Anita McKernan is Senior Legal Counsel at Grand Challenges Canada, where she is responsible for the negotiation and execution of Transition to Scale investment and seed grant transactions.

Anita is a lawyer licensed to practice law in Ontario, Canada in good standing with the Law Society of Ontario with over seventeen years of experience in corporate commercial law. Prior to joining Grand Challenges Canada, Anita worked as in-house counsel working on a wide variety of corporate commercial matters from real estate development globally to privacy compliance to a variety of procurement, contractor, and benefits contracts. Prior to her in-house work, Anita worked in private practice on a variety of corporate matters with a focus privacy and advertising and marketing compliance as well as corporate reorganizations.

Anita holds a BSc, from the University of Toronto (a specialist in human physiology and a minor in English literature), an MSc from the University of Western Ontario (cardiovascular physiology), and a LLB from the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. In 2001, she was called to the Bar of Ontario. Anita recently completed a LLM at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto with a focus on health and human rights, as well as Indigenous peoples and Canadian law.