigator for a current SSHRC Insight Grant, Melissa examines complexities of parent-child time together and apart in Canada and the U.S. Her research has also been supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is published in journals such as American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Society and Mental Health and Social Psychology Quarterly, among others. Recently, she was named as one of the top-cited work-family researchers in the world by the Work-Family Researchers Network (WFRN).
Irene Boeckmann
Co-Investigator
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
Irene Boeckmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Irene’s work focuses on gender, work, families and public policies. In addition to her research experience in the areas of gender, work, and families, she brings extensive experience working with various large quantitative data sets to the project. Her publications include several peer-reviewed journal articles on the links between public policies and mothers’ employment outcomes in countries across Europe and North America. In her current work, she examines the work-family nexus from the perspective of fathers, including how workplace policies and men’s occupational characteristics are related to fathers’ involvement in their children’s daily lives using Canadian and American time-use data. In her second strand of research, she investigates how couples with children organize their engagement in paid work across different work-family policy and cultural contexts using cross-national longitudinal labour market and household survey data from Europe and North America. Her research has been published in Social Forces, Work and Occupations, Social Politics and more.
Casey Scheibling
Postdoctoral Fellow
Casey Scheibling is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Casey’s research interests are in the sociological study of families, gender, culture, and health, with a particular focus on men and fathers. His doctoral thesis, completed at McMaster University in 2019, was an ethnographic study of a community of “dad bloggers” who are using social media to rework cultural discourses about fatherhood and masculinity. As a new recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Casey is beginning an interview-based project on the gender identities and emotional well-being of recent fathers in Ontario and Québec. In collaborative projects, he has compared the association between masculine norm adherence and father involvement cross-nationally in Canada and the U.S. and he is currently examining changes in the division of domestic labour in Canada since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. His work can be found in journals such as Men and Masculinities, Sex Roles, Symbolic Interaction, and Feminist Media Studies.
Dana Wray
Research Assistant
Dana Wray is a 4th-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of family, work, and social policy. More specifically, Dana uses time use data to explore how parental time with children is shaped by policies such as parental leave or workplace flexibility policies in the Canadian and international context. Her research is funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and has recently been published in Journal of Marriage and Family.
Laila Omar
Research Assistant
Laila is a 4th-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of International Migration and Qualitative Methods, with a special focus on the integration process of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in Canada. More specifically, Laila’s research explores how Syrian refugee mothers and youth experience time and conceptualize their futures after their resettlement in the host country and during different stages of uncertainty. Her research is funded by the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.
Michael Bator
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Michael Bator is a 4th-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Through his studies of criminology, and sociology, he grew interested in social psychology, the sociology of mental health, and looks to examine their possible applications within the field of policing.
Alumni of the PACT Team
Julia Ingenfeld
Research Assistant (2019-2020)
Cheryl Chin
Undergraduate Research Assistant (2020)
Emilie Stamelos
Undergraduate Research Assistant (2020)
Maryam Rahal
Undergraduate Research Assistant (2020)
Marcus Sangha
Undergraduate Research Assistant (2020)
Melissa Milkie 