Our instructors

Jenny Lu

Moussa Magassa

Dr. Moussa Magassa, PhD, is Principal Strategist, Community Engagement, EDI and Anti-Racism Education at the University of Victoria where he works to enhance understanding of the university’s human rights, equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism education goals, community engagement and participation. He’s also an associate faculty for the Diploma in Social Justice at UVic and for the Royal Roads University Master in Global Leadership. He also teaches as an instructor for the Diploma in Intercultural Studies programs at UVic.

Moussa has extensive experience researching, designing and facilitating training, courses and workshops in anti-racism awareness and intervention training, intercultural competency development, intercultural conflict resolution, human rights discrimination and harassment, social justice, anti-oppression education, and immigrant and refugee integration. Born in Senegal, and conversant in a number of languages, Moussa is an advisor to various organizations, including Resilience BC and Simon Fraser University’s Migrant Systems Change Leadership Certificate program. He has also served on several boards, including those of the Francophone Federation of BC, the Francophone Society of Victoria and as co-chair of the Greater Victoria Police Diversity Advisory Committee.

In addition to holding a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a special focus on critical race theory, anti-racism, Islamophobia and human rights, Moussa also holds a Master of Arts in Human Security and Peacebuilding, along with several credentials in conflict resolution, peace studies, forced migration and refugee studies, and humanitarian law. He is a qualified administrator of the intercultural competence assessment tool.

Marjan Mahmoudi

Marjan Mahmoudi, PhD, has been a French as a second language teacher and translator for more than 20 years. She has lived in Iran, France and Canada, and has taught at Conseil scolaire francophone (CSF) in Vancouver, and at a variety of private schools and colleges.

Jesse Malakoe

Rob Mathison

Rob Mathison has over 20 years of experience as a writer, content creator, and content strategist. After starting out as a print newspaper and magazine journalist in the UK, he moved into custom publishing, now known as content marketing. This led him to Toronto and Redwood Custom Communications (now Totem), the North American leader in custom publishing and brand journalism. He started offering writing and content strategy services, and in-house web writer training, through his own company in 2006. Clients past and present include Best Buy, Royal Bank of Scotland, Hootsuite, UBC, Government of Alberta, SFU, Fraser Health, Blast Radius, FCV, and Engine Digital.

Find Rob at www.robmathison.com and www.tincancommunications.com, and on Twitter at @tincancomms.

Connell Matthew

Lawrence McDaniel

Lawrence McDaniel, BSc, is a freelance full-stack web developer and business analyst, as well as an angel investor, entrepreneur and mentor. He has worked as a freelance technology consultant since 1999, and has advised dozens of startups as well as international banks, hedge funds and real estate investment funds.

Lawrence has years of experience designing high availability, horizontally scalable cloud-based infrastructure environments, and 20+ years’ experience designing transactional database systems. His areas of expertise include financial modelling and forecasting systems, analytics, machine learning, big data, web, mobile, database technology and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

Lawrence is an ambassador for the AWS Activate Program in Mexico and advises companies on migration plans to AWS. He also works with early-stage ventures creating back-end environments and implementing continuous integration strategies.

Christopher McLeod

Daria Melnik

Paula Moriarity