Dr. Wanda Polzin Holman, MA, RCSW, EdD

Clinical Director, Be Brave Ranch

Dr. Wanda Polzin Holman has over 25 years of counselling and clinical experience working with children, youth and families across various domains including Health/Mental Health and Addictions, Children and Family Services, as well as Education.

Dr. Polzin Holman has a Doctorate of Education (Ed. D) in Counselling Psychology, a Masters Degree (MA) in Counselling Psychology and is a Registered Social Worker.  Dr. Polzin Holman’s clinical training is multi-faceted, with specialization in Attachment, Trauma, EMDR, AAT, Neurobiofeedback, Family Therapy, Clinical Hypnotherapy, and Concurrent Addiction and Mental Health interventions. She has a deep passion and energy for working with children and caregivers, particularly in the area of attachment-based caregiving, trauma and trauma-informed care, family systems, complex case needs (dual diagnosis), evidence-based practices, supporting resiliency, and promoting wellness.

Melanie Jonkman, M.Ed

Trauma Therapist - Registered Psychologist

Melanie is a Registered Psychologist specializing in Child Trauma and Attachment. She is a certified Hakomi Therapist and TCI (Therapeutic Crisis Intervention) trainer. She has previously worked in children’s mental health at CASA Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health as the Clinical Lead for the Trauma Program and Trauma and Attachment Group Program.

Cheryl Horn, MPS-AT

Art Therapist

Cheryl completed a Masters of Psychotherapy and Spirituality Degree specializing in Art Therapy at St. Stephen’s College, and is a member of the Canadian Art Therapy Association and the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association.  She brings with her over ten years of experience directing and facilitating children’s programs in her community.

Cheryl has training in Trauma-Informed and Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy, as well as in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.  She is always amazed at how working through a creative process with these psychotherapy theories in mind helps facilitate self-exploration, which often opens up new perspectives on the issues we are facing.

Dr. Bina Nair, MD, FRCPC

Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist

Dr. Bina Nair MD, FRCPC is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Alberta.  After graduating medical school at the University of Saskatchewan, she finished her Psychiatry residency and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry training at the University of Calgary.  She then went on to do an Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Nair specializes in working with youth who are struggling with trauma, addictions and mental health concerns and practices from a compassionate, evidence-based, trauma-informed lens.  In 2012, she developed and was the Medical Lead of the Concurrent Addiction & Mental Health Program (CAMP) in Edmonton until 2020.  Currently she is the Consulting Psychiatrist to the Mental Health Supports for Teen Parents Program at the Terra Centre in Edmonton (a non profit organization supporting teen parents and young families).

Dr. Nair also has an interest in medical education and physician health.  She is the Region 1 representative on the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Specialty Committee in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and is the Co-Chair of the University of Alberta Resident Wellbeing Committee.

Megan Ivancic

Trauma Therapist - Registered Psychologist

Megan is a Registered Psychologist specializing in Child Trauma. She is trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and a certified TCI (Therapeutic Crisis Intervention) trainer. Megan has worked with Little Warriors since 2014 and continues to support the children, adolescents, and families impacted by trauma and sexual abuse.

Rugby

Facility Trauma Dog

We are so lucky to have Rugby on our Clinical team as a facility trauma dog at the Be Brave Ranch.  As co-therapist, Rugby supports individual therapy, group therapy, as well as family sessions. He enhances our Trauma-Informed healing environment through providing relational supports, sensing and supporting positive emotional regulation, providing healthy touch and therapeutic play opportunities. 

Eddy

Facility Trauma Dog

We are so lucky to have Eddy on our Clinical team as a facility trauma dog at the Be Brave Ranch.  As co-therapist, Eddy supports individual therapy, group therapy, as well as family sessions. He enhances our Trauma-Informed healing environment through providing relational supports, sensing and supporting positive emotional regulation, providing healthy touch and therapeutic play opportunities. 

