After a short early foray into political science, Verena pursued medicine and worked for several years as a psychiatrist in Switzerland. Yet her passion for policy and politics never faded. Over time, she grew frustrated by the limits of clinical care in addressing the systemic issues that were making her patients sick. Determined to work on systemic determinants of health, she left clinical practice and moved to Canada to complete an MSc in Population and Public Health at UBC.
During her Master’s studies, Verena became fascinated by how framing environmental policy as a human health issue can open new pathways for academic advocacy. She went on to complete a PhD at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), where she explored how academics engage in knowledge-to-action work to influence environmental policy. Drawing on policy theory, moral psychology, community organizing, and marketing, she examined how evidence can be mobilized more effectively to drive policy change. Her work highlighted that simply sharing knowledge—even when communicated well—is rarely enough;strategies such as activism and lobbying are evidence-based drivers of change, yet are often seen as “unacademic.”
Verena now returns to the School of Population and Public Health as a Michael Smith Health Research BC Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Anne Gadermann. In this role, she is contributing to a study assessing the impact of climate change on the mental health of youth in British Columbia. She is also partnering with Wellstream and Generation Squeeze to co-create an activism toolkit with and for young people and evaluate how engaging in collective action can influence their mental health and wellbeing.
Across her work, Verena takes a strength-based approach, focusing on the capacity of youth to create change rather than on deficits or barriers alone. She also draws on insights from realpolitik—the pragmatic realities of how power and influence shape policy—to make knowledge-to-action strategies more effective.