Anthony Ngugi, PhD

Aga Khan University Medical College, East Africa

Dr. Ngugi is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Population health with close to 15 years of experience in health research in Africa. His research interests include statistical epidemiology, maternal and child health, epidemiology of epilepsy, community health and health information systems. He has co-developed and co-led and analyzed large mixed design multi-country studies aimed at profiling the epidemiology of epilepsy and covering over 600,000 population in demographic surveillance systems in sub- Saharan African Countries.

Zul Merali, PhD

Dr. Merali is a Professor, College of Medicine – East Africa, Aga Khan University. He is the Founding Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the Aga Khan University, and was the CEO and VP Research at the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research. He was the founding scientific director of the Canadian Depression Research and Intervention Network (CDRIN), a pan-Canadian network of clinicians, researchers and people with lived experience, focused on depression.

Lukoye Atwoli, MBBS, PhD

Dr. Atwoli is the Dean, College of Medicine – East Africa, Aga Khan University. He leads and participates in mental health research locally and globally. He is a member of the WHO World Mental Health Surveys Consortium, which is the leading collaborative project in psychiatric epidemiology globally. He was also the Global Technical Director for the citiesRISE initiative (www.cities-rise.org), whose goal is to help make five cities mental health friendly (Nairobi, Chennai, Bogota, as well as Seattle and Sacramento). The initiative works with young people in these cities to increase connectedness, improving their coping ability by working to build resilience and hopefulness, and linking those in need to care.

Nancy Booker, PhD

Dr. Booker is an Associate Professor and the Associate Dean at the Graduate School of Media and Communications. She has had a distinguished career as an academic, teacher, researcher and media practitioner with over 18 years teaching and academic administration experience. Dr Booker specializes in broadcast journalism, multimedia storytelling, media management and health communication, and has several academic publications in these areas.

Marleen Temmerman, PhD

Dr. Temmerman is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Aga Khan University Hospital, Nairobi, Director of the Centre of Excellence in Women, Child and Adolescent Health, Aga Khan University and Chairholder of the Aga Khan University -UNESCO Chair.

She is a well-recognized global leader in women, adolescent and child health and rights. She brings academic, technical, political, governance, management and leadership skills to the table as well as diplomacy, advocacy, fundraising, training and clinical expertise.

Ferdinand Okwaro, PhD

Dr. Okwaro is a Medical Anthropologist with over 10 years of post-doctoral research experience conducting health research in various contexts and fields at Institutional and community level. His main expertise is in the design and implementation of health research projects employing a mixed method approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies. He is also experienced in policy analysis and engagement as well as in evaluation of health programs.

Angela Koech-Etyang, MBBS

Dr. Koech is an Assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Aga Khan University and a research scientist at the Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health, AKU-East Africa. She is a clinically qualified obstetrician with 8 years research experience in maternal health.

Samad Zainab, MBBS

Aga Khan University Medical College, Pakistan

Dr. Zainab Samad is chairwoman of the Department of Medicine at Aga Khan University in Pakistan and currently serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University. Dr. Samad’s clinical and research efforts are focused on understanding the epidemiology and outcomes of heart disease.

Symon Kariuki, DPhil

KEMRI – Wellcome Trust Research Programme

Dr. Kariuki is a post-doctoral scientist in the Neuroscience Unit at KEMRI and has research interests in neurodevelopmental comorbidities of epilepsy, and the downstream impacts of pregnancy and early life adversity to the development of these disorders. He has led or collaborated in various pieces of work involving longitudinal or cross-sectional analysis of developmental outcomes following adversities in pregnancy and early life.

Noni Mumba, MA

KEMRI – Wellcome Trust Research Programme

Ms. Mumba currently heads the Engagement platform at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP). She has a background in Strategic Behaviour Change Communication, Social Marketing and more recently community and public engagement. Her main interest is in how to develop meaningful interactions between Researchers and Communities in LMICs: not only ensuring that community views and perspectives influence the conduct of research, but also that communities can be inspired by researchers from the region, and scientists by the lessons of quality science communication.

