Lorraine Kalia (née Hajdur) is a clinician scientist and associate professor in the Division of Neurology at the University of Toronto. She enrolled as a student at Canada’s National Ballet School in 1983, graduating in 1990, after which she joined the National Ballet of Canada as an apprentice and later danced with the National Ballet of Portugal in the corps de ballet. During her time at NBS, she received the Peter Dwyer Scholarship in 1989. In 2017, she was honoured to receive the inaugural Ken McCarter Award as an NBS alumna.

After a short but formative career in dance, Lorraine redirected her passion for movement toward science and medicine. She completed a BSc at Queen’s University, an MD/PhD and neurology residency at the University of Toronto, a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and a movement disorders fellowship at Toronto Western Hospital. She is now a staff neurologist at Toronto Western Hospital and a senior scientist at the Krembil Research Institute, University Health Network. She holds the Wolfond-Krembil Chair in Parkinson’s Disease Research.

Lorraine is deeply committed to community engagement and served on the board of Dancing With Parkinson’s for close to a decade. She remains interested in how dance can support people living with Parkinson’s, bringing her artistic background together with her clinical and scientific work.

Now serving on the NBS Board, she is proud to give back to the school that shaped her, drawing on her experiences as a former student and her career in healthcare and scientific research.