In my fourth year at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a course on the social determinants of health asked us to take on a public health problem as a capstone project. I made the case to my group for hand hygiene and dry skin. It is not a glamorous topic. But I had been having the same conversation with friends for years, about ashiness, about being teased for it, about the quiet calculation of whether to wash your hands in a campus washroom knowing how they would feel afterward. My group backed the idea and we did well with it.
Then the course ended and everyone moved on to their own things, which was the reasonable choice. I could not let it go. It seemed important, and it seemed unfinished.
So I kept going on my own. I wrote the ethics application and took it through the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board. I designed the survey instrument from scratch, because no validated one existed for this. I recruited participants by tabling at the student union, running an email campaign, and putting QR code posters above the soap dispensers in campus washrooms. I ran the interviews, cleaned and analysed the data, and wrote the manuscript. My course professor became my supervisor and set the deadlines I worked to. All of this happened while I was working full time in field sales, so the research lived in evenings and weekends for about a year.
The manuscript went to the journal in April 2025. It was accepted in February 2026 and published the following month.
Published
Dry skin and hand hygiene practices in a racially diverse university community and their implications for public health
Discover Public Health, Springer Nature. Volume 23, article 309. Published 11 March 2026. Open access. With Leanne R. De Souza, Human Biology and Health Studies, University of Toronto.
We surveyed 160 students, staff, and faculty at a large campus in the Greater Toronto Area, then followed up with open-ended interviews. My role covered the survey design, the interviews, the literature review, and the manuscript.
Read the paper
What we found
74.4%
reported ashiness after drying their hands. Nearly everyone, 95.6 per cent, reported drier skin in colder months, and 87.5 per cent described real discomfort.
90% vs 67%
Black participants reported visible ashiness far more often than their non-Black peers, along with more discomfort (96 versus 83 per cent) and higher lotion use (92 versus 72 per cent). All three differences were statistically significant.
No difference
in how often people washed their hands. This is the finding that matters most. Everyone was doing the right thing. The soap was simply not designed for all of them.
The interviews carried what the numbers could not. Participants described embarrassment and self-consciousness about visible dryness, and the assumption other people make that ashy skin signals poor hygiene when it signals the opposite. Others described cracked knuckles that made holding a pen painful, or itching distracting enough to interfere with studying. Several had simply stopped using campus soap to avoid flare-ups, which is the outcome no public health policy wants.
The recommendation that came out of it is unglamorous and cheap. Provide moisturizing, fragrance-free soap and put lotion where the sanitizer already is. One participant put it more plainly than I could: "Have lotions in the washroom or around schools like we do hand sanitizer."
None of this was hidden. It was happening in every washroom on campus, every day, to a large share of the people using them. It just had not been counted, so it was not a problem anyone owned. That is the part I keep thinking about.
Recognition and coverage
Outstanding Graduate Student Award
One of two recipients at the Black Research Network Research Symposium 2026, awarded by the BRN and the Black Graduate Students' Association.
Black Research Network
A feature on the research and how everyday environments shape skin health.
Read the feature
Black at UTM
A profile on culturally competent public health research, published in Community Voices.
Read the profile
Now
Graduate research at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health.