Srijan Sen, MD, PhD

University of Michigan

Dr. Sen is the Frances and Kenneth Eisenberg Professor of Depression and Neurosciences, Director of the Frances and Kenneth Eisenberg and Family Depression Center, and Associate Vice President for Research – Health Sciences at the University of Michigan. Dr. Sen’s research focuses on the interactions between genes and the environment and their effect on stress, anxiety, and depression. He also leads the Intern Health Study, a multi country longitudinal study of depression and stress among over 20,000 first-year medical residents and has significant expertise in utilizing mobile technology tools to identify predictors of mental health outcomes among medical trainees.

Zhenke Wu, PhD

University of Michigan

Dr. Wu is an Assistant Professor in Biostatistics, core faculty in the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), and Faculty Associate in the Quantitative Methodology Program, Survey Research Center of Institute for Social Research (ISR), at the University of Michigan. His research interests include the design and application of statistical methods that inform health decisions made by individuals, or precision medicine. Dr. Wu has extensive experience designing and applying novel methods for implementing mobile health interventions and analyzing mobile health data.

Raymond De Vries, PhD

University of Michigan

Dr. Raymond is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Learning Health Sciences and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan. He is also visiting professor at CAPHRI School for Public Health and Primary Care, University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. Professor De Vries served as CBSSM Co-Director from August 2013 to March 2017 and CBSSM Associate Director from April 2017 to December 2020. He is particularly interested in the regulation of science and the production of scientific knowledge; clinical trials of genetic therapies; the export of western moral traditions to non-western societies; and the social, ethical, and policy issues associated with the medicalization of pregnancy and birth.

Cheryl Moyer, PhD

University of Michigan

Dr. Moyer is an Associate Professor of Learning Health Sciences and an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Her research focuses on the social and cultural factors that influence maternal and neonatal health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa with an emphasis on facility-based delivery, neonatal mortality, social autopsy, and the assessment of ‘near -miss mortality’-or those mothers and babies who suffer a life-threatening complication but ultimately survive.

Ji Zhu, PhD

University of Michigan

Dr. Zhu is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan, the director of the PhD program in Statistics and the Associate Chair of the Department. He is an international leader in statistical machine learning, high dimensional data analysis, and network analysis. He has worked with healthcare researchers on multiple risk prediction projects in the fields of hepatology, genetics, breast cancer, and gastroenterology.

Paul Clyde, PhD

University of Michigan

Paul Clyde is President of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan, the Tom Lantos Professor of Business Administration, the Movses and Maija Kaldjian Collegiate Lecturer in Business Economics and Public Policy at the Ross School of Business. Over the past 20 years, he has worked with dozens of companies experimenting with different business models in low- and middle-income countries. This work includes advising or directing more than 100 projects with firms in finance, education and healthcare industries in more than a dozen low- and middle-income countries.

Elena Frank

University of Michigan

Dr. Frank is an Assistant Research Scientist in the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan. Her research interests focus on the drivers of stress and depression during physician training, and the use of mobile technology to assess and treat depression and gender differences in depression. Dr. Frank has been the Director of the Intern Health Study for the past four years, which focuses on studying physicians in their first year of post-medical school training using genomics, mobile technology and other tools to understand how stress leads to depression

Jian Li Wang, PhD

Dalhouse University

Dr. Wang is a psychiatric epidemiologist with research interests in two areas: risk prediction analytics and workplace mental health. In risk prediction research, Dr. Wang’s team developed and validated the first sex specific prediction algorithms for the risk of developing major depression in the general population using data from over 10,000 Canadians who were followed for four years. His team also developed and validated the first risk calculator for predicting recurrence of major depression in depressed patients using the longitudinal data from the US National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC). Presently, He is leading a national randomized controlled trial to evaluate the benefits and potential psychological harms associated with disclosing personalized depression risk information.