Maha Kumaran, Diversity Committee Lead
Email Address:maha.kumaran@usask.ca
Maha is currently a liaison librarian at the Leslie and Irene Dubé Health Sciences Library, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. Since her arrival to Canada from Chennai, India in 1994, she has worked in various staff level capacities at the Saskatoon Public Library (SPL); the Angus L. MacDonald Library, StFX, Nova Scotia; Okanagan University College, Kelowna, (which is now University of British Columbia, Okanagan) British Columbia; and the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Burnaby, British Columbia. After her graduation from University of British Columbia with a degree in library science (2004), she worked as the adult/young adult librarian and later as the virtual reference librarian at SPL for 5 years and then moved to the U of S. She is very interested in multicultural populations, particularly visible minorities and libraries or librarianship. She initiated and co-founded the Visible Minority Librarians of Canada (ViMLoC) Network in 2012, which she currently co-chairs.
Ray is the Youth Services Consultant with the Nova Scotia Provincial Library, a government division that supports public libraries across Nova Scotia. He has spent most of his career working in public libraries including Halifax, Edmonton, and Vaughan, in various roles including youth services librarian, teen services librarian, branch manager and as a multicultural librarian. His cultural roots are in Goa, a former Portuguese colony, a tiny state on the west coast of India. His parents arrived in multicultural Toronto just a few months before he was born. He has lived in four different provinces across Canada, including Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and now calls Nova Scotia home, where he has lived since 2010. A big part of his job is assisting in the public library campaign towards celebrating and commemorating cultural diversity in Nova Scotia.
Ying is a reference and subject liaison librarian at the University of Victoria Libraries. With an M.A. in Linguistics, she used to work as a college teacher in Shanghai, China. In 2001, she moved to Canada. After receiving an M.L.I.S. degree from McGill University, she worked as a collection development librarian at the Dr. John Archer Library, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan between 2005 to 2008. She was one of the foundational members of ViMLoC and played an instrumental role in its initiation. She has also served on the UVic Faculty Association Diversity Committee for years.
Naz graduated from the Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia 7 years ago. In 1999, she moved to Montreal from Iran. She began her career as a Research and Instructional Librarian for the School of Nursing at the Western University in London, Ontario. Since 2014, she works as the Health Sciences Librarian at McGill University Library, where she is a liaison for the undergraduate medical education and several post-graduate medical programs. Due to her diverse background, she is very knowledgeable about the struggles that international students might face at higher education. In 2015, in collaboration with several colleagues at McGill University, she planned and delivered several multilingual library orientation sessions for international students.