Helana Marie Boutros is a practicing Coptic Orthodox Christian, whose faith shapes and motivates all spheres of her life. She grew up in the Church of St. Mary and St. Athanasius in Mississauga, Ontario and serves there with her community. As a Coptic interdisciplinary scholar and aspiring anthropologist, she sees her current doctoral work as a gift back to her Coptic community. She completed her Bachelors of Health Sciences with a Double Minor in Psychology and Liberal Arts at Redeemer University in April 2022, and completed her Masters in Public Health with a field specialization in Indigenous Health at the University of Toronto in August 2023. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at McMaster University, where her thesis anthropologically explores the lived experiences of Coptic women as they pursue spiritual health, and how these experiences shape and frame their encounters with Western imaginaries of mental health and biomedicine in the Greater Toronto Area. In this work, she foregrounds the anthropologies of health/medicine, the life of the senses, and Orthodox Christianity, and draws heavily on cultural psychology and transcultural psychiatry. She hopes that this written work can help readers think about the world differently, while preserving the stories of Coptic women in an authentic and beautiful way.

Outside of her thesis, Helana juggles multiple responsibilities within and outside of her Coptic community. Helana is currently leading two sensory-ethnographic-focused projects in the Coptic community, namely with respect to (1) liturgical hymnology, and (2) sacred and environmental materiality in the Coptic diaspora. On a teaching and supervisory level, Helana is a thesis supervisor to undergraduate students at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Teaching Assistant at McMaster University. Outside of her own Coptic community, Helana is deeply involved in community-based gerontology and indigenous health efforts with other researchers. She works at Wilfrid Laurier University where she does community-based participatory work pertaining to the health of Black older adults, digital health technologies, social gerontology, and community engagement. She also works with the Métis Nation of Ontario, where she has led and assisted multiple Métis-specific research projects, namely with respect to health and wellness, housing and health, child-youth health, and prenatal care. Collectively, these work experiences have helped Helana develop community-engagement experience, publish widely and present meaningful work at many conferences, and sustain a strong network of amazing human beings who reciprocally sharpen her to become a better scholar.

Outside of academia, Helana loves to spend time with her family, friends, and church community, cook and bake to wind down, actively write poetry (her first collection of poetry, "His Prodigal Bride" was released in June 2024), paint trees, and spend time in nature.