St. Michael’s proudly embraces students across every field of study in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. This series profiles students in the STEM disciplines who are approaching their work in fascinating ways, and uncovers how St. Michael’s has supported them along the way.
Stepping into unfamiliar territory is uncomfortable. Clizia Martini knows that better than most. A public health class she took on a whim reshaped her entire degree. A pain research lab at the Faculty of Dentistry was the last place she expected to find herself, but it became the foundation of her research work. Running for St. Michael’s College Student Union wasn’t something she had considered until she saw the opportunity to champion mental health awareness on campus.
That willingness to step into unfamiliar territory, and find purpose there, is also what drives her work as SMCSU’s Vice President of Mental Health. Because for many St. Mike’s students, reaching out for mental health support feels exactly like that: a step into the unknown. Clizia is trying to make it easier.
Clizia grew up in Indiana and arrived at U of T certain of one thing: she wanted to study psychology. Everything else followed from there.
Her global health major came after an introductory public health class in her first semester prompted her to think differently about health systems and the communities they serve.
Her research career began the same way. In second year, she came across a posting seeking research assistants for the Centre for Multimodal Sensorimotor and Pain Research, housed in U of T’s Faculty of Dentistry. She was skeptical. Pain research wasn’t on her radar, and the Faculty of Dentistry felt like an odd fit for a psychology student, but she applied anyways.
“It was really interesting getting to learn about how much pain affects so many people in our general population, and how little of it is understood,” she says.
Three years later, she is leading her own project in the lab, examining the thermal grill illusion, a physiological phenomenon in which non-painful temperatures produce a burning sensation. Her work aims to determine whether the effect is transient or long-lasting, with implications for understanding the body’s underlying pain mechanisms.
She also works in the Corbit Lab in U of T’s Department of Psychology, where she conducts behavioral neuroscience research using rodents. These research projects have laid the foundation for how she thinks about human behavior, stress and the gap between what people feel and what they are able to articulate.
That foundation is visible in how Clizia approaches her SMCSU role. Rather than simply promoting existing resources, she has focused on the specific obstacles that keep students from using them.
One of her first initiatives was a series of short videos walking students through the process of booking a health and wellness appointment. The videos cover what to expect on the call and suggest practical strategies for managing the anxiety that can make even that first step feel difficult. The approach reflects what she has learned in her psychology coursework about behavior and the conditions that make change possible.
She also organized Wired Wellness, a panel event that brought together St. Mike’s Wellness Manager and Accessibility Advisor in the same room to answer students’ questions. The event was designed to address a specific problem she had observed: students either didn’t know who to contact or assumed that certain services, particularly accessibility services, weren’t relevant to them.
The connection between her coursework and her advocacy work runs through her events programming as well. At a recent trivia night co-hosted with the SMCSU’s Academic Portfolio, one of her categories focused on debunking common misconceptions about mental health conditions. She built the questions using her abnormal psychology notes. Concepts from her learning and plasticity course, which covers behavioral paradigms and habit formation, inform the study strategies she shares with fellow students.
As Clizia prepares to graduate in June, she is focused on what she leaves behind at St. Mike’s.
“I hope that other people in my position after me will keep building on the work I’ve done,” she says.