Congratulations to Dr. Meaghan Thumath, who received the King Charles III Coronation Medal on March 13, 2025.
March 18, 2025
Dr. Meaghan Thumath is a UBC alumna and Clinical Assistant Professor at the UBC School of Nursing, specializing in health equity during public health emergencies. Her work bridges clinical practice, research, and policy to strengthen epidemic and pandemic preparedness, with a particular focus on human rights, gender, and marginalized populations.
She is a member of the World Health Emergencies Programme at the World Health Organization and has provided technical expertise on global outbreak response efforts, including WHO’s COVID-19 response in South Africa and the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In addition to her work with WHO, she has conducted field research on infectious disease outbreaks with the Canadian Red Cross, UNAIDS, and the World Bank in South Sudan, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka.
In Canada, Dr. Thumath has played a key role in public health leadership, serving as Chief of Staff to the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction, a Senior Practice Leader at the BC Centre for Disease Control, and the Executive Director of Population and Public Health for the BC Ministry of Health. Her work has informed national and provincial health strategies on harm reduction, infectious disease control, and health system preparedness.
She holds a doctorate in Social Intervention and Policy from the University of Oxford, where she was a Trudeau Scholar at the Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention (CEBI). She also has a Master of Science in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and maintains academic affiliations with the Women’s Health Research Institute (WHRI, the BC Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU) and Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. Dr. Thumath is a registered nurse (RN) with advanced practice certification in sexual and reproductive health and addiction medicine, integrating frontline experience with policy and research to advance health equity in public health emergencies.
The Coronation Medal commemorates the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III as King of Canada. The medal is administered by the Chancellery of Honours at Rideau Hall. Honourees have made a significant contribution to Canada or to a particular province, territory, region or community of Canada, or have made an outstanding achievement abroad that brings credit to Canada.
