IWH’s Mustard Postdoctoral Award recipient announced

The Institute for Work & Health (IWH) is pleased to announce that Dr. Cherise Regier has been awarded the two-year Mustard Postdoctoral Award. Regier recently completed her Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford, where her research explored work as a fundamental social determinant of health and wellbeing.

Her thesis, Employee wellbeing in an era of declining worker power, was a multidimensional examination of how decades of economic, political, and institutional shifts have reshaped employment conditions and impacted employee wellbeing. Her research evaluated how policy- and workplace-level interventions, including labour legislation, trade unions, and employer-driven programs, can enhance or constrain workers’ ability to meaningfully influence their working lives and safeguard their wellbeing.

Regier’s academic background is multidisciplinary with a bachelor’s degree in management and two master’s degrees from the University of Toronto—one in industrial relations and human resources and another in public policy. Prior to her doctoral work, she gained public sector experience at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, deepening her expertise in the governance and policy mechanisms shaping labour markets. Among her doctoral papers is a study on the effects of right-to-disconnect legislation on employee wellbeing across several European countries. It underscored the importance of robust institutional frameworks for translating formal rights into meaningful protections, says Regier.

As part of her postdoctoral objectives at IWH, Regier plans to extend this research to investigate the evolving intersections between job quality, mental health, and labour market transformation, particularly in the context of technological disruption and the rise of artificial intelligence. In a world where structural and technological changes are reshaping work at an unprecedented pace, the need to amplify employee voice has never been more urgent, says Regier. A just and healthy future of work cannot be engineered solely by employers or governments—it must be co-created with the workers whose lives, wellbeing, and agency are most directly affected.

At IWH we appreciate the strengths that come from our multidisciplinary scientific environment, says Dr. Monique Gignac, IWH scientific director and senior scientist. We are excited with the opportunities that Cherise’s diverse training and background will bring to our research agenda at IWH contributing to safer, healthier and more inclusive work environments.