Dr. Zahra Shakeri, Assistant Professor of Health Informatics and Information Visualization at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is an extraordinary early-career educator whose innovative teaching has transformed student learning and elevated health data science education at the University of Toronto. She has developed high-impact graduate courses -Applied Machine Learning for Health Data, Health Data Visualization, and Special Topics in Artificial Intelligence. These courses address critical curricular gaps and consistently earn exceptional evaluations, reflecting her ability to engage, challenge, and support learners from diverse technical backgrounds. A hallmark of Dr. Shakeri’s teaching is her commitment to accessible, practice-focused learning. She has built interactive platforms, reproducible computational workflows, and datathon-style assessments that simulate real-world analytic environments. Her structured mentorship model enables students to produce high-quality scholarly and public-facing outputs by emphasizing iterative feedback, teamwork, and clear milestones. Remarkably, nine course-based projects have resulted in peer-reviewed publications, an exceptional achievement in graduate coursework. Her pedagogical influence extends nationally through her leadership in the AI for Public Health training program and widely attended workshops on data visualization, AI literacy, and evidence-based communication. Colleagues describe her as a generous mentor whose methods are shaping departmental teaching practices. Students consistently characterize her courses as transformative, citing direct impacts on their research productivity, practica opportunities, and career trajectories. Through her creativity, rigor, and unwavering commitment to student growth, Dr. Shakeri exemplifies the spirit of the Cheryl Regehr Early Career Teaching Award and stands as a model of educational excellence and impact.