Our partner
Sarah Wolfe – Tkaronto Indigenous Health Data Cooperative, Canada
Working closely with Sara Wolfe, an Indigenous healthcare provider and health strategy leader, the Clinic is supporting the evolution of an Indigenous Health Data Cooperative.
Sara has spent decades building health infrastructure that centres Indigenous communities, values and ways of knowing.
Her combination of clinical expertise, research leadership, and deep roots in Toronto's urban Indigenous community makes her uniquely positioned to lead the design of a governance model that is genuinely community-led and that the community has helped co-create – hopefully contributing to more meaningful involvement in the longer term.
The Tkaronto Indigenous Health Data Cooperative represents a vision of Indigenous-led health innovation that goes to the heart of what Indigenous data sovereignty and rights can actually mean in practice, particularly as it relates to a diverse urban Indigenous community, like Toronto, where there are Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island (North America).
The cooperative would enable the community to shape research, direct resources, and build data infrastructure that reflects Indigenous values and ways of knowing including Indigenous-informed frameworks like OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) and CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics) principles.
Meet our students
Amala Vattappally
Amala is an MSc Environment, Politics and Development student with experience in community engagement and participatory democracy.
She is motivated by advancing community empowerment through hands-on, socially meaningful work. Amala has previously worked as a research assistant on participatory democracy projects, which has sparked a strong interest in applying these approaches in practice.
Amala is joining the Clinic because she is eager to build on this experience and sees the Clinic as an opportunity to deepen her technical understanding of data empowerment while continuing to work directly with communities.
She hopes to contribute insights from participatory democratic processes alongside her broader commitment to shaping collaborative, community-led engagement.
Amala is particularly interested in environmental justice and looks forward to supporting projects that connect data empowerment with community resilience efforts.
Emine Karabay
Emine is a third-year LLB student who is keen to sharpen her focus on themes of data governance, participatory justice and healthcare equity.
Her legal studies have shaped her intrigue around current power asymmetries in decision-making, particularly where those most affected by data-driven systems have the least influence over how they are designed and governed.
In specific, Emine is especially concerned with exclusion and misrepresentation, noting that “marginalised groups are often missing from datasets, adding inequities and leading to systems that reinforce harm rather than correct it.”
For Emine, this is not only a technical flaw but a justice issue, because when people cannot shape how their data is used, they are effectively excluded from decisions about their own welfare.
Through their coursework in Tort and Intellectual Property Law, Emine has examined how nominal rights often translate into hollow or fragile forms of consent. As a result, Emine is keen to explore alternatives to extractive consent models, believing that “empowerment must be durable, participatory, and collective, not performative.”
She is particularly invested in healthcare and public health, where data holds immense potential for positive impact but also risks reinforcing inequities when communities are excluded from governance.
Through the Clinic, Emine aims to understand how legal frameworks can support participatory governance by exploring how ongoing risk benefit communication can be strengthened, how clear routes to contest or correct decisions can be created, and how transparency around data collection, analysis, and integration into AI systems can be improved.
Through this, she also is interested to explore how models like data trusts, cooperatives and community licensing might offer pathways to translate theory into practical systems organisations can use and sustain.
Evangelia Maria Sfakianaki
Evangelia Maria is an LLM student in Law and Technology with a strong interest in participatory data governance and community-centred approaches to data protection.
Their academic work focuses on how legal and ethical frameworks can be translated into practical models that promote transparency, fairness, and accountability.
Evangelia Maria is joining the Clinic because she sees it as an opportunity to apply academic knowledge in a collaborative problem-solving setting.
Through her studies and work at the Cyber Security International Institute, Evangelia Maria brings experience in interpreting regulatory requirements and communicating complex legal and technical concepts in accessible ways.
Evangelia Maria is particularly invested in the governance of health data, where she hopes to explore how systems can balance research access with the protection of patients’ fundamental rights.
She is keen to engage with projects that address data silos, interoperability, and public trust, believing that effective data empowerment requires legal clarity, technical design, and meaningful stakeholder participation.
Kendall Stockard
Kendall is an MSC Law and Professional Practice student whose prior experience with data analysis in the cinema exhibition industry has given her an understanding of technical and theoretical dimensions of data.
She now hopes to expand her knowledge on data stewardship while engaging directly with communities affected by data systems.
Kendall is joining the Clinic because here she has a chance to apply legal thinking in real world settings while working alongside community partners to co-create solutions that reflect their lived experiences and local priorities.
She is particularly motivated to explore how practical data governance can address power imbalances in the data sector and help shift communities from passive data subjects to active agents.
Kendall is especially concerned with the lack of meaningful participation in the design and governance of data systems particularly in areas such as healthcare and housing where marginalised groups are often underrepresented or missing from datasets, reinforcing social inequalities and widening gaps in outcome.
Through the Clinic, she hopes to grow as a data steward, contributing a collaborative mindset and commitment to advancing equity, while helping shape data practices that are more transparent, inclusive and community centred.
Priscilla Kariuki
Priscilla is an LLM student specialising in Law and Technology with experience in providing community legal support.
During her undergraduate studies, Priscilla focused on the intersection of law and technology while volunteering with the Essex Business Law Clinic where she wrote on the ‘Law Tech Journal Lab’ newsletters, aimed at providing accessible articles on how AI and emerging technology are transforming the legal profession.
She also worked with Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Unit, which uses open-source intelligence to investigate global human rights violations.
Priscilla is joining the Clinic because it offers the opportunity to combine her academic research on law and technology with their experience in practical social work. She is particularly motivated by helping communities access and understand their own data, believing that this can improve how resources are distributed while strengthening control over personal information.
With strong experience in data research across academic and advocacy contexts, Priscilla hopes to build on her understanding of how data is gathered, stored, and governed, and how these systems can be harnessed for good. She's also excited to learn from and with their other team members from digital humanities and informatics.
Meet our supervisor
Mariam Al-Hussona
Marian is a LAHP PhD student in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London.
Mariam's research focuses on issues of marginalisation along gendered, classed, racial and ethnic lines in south Iraq in the context of various power dynamics and state politics.
Specifically, she uses an ethnographic and historical approach to examine these issues within the cultural performance industry in Iraq.
Prior to starting her PhD, Mariam worked as a data analyst and data scientist for a few tech start-ups within the market tech industry.
Mariam's last role also involved advising on ethical issues relating to the company’s data solutions.