Jared Star,
BSW, MSC, PhD

My research focuses on how we understand complexity, lived experience, relationships, and change over time—and how that understanding can inform policy, practice, and systems change. I am particularly interested in approaches that make visible forms of knowledge conventional research and measurement systems often overlook, and that enable people and communities to shape the questions, methods, interpretation, and use of knowledge.

My current research program spans several projects, including my work as Co-Principal Investigator of the Nindinawemadanigok Research Project, a partnership between Nine Circles Community Health Centre and the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre of Winnipeg. Other projects explore the intersections of sexual health, program science, and technology, with a particular focus on queer health and socio-sexual media.

Working across academic, health, and community-based policy settings has given my research an applied orientation. My expertise spans multi-method study design, qualitative inquiry, longitudinal and rapid research, participatory approaches, and program development and evaluation. As Principal and CEO of Bison Research & Development, I bring this work into direct conversation with the realities of communities, organizations, and decision-makers.

Across this work, my commitment is to research that is rigorous enough to withstand scrutiny, reflexive enough to recognize the limits of our ways of knowing, and useful enough to matter. I see research as both an intellectual and a relational endeavour: a way to understand the systems in which we live and create possibilities for changing them.