Aida Karazhanova (Ph.D., Ms.) is currently promoting ICT for Development at UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), in particular, through (i) facilitation of the implementation of the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS) action plan 2022-2026, (ii) acting as a focal point of the ICT and Disaster Risk Reduction Division of ESCAP to ESCAP Sustainable Business Network (ESBN) task forces on "Digital Economy" and "Disaster and Climate". She is interested in packaging projects, enabling policies & digital technologies in linking the digital and green components.

Previously Dr. Aida focused on urban water governance and inclusive development through policy advocacy with a special emphasis on decentralized solutions under technical cooperation projects within the Asia-Pacific Water Forum network and supported Asia-Pacific Water Summits. Before joining UN ESCAP, Aida facilitated the development of regional and national sustainable development strategies in the region as part of UNDP and UNEP RRC.AP at AIT. She promoted the application of integrated policy frameworks using systems thinking approach at goal and target levels of SDGs and through rapid assessments of policy impacts.

The areas of research interventions and service products also cover policy guidelines and tools for the development of the Country Sustainability Outlooks, as well as policy frameworks to support the sectoral interventions in energy and in water cycles in cities, which included sanitation and wastewater treatment. Dr. Aida received her Ph.D. in biochemistry, Headed Chemical Laboratory at the British Gas Chair of Environmental Technology at KAZ State Academy of Architecture and Construction (Almaty), at UNDP, UNEP RRC.AP, taking principle positions, raising the grants portfolio on Environment and SD, climate change, with further inputs towards substantial operationalization of national and regional UN programs and projects.

Bach Tran is an Associate Professor and Vice Head of the Department of Health Economics at Hanoi Medical University, Vietnam, and an Adjunct Professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, USA.

His research interests include the application of epidemiological-economic models to explore the determinants of infectious diseases outbreaks, assess nations’ vulnerability, and identify effective system and human behavioral responses. He has extensive experience in research, surveillance, and evaluation of global health threats in South-East Asia. Much of his work centers on determining cost-effective interventions, assessing health services and innovations, and strengthening health systems, particularly related to HIV/AIDS and emerging diseases.

He is the winner of numerous international and domestic research awards, including the Hopkins Center for AIDS Research’s International Research Award and the Dang Van Ngu Memorial Award. He has been publishing frequently in highly regarded international journals in global health sciences, including The Lancet, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, and AIDS and Behaviors among others.

Dr. Bach Tran earned his Ph.D. (2011) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship (2013) in Health Economics and Policy from the University of Alberta, Canada. He is an alumnus of the InterAcademy Partnership’s Young Physician Leaders program (2013) and an Executive Committee member of the Global Young Academy (2018-9).

Dr. Bach Tran served as a Health Economist at the Institute of Health Economics, Canada (2013), and a research fellow of the International AIDS Society at Johns Hopkins University, USA (2014). Since 2015, he is co-chair of the Global Health Innovations Network (GHIN) which aims to foster innovations, research, and publications toward sustainable health and development in LMICs. Serving as Vice President of the Vietnam Young Physician Association, Dr. Tran has also been a pioneer in promoting research and evidence-based medicine in the Vietnamese health care system.

Gabriel Leung is the fortieth Dean of Medicine (2013-), inaugural Helen and Francis Zimmern Professor in Population Health, and holds the Chair of Public Health Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He was the last Head of Community Medicine (2012-3) at the University as well as Hong Kong's first Under Secretary for Food and Health (2008-11) and fifth Director of the Chief Executive's Office (2011-2) in government.

He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine (formerly Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences) and was awarded the Gold Bauhinia Star (second highest civilian honor) by the Hong Kong government for distinguished service in protecting and promoting population health.

A specialist in public health medicine, Dr. Leung's interdisciplinary work revolves around topics that have major population health impact locally, where Hong Kong is a reliable and unique epidemiologic sentinel for mainland China and the Chinese diaspora, or where it is best placed to address the fundamental science at hand globally.

Dr. Leung is one of Asia's leading epidemiologists and global health exponents, having authored more than 480 scholarly papers with an h-index of 61 (Scopus). His research defined the epidemiology of two novel viral epidemics, namely SARS-CoV in 2003 and influenza A(H7N9) in 2013. He also led Hong Kong government's efforts against pandemic A(H1N1) in 2009. He was founding co-director of HKU's World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control (2014-8) and currently directs the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (2020-).

One of Asia’s most respected higher education and health leaders, Dr. Leung is known for his commitment to expanding student opportunity, building strong institutions, and nurturing impactful innovation.

John C. Langenbrunner is a global health financing expert with over 35 years of experience advising governments on health systems reform, including advising the US government’s health reforms. Dr. Langenbrunner’s major areas of expertise include health financing, strategic purchasing, and universal health coverage. He has extensive experience working on health financing issues in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa as a health economist.

He was formerly the Lead Health Economist at The World Bank where he led the design, development, and implementation of health sector loan projects, and was a resident technical health advisor in China and Russia, and subsequently in Indonesia. He previously worked at the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and with the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. In the mid-1990s Dr. Langenbrunner served on the Clinton Health Care Reform Task Force for the U.S. White House.

