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.

Patrick Fafard has enjoyed a lengthy career that spans both government and academe. While with the Government of Canada he served as a Director General in the Intergovernmental Affairs Secretariat of the Privy Council Office. Earlier, he served in multiple capacities with three provincial governments, including as Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Commission on Medicare (2000-2001), and Executive Director, Policy and Planning, Saskatchewan Department of Health. Patrick’s academic interests are wide-ranging, including health, trade, and environmental policies, federalism and intergovernmental relations in Canada, the role of senior public health leaders in Commonwealth countries, global health governance to address the challenge of antimicrobial resistance, the governance of organ donation and transplantation, and developing public health political science.

Bridging the fields of international law, health law and human rights, Roojin's current research program examines normative interpretation and change in global health law. Her mixed methods and collaborative approach to research has led to the convening of several international conferences as well as publications across a range of venues, including in journals of public health and medicine, law and social science reviews, commissioned reports, foundational law textbooks, and public news and media outlets.

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.

Jason Nickerson is the Humanitarian Representative to Canada for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), based in Ottawa. Jason is appointed as a Clinical Scientist at the Bruyère Research Institute in Ottawa and as an Adjunct Professor of Common Law at the University of Ottawa. He leads MSF’s humanitarian diplomacy in Canada and provides advice on humanitarian operations, medical advocacy and policy, and access to medicines to MSF’s operations in more than 70 countries affected by crises. Jason has over 10 years’ clinical experience as a respiratory therapist working in adult critical care and anesthesia and has worked extensively in global public health response in Canada and internationally during armed conflicts, disease epidemics, and sudden onset disasters. He is widely quoted in international news outlets on a variety of global health and health policy issues including COVID-19, access to pain medicines for safe anesthesia and palliative care, access to affordable medicines, science policy, and humanitarian assistance in natural disasters, armed conflicts, refugee crises, and disease epidemics such as Ebola.

Professor Oguamanam has diverse interdisciplinary research interests in the areas of global knowledge governance in general, especially as manifested in the dynamics of intellectual property and technology law with emphasis on biodiversity, biotechnology, including agricultural biotechnology. He identifies the policy and practical contexts for the exploration of the intersections of knowledge systems, particularly western science and the traditional knowledge of indigenous and local communities within the broader development discourse and paradigm. He is interested in the global institutional and regime dynamics for negotiating access and distributional challenges regarding the optimization of benefits of innovation by stakeholders. He has written and published several articles on international intellectual property law-making, biotechnology in the context of health and agriculture, indigenous peoples, indigenous knowledge, farmers’ rights, access and benefit sharing over genetic resources, environmental law and biodiversity conservation, the policy and legal intersections of traditional and hi-tech agricultural practices, documentation and digitization of local knowledge systems, globalization, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), medical ethics, nutrition, public health law and policy, colonialism and the legal profession.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson is a specialist in General Internal Medicine at The Ottawa Hospital; Chief Executive Officer/Chief Scientific Officer, Bruyère Research Institute; Vice President Research & Academic, Bruyère Continuing Care; Chief Scientific Officer, CANImmunize Inc.; and Faculty of Medicine Clinical Research Chair in Digital Health Innovation, University of Ottawa. He is the co-founder of CANImmunize Inc., a science-based technology company spun out from The Ottawa Hospital in 2019. To help Canadians keep track of their vaccinations, the team developed CANImmunize, a pan-Canadian digital immunization tracking system available as a mobile app and through a web portal. Dr. Wilson’s research focuses on digital health, immunization, pandemic preparedness and public health policy and innovation. His research on immunization has explored social media’s impact on vaccine hesitancy, evaluation of vaccine safety using health services data and vaccine policy, including advocating for vaccine injury compensation. Other research interests include blood safety and newborn screening, health ethics, law and policy.