Shaila Jamal is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow, a position she jointly holds with Department of Human Geography at University of Toronto Scarborough and Transport Studies Unit at University of Oxford. As an urban researcher with training in geography and planning, her research mostly revolved around the transportation of different socio-demographic groups, focusing on equity and justice-seeking populations. She has explored intergenerational heterogeneity in travel behavior, impact of smartphone uses on travel behavior, well-being implications of COVID-19 on mobility, and transport-related preferences and dilemmas during COVID-19. Before her SSHRC Postdoc, she worked with Dr. Steven Farber in Suburban Mobilities Cluster at UTSC. There, she investigated online service usage behavior, complete communities in suburban contexts, and preferred amenities of different racialized communities and their accessibility.
Her current research explores the transit experiences and perceptions of immigrant older adults in Canada. The study will delve into the facilitators and barriers of their day-to-day mobility, explicitly focusing on non-English-speaking immigrants. It will assess the role of various aspects, such as organizational, institutional, cultural, social, and personal, including their social networks, in facilitating their mobility in Canada.
She is also a guest editor for a special issue of Transportation Research Part D, "Evaluating initiatives to combat injustice in transportation," with Drs. Tim Schwanen, Hannah Hook and David Duran-Rodas.