The pace of societal change is accelerating. Pandemics, artificial intelligence, space exploration, climate change, political upheavals, anomalous sightings, and even the new ways in which we communicate with each other are all contributing to an ever more confusing and frantic world. As a global health epidemiologist and science communicator, Professor Deonandan sees his role as bringing measurement and critical appraisal to whatever evidence exists to help us navigate this thickening soup of competing influences. Much of his scholastic output involves the epidemiology of reproductive technologies and the ethics of global health interventions, as well digital technologies in health care and the creative use of administrative data to answer questions surrounding population health. A significant portion of Professor Deonandan’s global health work has been conducted in the interior of Guyana, where he has worked to both measure and mitigate the health challenges experienced by remote Indigenous peoples. During the COVID pandemic, Professor Deonandan focused solely on communicating infection risk and vaccine science to the general public, assessing the potency of mitigation strategies, charting the trajectory of the epidemic, and weighing the changing evidence to advise on pandemic response policies. Professor Deonandan is also examining how artificial intelligence can improve pedagogy, with specific focus on using large language models to improve writing skills among health science students. His larger vision is to reimagine the wider role of the university in society in the face of rapid technological change.

Adam R. Houston is a Canadian health & human rights advocate, specializing in access to medicines and the role of law in the response to infectious disease. He has worked with organizations across Canada and around the world on a wide range of issues, including global COVID-19 vaccine (in)equity, reconciling disparate human rights approaches towards HIV and tuberculosis, and United Nations accountability for the Haitian cholera epidemic. By day, he is the Medical Policy & Advocacy Advisor for Médecins sans frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Canada.

João Velloso teaches sentencing and “sanctioning”, legal research methods, criminology and socio-legal studies. He has a multidisciplinary background in law, criminology, sociology, anthropology and communication. He works in the areas of criminal law and sentencing, critical criminology and socio-legal studies, more particularly sociology and anthropology of law. His empirical research deals with the penalization of protesters and migrants (deportation and detention), access to justice in detention, and the regulation of cannabis. He is particularly interested in the governance of security through the use of administrative law and the deterioration of rights resulting from these penal configurations which operate alternatively and in addition to criminal justice.