John H. Moss Scholarship Awarded to Armiti Zarbakhsh

^{Photo by Neil Gaikwad}

By Sally Szuster

When Armiti Zarbakhsh was in kindergarten, she was already navigating worlds. Sitting beside her mother in a busy medical clinic, she translated between Farsi and English, balancing the Canadian expectation of clinical directness with ta’arof, a Persian cultural norm centred on deference and making others comfortable. When a miscommunication led to her mother’s misdiagnosis and hospitalization, the experience stayed with her.

“That was the first time I realized how much culture shapes health outcomes,” Zarbakhsh says. “It’s not just what symptoms you describe, it’s how you describe them, and whether the system is actually listening.”

That early experience did not simply stay with her; it became the lens through which Zarbakhsh approached her studies and leadership. As a Victoria College student at the University of Toronto, that journey has earned her the John H. Moss Scholarship, U of T’s most prestigious undergraduate award, recognizing her exceptional leadership, academic excellence and commitment to public service.

When Zarbakhsh arrived at the U of T, she was drawn to health sciences not only to understand the biology of illness, but also to examine how social, cultural and systemic forces shape whether care succeeds at all. She found her intellectual home early at Victoria College, one of seven colleges within the Faculty of Arts & Science and one of two colleges that comprise Victoria University.

As she began her studies, she discovered the advantages of a smaller college community within the university’s vast landscape, where mentorship and leadership opportunities are part of daily life. “U of T is huge, and that can be overwhelming,” she says. “But Vic is a small community inside that big system. You’re not just a number. People actually know you.”

In addition to mentorship and leadership opportunities, Victoria College supported Zarbakhsh through admission and in-course scholarships, including the Clifton G. Roberts Admission Award, the Dale Anne Freed Scholarship and Dean’s List scholarships. These awards, funded through the generosity of Vic alumni, reflect the college’s ongoing commitment to reducing financial barriers and enabling students to focus fully on their academic and leadership pursuits.

Zarbakhsh’s academic focus crystallized through her studies in Human Biology and Public Health. “Human biology helped me understand the science,” she explains, “but public health helped me understand context, including how people’s lives actually shape whether care works or not.”

In her second year, that curiosity turned into action. “I ended up actually co-founding a health-care startup,” she says. Working through the U of T Hatchery, her team interviewed patients, physicians and administrators at 75 walk-in clinics across Ontario. “We began to notice that it was a lot of language barriers that were creating variability in patient-physician consultation times.”

Zarbakhsh went on to lead a 12-member interdisciplinary team of lawyers, clinicians, computer scientists, medical students, administrators and patients to develop an AI pre-screening tool available in 12 languages, enabling patients to describe concerns in their own words before seeing a physician. The project raised $100,000 in funding and was piloted in a Toronto clinic. “We weren’t trying to take over the physician’s job,” she says. “We were trying to create shared understanding so the real conversation could matter more.”

Zarbakhsh’s ability to pair technical innovation with human-centred leadership is something Dr. Rhonda McEwen, president and vice-chancellor of Victoria University, has seen firsthand. Zarbakhsh worked in McEwen’s research lab, Et Al, where she contributed to disability studies grounded in questions of equity, ethics and lived experience. “Armiti is a talented and thoughtful researcher,” says McEwen. “What distinguishes her is not just her technical ability, but her instinct to lead with empathy. She understands that artificial intelligence is only powerful when it is guided by human values, and she brings creativity, care and moral clarity to everything she builds.”

Alongside research and innovation, Zarbakhsh became deeply involved in student life at Victoria College, serving as orientation executive, mental wellness commissioner and commuter don. Her leadership focused on preventative mental health supports, including the development of decision-tree resources to help students navigate care before reaching crisis. “A lot of students were saying, ‘There are so many resources, but where do I go?’” she recalls. “We wanted to make support feel reachable, not overwhelming.”

Throughout her Moss application, Zarbakhsh was encouraged and supported by staff in both the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of the Registrar and Academic Advising.

“For a college of our size, our students achieve remarkable success, driven by early mentorship, strong personal connections and the support that empowers them to see themselves as change-makers for the common good,” says Yvette Ali, registrar at Victoria College. “We are deeply proud of Armiti.”

“Armiti’s goal of fostering agency in patients, especially those with language and cultural barriers, is informed by her compassion and resolve,” says Kelley Castle, dean of students at Victoria College. “We are all excited to see how Armiti’s work translates into better and more accessible health care.”

That institutional culture is reflected in outcomes. Victoria College has a longstanding record of success in students earning the most competitive academic awards, including the John H. Moss Scholarship, Rhodes Scholarships and McCall MacBain Scholarships, a distinction that speaks to the power of pairing academic excellence with mentorship, leadership and service.

As Zarbakhsh looks ahead, she plans to pursue both an MD and a master of public health, with the goal of bridging patient-centred care and system-level change. “I want to be a physician who understands cultural nuance,” she says, “and who designs systems that actually work for the people they’re meant to serve.”

From a childhood spent translating in clinics to leading innovation, research and student life at Victoria College, Zarbakhsh’s journey reflects what happens when talent finds the right academic home and when a community knows how to help it thrive.