Andrea Baccarelli, MD, PhD, is Dean of the Faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A distinguished scientist, Baccarelli investigates the molecular mechanisms by which a wide array of environmental exposures causes human disease. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for his pioneering work showing that social and environmental risk factors adversely affect the human epigenome, thereby causing long-term health consequences. Baccarelli’s work has been used by multiple agencies worldwide, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to help shape pollution control policies. Before he took office as Dean of the Faculty in January 2024, Baccarelli served as Leon Hess Professor and chair of the department of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. He also served as director of the NIH/NIEHS P30 Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan and as president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. Baccarelli previously worked at Harvard Chan School as an associate professor from 2010 to 2016. He holds an MD from University of Perugia in Italy, an MS in epidemiology from University of Turin, and a PhD from University of Milan.

Natalia Kanem, MD, MPH, is executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency. In this role, Kanem oversees the agency’s life-saving policy, development, and humanitarian work in over 120 countries, with the aim of assuring that “every pregnancy is intended, every childbirth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.” She worked with the Ford Foundation from 1992 to 2004, where she helped pioneer work in women’s reproductive health and human rights in West Africa, before serving as Deputy Vice President for the Foundation’s peace and social justice programs in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and North America. She was also the founded president of ELMA Philanthropies, Inc., a private funding institution focusing on Africa’s children and youth, and a senior associate of the Lloyd Best Institute of the West Indies. She was listed on the 2019 Gender Equality Top 100 and is recognized as one of the most influential people in formulating global policy on sexual and reproductive health and rights in the Sustainable Development Goals era. She holds an MD from Columbia University and an MPH with specializations in epidemiology and preventative medicine from University of Washington–Seattle.

Judith Bruce is a senior associate and policy analyst based at the Population Council, which she joined in 1977. Bruce leads the Council’s efforts to develop programs that protect the health and well-being and expand the opportunities of the poorest adolescent girls in the poorest communities. The programs often include social support, mentoring, and meaningful educational opportunities including financial literacy, livelihood skills and savings, and health information and access. Her work engages grassroots organizations, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and donors in a multi-country effort to place adolescent girls at the center of the global health and development agenda. Earlier in her career, Bruce published the family planning quality-of-care framework, which was instrumental in the global shift in family planning programs from target-driven approaches to a focus on quality, as defined by a program’s ability to meet clients’ needs sustainably. The framework remains the foundation for defining the goals and evaluating the outcomes of family planning and reproductive health programs. Recently, Bruce served as co-chair of the UN Expert Group Meeting on the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl-child, and in 1993, she received the Association for Women in Development’s bi-annual award for outstanding contributions to the field.

Marcia Castro, PhD, is Andelot Professor of Demography, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and director of the Brazil Studies Program at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). Her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches to identify the determinants of infectious disease transmission in different ecological settings to inform control policies. She made important contributions during recent public health emergencies (the Zika virus epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic) and has projects on malaria, COVID-19, arboviruses, women’s health, infant/child mortality and development, and climate change in the Brazilian Amazon. She serves on several advisory boards in Brazil and the U.S. and is an elected member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She holds a PhD in demography from Princeton University.

Jacqueline Pitanguy is the founder and executive coordinator of CEPIA (Citizenship, Studies, Information, Action), a leading women’s rights civil society organization in Brazil that works on sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender equality, violence, and access to justice, with significant research and public policy advocacy experience. From 1986 to 1989, Pitanguy held a cabinet position as president of the National Council for the Rights of Women (CNDM), which inaugurated public policies for women at the federal level and played a major role in assuring women’s rights in the new constitution during the democratization of Brazil. Pitanguy has also held academic positions in leading universities in Brazil and the U.S. and has served as a participant and board member of the Inter-American Dialogue, the Women Learning Partnership, and Action AID Brazil.

