Sandra Zelinsky is a graduate of the Patient and Community Engagement Research (PaCER) program from the University of Calgary, and she is a trained Digital Storytelling facilitator from The Story Center, USA. She believes in the importance of bringing lived experience partners as experts to health research teams and has seen the direct impact on the conduct and outputs of research. She helps to support research teams in working together in patient engagement and patient-oriented research for the AbSPORU Patient Engagement Team. She also conducts qualitative patient-led research with an interest in arts-based approaches, specifically Digital Storytelling. It is her lived experiences as a person living with chronic disease and a cancer survivor that motivates her to work collaboratively in health research.