Sonya Jakubec

About Sonya Jakubec
Sonya Jakubec, RN, PhD (c) is an Associate Professor at the School of Nursing with Mount Royal University and a Doctoral Candidate with the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary. She has been working in the field of international development and health for the past 12 years.

Initially Sonya worked as a VSO volunteer leading a community mental health team in The Gambia in West Africa, later she taught in a rural nurse practitioner program in Ghana, West Africa, and more recently she has been involved in mental health research and advocacy with the international NGO BasicNeeds that conducts rights based mental health promotion in several low income countries. This work informs the writing and consultation work Sonya shares with the Hesperian Foundation, publishers of health resources for low-income countries. She is a contributor for the latest edition of “Where There Is No Doctor” as well as a new Hesperian publication “Helping Vulnerable Children” which is village mental health guidebook focused on children’s mental health.

In her doctoral work Sonya is exploring the social organization of the right to health discourse in mental health and development. She has been a research associate and published in the areas of mental health and cultural dominance in low income countries, older and refugee women’s health, as well as mental health promotion issues at the more local level.