Richard M. Bird Post-Doctoral Fellowship
2023-24 Award Winner
Stephanie Ortynsky is the 2023-2024 Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance. She received a Doctorate (PhD) in Public Policy from the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (JSGS) at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Regina in 2023. Her doctoral research was focused on the adoption and implementation of public sector budgeting approaches for education and well-being outcomes at the provincial and national levels. She was awarded several academic scholarships, fellowships, and awards over the course of her PhD, including a Queen Elizabeth II scholarship, a Teacher Scholar Doctoral fellowship, a Western Regional Training Centre (WRTC) fellowship, NSERC One Health ITraP fellowship, and an Aga Khan Foundation of Canada fellowship. Stephanie has worked on several research, evaluation, and knowledge mobilization projects in Saskatchewan, Switzerland, South Africa and Tajikistan. Prior to joining IMFG, Stephanie taught graduate-level courses in policy analysis, public sector financial management, statistics, and COVID-19 and public policy. She was also a Research Associate on a SSHRC-funded project entitled “Well-being in Policy: Cultivating Knowledge with Municipal Stakeholders about a Quality-of-Life Approach to Community Planning.” She looks forward to conducting research at IMFG on the politics of municipal budgeting approaches, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and the intersection between the politics of federal immigration targets and municipal government implications.
IMFG Fellowship in Municipal Finance and Governance
2023-24 Award Winner
Sean Grisdale is the recipient of the 2023–24 Graduate Fellowship in Municipal Finance and Governance. He is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. He has researched, written and published on a wide range of housing affordability issues, including the privatization of publicly-owned land in Canada; the impact of short-term rentals on housing affordability in Toronto; the recent resurgence of purpose-built rental housing development in Toronto and Vancouver; the implications of the rise of investor-owned condominium rentals in Canada; and the impact of evictions policies on tenants during the pandemic.
The Blanche and Sandy Van Ginkel Graduate Fellowship in Municipal Finance and Governance
2023-24 Award Winner
Keir Matthews-Hunter is the recipient of the Blanche and Sandy Van Ginkel Graduate Fellowship in Municipal Finance and Governance. He is a first-year PhD student in Planning and graduate of the Master of Science in Planning program (2018) at the University of Toronto. His doctoral research is informed by real options theory and aims to empirically investigate the degree to which real estate developers in Toronto delay multi-residential development (particularly after securing planning approvals), the characteristics of development projects that are delayed, and the relationship among the stringency of land use regulation, developer (un)certainty about the profit-maximizing use of land, and development timing. Before beginning his PhD, Keir worked for four years as a housing planner with the City of Toronto, where he undertook assignments and advised on the development and implementation of housing policy and regulation, and spent one year as a research analyst with the Canadian Urban Institute. He is a Registered Professional Planner and Full Member of the Canadian Institute of Planners.