Steven W. Sinding, PhD, was director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in London from 2002 to his retirement in 2006. He began his career in 1971 at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Following assignments in Washington, Pakistan and the Philippines, Sinding served from 1983 to 1986 as director of the USAID Office of Population, and from 1986 to 1990, he was the director of USAID’s Mission to Kenya. Following this 20-year career at USAID, Sinding served for a year as senior population advisor to the World Bank and then moved to the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was director of the population sciences program from 1991 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002, he was a clinical professor of public health at Columbia University. From 2009 to 2015, Sinding chaired the board of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, and he has served on the boards of Abt Associates, the Guttmacher Institute, the Center for Health and Gender Equity, Pathfinder International, the African Population and Health Research Center, the World Population Foundation, Engender Health, the Population Resource Center, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, and Population Action International. He was a member of the U.S. delegation to the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994. Sinding holds a PhD in political science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Brittany Charlton, ScD, is an associate professor in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, as well as in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Charlton is known as a leading scholar documenting reproductive health and cancer disparities affecting sexual and gender minorities. She also conducts research on contraception use and family planning among people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. In addition to Charlton’s research program, she co-leads Harvard SOGIE (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression) Health Equity Research Collaborative—a 125+ member collaborative of sexual and gender minority health researchers across the University. Further, Charlton leads several mentoring initiatives, particularly for underrepresented minorities. She is a certified facilitator through the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences and the founder of the Harvard Sexual and Gender Minority Health Mentoring Program. Charlton received her MSc and ScD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Jewel Gausman, ScD, MHS, is a senior research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. Gausman’s research focuses on the social determinants of sexual and reproductive health and rights across the life course. Throughout her career, she has led work focused on applying unique qualitative and quantitative research methodologies to understand the underlying drivers of disparities in child marriage, sexual and gender-based violence, and contraceptive use and access, as well as improving global measurement and indicator validation in the fields of reproductive health, family planning and maternal health. Gausman previously led a research portfolio at the Women and Health Initiative in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and spent eight years as a family planning program research technical advisor in the Research, Technology and Utilization Division of the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Gausman currently serves as adjunct associate professor in the department of maternal and child health nursing at the School of Nursing, University of Jordan in Amman. She has extensive international experience, having lived and worked in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Gausman received an ScD in social epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an MHS in social and behavioral interventions from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Joshua Glasser, SM, joined the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in March 2024, where he serves as assistant director for Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance and Integrated Health Innovation. He came to OSTP having previously served as acting head of strategy for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. He has also served as a foreign affairs officer and senior advisor for the Department’s Office of International Health and Biodefense. During his decade at the State Department, he held a portfolio focused on health security, climate change, and the global environment. Glasser has worked on a variety of human-animal-environmental health (“One Health”) and climate-related health issues, including in the Arctic region, the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and in multilateral contexts such as WHO and the UNFCCC. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in political science and public policy analysis, and he holds a master of science in global health and population from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has also studied as a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam (2007‒2008). Glasser joined the State Department as a Presidential Management Fellow in 2013; his work has been recognized with two Superior Honor Awards, several Meritorious Honor Awards, a Franklin Award, and a Director’s Award from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Ana Langer, MD, joined the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in July 2010 as a professor of the practice of public health (Department of Global Health and Population), leading the Women and Health Initiative. Langer, a physician specializing in pediatrics and neonatology and a reproductive health expert, has conducted research in low- and middle-income countries and published extensively on maternal health, unsafe abortion, contraception, strategies to improve quality of reproductive health care, integration of maternal and newborn health care, and maternal health in humanitarian settings. Throughout her career, Langer has conducted extensive research and worked effectively on the translation of scientific evidence into policy and programs in her field in all three major developing regions and in the U.S. Langer retired from Harvard Chan School in December 2022 and was appointed as professor of the practice, emerita, at Harvard University.

Marcia Castro, PhD, is Andelot Professor of Demography, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and director of the Brazil Studies Program at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). Her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches to identify the determinants of infectious disease transmission in different ecological settings to inform control policies. She made important contributions during recent public health emergencies (the Zika virus epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic) and has projects on malaria, COVID-19, arboviruses, women’s health, infant/child mortality and development, and climate change in the Brazilian Amazon. She serves on several advisory boards in Brazil and the U.S. and is an elected member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She holds a PhD in demography from Princeton University.

Poster day information forthcoming.