Marcus Fung

Music Therapist

Coming soon

Jennifer Steed, RMT, RYT

Yoga instructor

Jennifer Steed, RMT, RYT has been a practitioner in the field of massage therapy, life and nutritional coaching, yoga teaching and related healing or expressive arts for 35 years.  Also trained in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction for Teens and families, Jennifer brings knowledge and plenty of life experience to her classes adding humour and a sincere desire to share skills and tools for living a healthy life.

Dr. Peter Silverstone

Chair

Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Centre for Neuroscience at the University of Alberta

Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Business

Dr. Silverstone trained in psychiatry at the prestigious Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry in London, UK, and then at Oxford University, where he completed his Doctoral Fellowship. He then joined the University of Alberta in 1992. He is an active researcher and teacher, having published over 130 peer-reviewed articles and has given more than 200 national and international presentations. He was independently funded by the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR) for the period 1994 – 2013, as well as receiving funding from multiple national and international agencies for his research.

His current research focus is on prevention of mental health disorders, particularly in children and youth, and has carried out two successful programs in Alberta involving approximately 10,000 students in Grades 6 – 12.

Previous major research interests focused on mood disorders, psychopharmacology (drugs and the brain), and the use of brain imaging studies to better understand mood disorders. He also recently completed a program to help police forces and other first responders improve their interactions with individuals who have mental health issues, and to improve the mental health of police and other first responders.

He also has a diverse range of other interests, having previously worked in business, including being a Senior Vice-President at a billion dollar pharmaceutical company, starting several health-care companies, and serving as the inaugural Scientific Director for the Strategic Clinical Network for Addiction and Mental Health within Alberta Health Services. He is has also been active as a board member of multiple organizations in a wide range of areas.

Dr. Andrew Greenshaw

Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, University of Alberta

Currently a Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Dr. Andy Greenshaw trained in Europe and Canada. He joined the University of Alberta in 1986 as a Heritage Medical Research Scholar.

A Fellow of the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CCNP), for which he served as President from 2000-2002, and a Fellow of the Collegium Internationale Neuropsychopharmacologicum (CINP), Andy has served as University of Alberta Associate Vice President (Research) and has served on national and international boards including the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation, the Institute of Health Economics and The University of the Arctic. From 2006 until 2015 he served as founding Co-Chair of the Alberta Addictions and Mental Health Research Partnership Committee.

Andy is the Research Director for the APEC Digital Hub for Best Practices in Mental Health, a digital hub that will serve the combined APEC population of 2.7 Billion people in the Pacific Rim, including indigenous stakeholders.

With extensive experience on Canadian Medical Research Council and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) grant panels since 1989, Andy was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the CIHR Institute of Neuroscience Mental Health & Addiction from 2012-2016. He is the director of the Alberta-based node of the national Canadian Depression & Research Intervention Network (CDRIN), which focusses on engagement of people with lived experience of mental disorders as partners in patient-oriented research, he is also Chair of the CDRIN Depression Hubs National Advisory Panel and a member of the CDRIN Board. Andy is also a member or the Scientific Advisory Board of The Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research in Ottawa and of the Research Advisory Board for Little Warriors, a national organization committed to the awareness, prevention and treatment of child sexual abuse.

With broad interests in biological and psychosocial areas in biological psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, his active research includes the application of machine learning and data-mining to prediction of differential diagnosis and treatment responses in mental disorders. He is part of a collaborative computational psychiatry group that includes researchers from the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and the IBM Centre for Advanced Study at UAlberta, the IBM TJ Watson Centre in New York, West Sichuan Hospital in Chengdu and NIMHANS in Bangalore.

Dr. Vincent Agyapong

Clinical Professor with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta

Edmonton Zone Clinical Section Chief for Community Mental Health

Dr. Agyapong is an expert in Global Mental Health. He is currently a Clinical Professor with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta and the Edmonton Zone Clinical Section Chief for Community Mental Health. His research and leadership roles are primarily focused on expanding access to quality mental health services. Utilizing collaborative approaches to identify barriers to access, safety and quality care as they relate particularly to human resources, organizational changes, and analyzing reform and restructuring in healthcare to identify learning and effect transformational change are the main focus of his research and leadership.