Dr. Langenbrunner is currently an Expert Advisor on Health Reform to the Kingdom of Bahrain, and an Expert Adviser on Social Health Insurance to the government of Indonesia.

The author of multiple books and articles, he holds master’s and doctorate degrees in Public Policy/Economics and Health Policy from the University of Michigan.

Prof. K. Srinath Reddy is the President, of the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). He formerly headed the Department of Cardiology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Under his leadership, PHFI has established five Indian Institutes of Public Health (IIPHs) in different regions of India, to advance multi-disciplinary public health education, research, health technologies, and implementation support for strengthening health systems.

He was appointed as the First Bernard Lown Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Health at the Harvard School of Public Health (2009-13) and presently serves as an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard (2014-2023). He holds advisory positions in several national and international bodies and recently published the book Make Health in India: Reaching A Billion Plus.

He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, and an Honorary Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the first Indian to be elected to the National Academy of Medicine, USA, and was awarded several prestigious international and national doctorates and fellowships. He was President of the World Heart Federation (2013-15). He is a Padma Bhushan awardee. He is also an Advisor to the Governments of Odisha, Punjab, Haryana, and Andhra Pradesh on Public Health. He served as a physician to two Prime Ministers of India.

Prof. Reddy obtained his medical degree from Osmania Medical College (Hyderabad), M.D. (Medicine), and D.M. (Cardiology) degrees from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Delhi), and M.Sc. (Epidemiology) from McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada).

He has served on many WHO expert panels and has been the President of the World Heart Federation (2013-14).   He chaired the Core Advisory Group on Health and Human Rights for the National Human Rights Commission of India for several years and was a member of the first National Science and Engineering Research Board of the Government of India. He chaired the High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage, set up by the Planning Commission of India. He has also served as the President of the National Board of Examinations which deals with post-graduate medical education in India.

Kevin A. Schulman, MD, was appointed as Professor of Medicine, Associate Chair of Business Development and Strategy in the Department of Medicine, Director of Industry Partnerships and Education for the Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC) at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and, by courtesy, Professor of Operations, Information & Technology at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Dr. Schulman’s research interests include organizational innovation in health care, health care policy and health economics. With over 300 original articles, 100 review articles/commentaries, and 40 case studies/book chapters, Kevin Schulman has had a broad impact on health policy (h-index = 77). His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine. He is a member of the editorial/advisory boards of the American Heart Journal, Health Policy, Management and Innovation (www.HMPI.Org), and Senior Associate Editor of Health Services Research.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Dr. Schulman served as a Professor of Medicine at Duke University, directed the Health Sector Management Program at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business for a dozen years, created and directed the Duke University Master’s of Management in Clinical Informatics Program, and served as a Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School.

He is a co-founder of Bivarus (exit January, 2018), co-founder and Managing Member of Faculty Connection, LLC., and is a Board Member of Grid Therapeutics. He is an elected member of ASCI and AAP.

He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the New York University School of Medicine, and The Wharton Health Care Management Program.

Professor Mala Rao is Director of the Ethnicity and Health Unit at Imperial College London. She was a Director of Public Health in the UK NHS in the 1990s, Head of Public Health Workforce for England during 2004 to 2008 and Director of Public Health Foundation of India’s first Institute of Public Health under the aegis of the UK Global Health Strategy and UK-India health collaboration during 2008 to 2011. She is the chair of WHO South East Asia Region’s Expert Group on the Environmental Determinants of Climate Change and Health and has served as Medical Adviser to NHS England’s Workforce Race Equality Strategy during 2018 to 2022. Her career has spanned public health practice, policy, research and training and her most impactful achievements have been in workforce development, strengthening health systems and environmental health in the UK and overseas.

Her research and advice to governments and global institutions have improved health care for millions in some of the poorest states in India and elsewhere. She has been included among the most influential people in India-UK relations.

Mala is a recognised champion of climate action, safe water and sanitation and gender equity. She guest edited the 2022 issue of the International Review of Psychiatry focusing on the climate crisis and mental health. She is Vice Chair of WaterAid UK and honorary adviser to a number of other charitable organisations focusing on health and social inequalities.

Mala is also globally respected for her research and advocacy for race equality and the intersection between race, health and climate. A review which she lead influenced parliamentarians to establish the NHS Workforce Race Equality Strategic Advisory Group of which she was Vice-Chair during 2016 - 2018. She co- guest edited the February 2020 British Medical Journal’s special issue on Racism in Medicine which won a prestigious UK Professional Publishers Award (PPA) in 2021 and lead to the launch of the NHS Race and Health Observatory. In 2021, she lead the development of the Medical Workforce Race Equality Standard, a ‘world first’ in monitoring racism and discrimination across the medical workforce.

She has been included in the most influential ethnic minority people in the English health world and is the recipient of awards, including an OBE in the Queen’s Honours in 2013, the Alwyn Smith prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for public health, in 2021 and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in 2022.