He won Alberta Health Services’ Spirit of Excellence Award in 2016 and the EZMSA 2018 Physician Innovator of the Year Award for the development of the Text4Mood program, a daily supportive text message system for patients with depression and anxiety which currently has about 20,000 subscribers across Alberta. The program has been recognized by WHO’s Mental Health Innovations Network.

Dr. Agyapong founded the annual inter-medical school public speaking competition in Ghana to promote psychiatry as a fulfilling career option for Ghanaian medical students. Currently in its eighth year, the competition which has ongoing sponsorship from St. Patrick’s Mental Health Services in Dublin and has offered fully sponsored elective placements to nineteen Ghanaian medical students at two leading Irish mental health institutions.

In addition, Dr. Agyapong has been involved in extensive mental health advocacy in Ghana for more than a decade and played a strategic role in the advocacy that led to the passage of Ghana’s mental health law in 2012. Between 2010 and 2012, he was the country lead in Ireland of a 5 country multi-center project funded by the Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Program of the European Commission that explored innovative ways to reduce racism and discrimination against migrant women living in Europe. He has over 70 publications in peer reviewed journals and has made over 50 research presentations at national and international conferences in 16 countries across four continents.

Dr. Yifeng Wei, MA, PhD

Dr. Wei has worked as a researcher and school mental health lead with the Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health team at Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre since 2008. She is currently the assistant professor with the Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University and the interim director of the Chair team. Her research interest has focused on promoting mental health literacy in schools (both secondary and post-secondary settings) to help students achieve better understanding about mental health and mental disorders, reduce stigma against mental illness, obtain and maintain good mental health and enhance help-seeking behaviors. She has played a key role in school mental health research and program development, and has made significant contributions to the work of the team. Dr. Wei has received funding from various agencies such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, RBC Foundation, Medavie Foundation, Carthy Foundation and MaxBell Foundation.

Dr. Wei has co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and one book on school mental health. She has lead/co-led more than 30 school mental health projects, locally, nationally and internationally. She has also presented at the local, regional, national and international scientific meetings and conferences. Dr. Wei was awarded the Canadian Institute of Health Research Doctoral Research Award in 2011and the Dalhousie University President’s award in 2011 and 2012.

Dr. Hannah Pazderka, PhD

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta

Dr. Hannah Pazderka received her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Alberta in 2004, looking at indices of drug and alcohol craving. Since then, she has worked in a number of roles, including creation of public policy, research, and advocacy. Her primary research interests are in the regulation of impulsive and risk-taking behaviour via the frontal lobes and subcortical reward structures. She has worked with a number of different methodologies, including structural equation modeling, electrophysiology (ERPs and skin conductance), neuropsychological assessment, and epidemiology.

She is currently consulting with the PAXIS Institute out of Tucson, Arizona, helping validate a program designed to improve the resiliency and self-regulation of school-aged children. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta. Dr. Pazderka is a local business owner, and is currently working on a nonfiction book about the neuroscience of aesthetics.

Dr. Matthew Reeson, PhD

Research Director

Dr. Matthew Reeson has a PhD in Psychiatry from the University of Alberta, with a specific focus on improving child and adolescent mental health services. He has done extensive research on the impact of early-life stress and adverse childhood experiences on psychiatric development.

Matthew is currently a postdoctoral fellow working on the development of an artificially intelligent chatbot designed to assist youth with accessing and navigating mental health resources.  His current research at the Little Warriors Be Brave Ranch focuses on improving program design and evaluating clinical outcomes to help develop a more efficient method for assessing treatment response in youth community programs. His research intends to explore factors that predict successful outcomes and promote resilience. Long-term, Matthew intends on becoming a registered psychologist with a specialty in trauma-focused care.