Ahmed Mushtaque Raza Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi development worker, researcher, academic, and micro-philanthropist. He spent about four decades with BRAC, the world's largest NGO. He was its Vice-Chair, Executive Director, and founding director of the Research and Evaluation Division (now merged with the Graduate Institutes of BRAC University) and the founding dean of the James P. Grant School of Public Health. Currently, he is an Adviser to the James P. Grant School of Public Health at BRAC University.

Prof Chowdhury is also a professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University in New York. He also worked as the senior adviser and acting managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation and as a fellow at Harvard University.

Prof Chowdhury received several awards and accolades including the prestigious "Medical Award of Excellence" bestowed by the Chicago-based Ronald McDonald House Charities in 2017 and has been honored by The Lancet for his contribution to global health in 2013.

He is a founder of the Bangladesh Education Watch and Bangladesh Health Watch, two civil society watchdogs He is on the boards and committees of a number of important organizations and initiatives.

Prof Chowdhury has published nearly 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles in national and international journals. He holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hon's) in Statistics from Dhaka University.

Prof Bharat has nearly four decades of experience in teaching, research, capacity building, advocacy, and field action in broad areas of social science and health, social development, family studies, and minority community demographics. She is known for her work on equity and access issues with special reference to reproductive and women’s health; social determinants of HIV and TB, including stigma, discrimination, and human rights issues; multi-purpose prevention technologies for the HIV epidemic; self-testing for HIV prevention; young people’s health and wellbeing; family studies and child adoption; women, work and family; and demography of the Indian Parsi community.

With her wide experience in community-based research using qualitative and mixed methodology research approaches, she has contributed to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the social and gender dimensions of a range of issues concerning the health, development, and wellbeing of women, youth, and vulnerable populations such as people living with HIV, transgender people and homosexual men, and female sex workers.

She has also contributed to understanding mainstreaming of gender in HIV and mental health and social linkages for controlling drug-resistant TB. Her research on the Parsi community is an in-depth exploration of the psycho-social aspects of the demographic decline of India’s most threatened population group on the verge of extinction.

Shalini Bharat currently also leads the Institute’s ‘Saksham’ program, a sub-recipient of the Global Fund grant, for developing and implementing psycho-social counseling and social linkages for drug-resistant TB patients in four Indian states.

As a member of several national scientific advisory committees and boards, Shalini Bharat is actively engaged with a wide range of national-level programs, schemes, policies, and field interventions in health and public health, social development, gender, HIV/AIDS, TB prevention among others.

Mr. Stefan Nachuk, is currently the Deputy Director, Health System Design for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in India. He previously worked as a Health Systems Specialist for ThinkWell Global and as a Lead - Private Sector Health Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.

Mr. Nachuk served as an Associate Director at The Rockefeller Foundation, where he provided strategic leadership and guided efforts aimed at transforming health systems in developing countries. Furthermore, he was a key architect, financial supporter, and thought leader of The Rockefeller Foundation's Joint Learning Network (JLN) for Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

He also promoted the creation of concrete models of climate resilience in Asia. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr. Nachuk was a Senior Poverty Specialist with the World Bank, based in Indonesia, where he focused on poverty analytics, service provision, local governance, and sub-national investment climates.

Mr. Nachuk received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Sten Vermund is a pediatrician and infectious disease epidemiologist focused on diseases of low and middle-income countries. His work on HIV-HPV interactions among women in Bronx methadone programs motivated a change in the 1993 CDC AIDS case surveillance definition and inspired cervical cancer screening programs launched within HIV/AIDS programs around the world.

The thrust of his research has focused on health care access, adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights, and prevention of HIV transmission among general and key populations, including mother-to-child.

Dr. Vermund has become increasingly engaged in health policy, particularly around the sustainability of HIV/AIDS programs and their expansion to non-communicable diseases, coronavirus pandemic response and prevention, and public health workforce development. His recent grants include capacity-building for public health in Chad, molecular epidemiology for HIV in Kazakhstan, and COVID-19 vaccine studies in the Dominican Republic and Connecticut. He has worked with schools and arts organizations for COVID-19 risk mitigation and institutional safety.

Dr. Xu Ming is currently the Dean of the Department of Global Health, School of Public Health of Peking University. Dr. Xu has rich diplomatic and international working experience. He was the Head of the Department for Emerging Economies and previously the Senior Political Advisor for External Relations in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Prior to that, he was the Vice President of the China Chamber of Commerce for the Import and Export of Medicines and Health Products under the Ministry of Commerce of China. Earlier, he served in the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission and the Chinese Embassy in the Republic of Korea. When working with the Global Fund, his focus was mainly on the prevention and control of major infectious diseases and health system strengthening in the implementing countries, and building up collaborations with emerging economies in the health field.

When working in China, Dr. Xu participated a lot in formulating the policies and regulations of China’s healthcare industry, ranging from the promotion of trade and investment, and regulation of medicinal products, to the enhancement of the international competitiveness of companies. He was the chair and PI of key health projects, and the head or member of evaluation groups to review major health projects at the national level.

He got a Ph.D. in industrial economics from Fudan University and completed his post-doctoral fellowship at Guanghua School of Management of Peking University. He has written more than one hundred papers and articles in journals and specialized publications.