Nov 22 – 24, 2023
CERN
Europe/Zurich timezone

List of Participants

Isabelle Collet

Isabelle Collet is Professor in the Education Sciences Section at the University of Geneva, where she heads the G-RIRE team: Genre - Rapports intersectionnels, Relation éducative. Since September 2022, she has been President of the Education Sciences Section within the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences.

Trained as a computer scientist, in 2005 she defended a doctorate in educational science at the Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense on "The masculinization of computer science studies".

Having worked extensively on the issue of gender in science and technology, she is now exploring more broadly the question of gender in schools and the way in which different social relations intersect in the field of education and training. Her work with teachers and future teachers focuses on the implementation of a genuine pedagogy of equality.

In 2006, she was awarded a prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. In 2012, she founded ARGEF, the association for gender research in education and training. In 2019, she published "Les oubliées du numérique" with Éditions Le Passeur, which won her the "Pôle emploi" Book Prize in 2020. In 2021, she was named honorary member of the Société informatique de France (SIF). She is a member of various scientific bodies and committees: Co-direction of the journal GEF: Genre, éducation, formation with Sigolène Couchot

Meg Davis 

Meg Davis joined CIM in June 2023, having launched the Digital Health and Rights Project as senior researcher at the Global Health Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute. Prior to that, Davis was a research fellow at New York University’s Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice, and a visiting fellow at Fordham University School of Law and Columbia University. Davis served as the first senior advisor on human rights at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, where Davis led the process of putting policies and procedures in place to integrate human rights into their portfolio in over 120 countries. Davis was founding executive director of Asia Catalyst, a human rights group, and China researcher at Human Rights Watch. Davis earned her MA and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and UCLA. In 2017, Davis was one of three winners of the International Geneva Award.

Michael Dieter

Michael Dieter is an interdisciplinary researcher with a primary focus in digital media studies, media theory and political philosophy. His research investigates socio-technical forms of interface critique, drawing from design methods, software studies and media art. He is also engaged in app studies, particularly in developing digital methods to critically investigate the platform economy of apps, including key issues of media concentration, datafication and governance. Finally, his work branches into tactical media, technological aesthetics and media genealogies concerned with socio-political organization, labour and infrastructural power.

Fatima Hassan

Fatima Hassan is a human rights lawyer and social justice activist and the founder of the Health Justice Iniative. She is the recipient of the 2022 Calgary Peace Prize and is a 2023 Echoing Green Fellow. She has dedicated her professional life to defending and promoting human rights in South Africa, especially in the field of HIV/AIDS. She has worked as a Ministerial Advisor, and in philanthropy as well as the not-for-profit sector. She has served on several NFP boards and is the recipient of several awards, and often writes for local and international media publications. She is currently a Board Member of Global Witness and serves on the Advisory Group for Resolve to Save Lives.

Shirin Heidari 

Dr. Shirin Heidari is Senior Research Fellow at the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a Senior Technical Consultant on gender to WHO Gender, Equity and Human Rights Unit. Most recently, Dr. Heidari was the Executive Director of Reproductive Health Matters, and Editor-in-Chief of its academic journal. Prior to that, she oversaw the Research Promotion Department of the International AIDS Society in Geneva and was the Executive Editor of the Journal of the International AIDS Society. Dr. Heidari has been a trusted board member of Amnesty International in Sweden. During her time as a member of Council of European Association of Science Editors, she established and co-chaired a Gender Policy Committee, leading the development of the widely cited SAGER guidelines, encouraging researchers to address the sex and gender bias in research. She has also presented a TEDx talk on the topic.  


As a gender-equality and human rights advocate, Dr. Heidari has served as member of several international expert and scientific committees and engaged in various efforts advancing the integration of sex and gender in the production of knowledge and evidence. 

Sharada Mohanty 

Sharada Mohanty is the CEO and Founder of AIcrowd, a platform for crowdsourcing Artificial Intelligence for real world problems. His research focuses on using Artificial Intelligence for diagnosing plant diseases, teaching simulated skeletons how to walk, prediction of autism spectrum disorders in young children, scheduling trains in simulated railway networks, and on AI agents which can perform complex tasks in Minecraft.

During his Ph.D. at EPFL, he worked on numerous problems at the intersection of AI and health, with a strong interest in reinforcement learning. In his previous roles, he has worked at the Theoretical Physics department at CERN; he has had a brief stint at UNOSAT building GeoTag-X. In his current role, he focuses on building better engineering tools for AI researchers and making research in AI accessible to a broader community of problem solvers.

Nyalleng Moorosi

Nyalleng is a research software engineer at Google working on topics related to ethics and fairness in machine learning. Before Google she was a senior researcher at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial research, where she worked closely with government and academic institutions to develop products to understand phenomena such as Rhino poaching with the South African Park services and Election sentiment analysis with the South African Broadcasting Corporation and legacies of Spatial Aparthied with local faculty.

Outside of formal work she is involved in efforts to democratize AI; she is a founding member of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest machine learning consortium of AI/ML practitioners in Africa, a member of A+ Alliance an international coalition that seeks to not only detect, but correct, gender bias in Artificial Intelligence.

Tinashe Rufurwadzo

Tinashe Rufurwadzo (He/They) is a Programme Manager for Digital Health and Rights at GNP+ who champions the equitable involvement and leadership of marginalized communities in political and programmatic spaces that impact their health and rights. They are passionate about digital and artificial intelligence governance, and they possess expertise in technical and feminist leadership.

Claire Somerville 

Claire Somerville joined the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2012 and has taught courses on gender, global health, qualitative and mixed methods approaches to research, and applied research in environment and sustainability, gender, race, and diversity.

Claire studied anthropology at the University of Sussex, SOAS, and completed her doctoral research at St John’s College, University of Cambridge before going on to post-doctoral research and teaching at the University of Newcastle, Australia; Queen Mary, London; and, Trinity College Dublin.

Her research critically examines the circulation and transformations of knowledge(s) between global processes and local contexts bridging theory, policy, and practice in gender, health, and digitalization.

Research grants and projects include studies on diagnostic taxonomies, risk and body politics; the double burden of disease in Mozambique, Nepal and Peru; unmet health needs of LGBTQ communities, and the rise of non-communicable diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, she has developed research and pedagogical activities on digital gender gaps and the role of applied research and navigating policy-world decision-making.

Claire serves on the Policy and Practice Committee of the Royal Anthropology Institute and numerous advisory and expert groups on gender and health across the UN and International Organizations.

Els Torreele

Els Torreele has worked for over two decades at the interface of pharmaceutical R&D, human rights and access to medicines, and policy analysis and advocacy around biomedical innovation and access. A bioengineer and PhD in biomedical sciences from the Free University Brussels (VUB), she started to work at the university on innovation policy issues related to R&D agenda-setting, patenting of research, and the commercialization of biotechnology research.

In 2000, Els Torreele joined the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access to Essential Medicines Campaign in its pioneering years as chair of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Working Group, a multidisciplinary think tank to advance needs-driven R&D for diseases that primarily affect developing countries. A key outcome was the creation in 2003 of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (www.DNDi.org), a nonprofit drug development organization which she joined as a founding team member. At DNDi, she led several R&D projects from discovery through clinical trials, which included uncovering and driving the development of fexinidazole, which is now available to patients as the first all-oral treatment for Human African Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). 
In 2009, she joined the Open Society Foundations in New York to lead their Access to Medicines and Innovation work, advancing health and human rights in the area of medicines with a focus on governance, transparency and accountability, and supporting civil society voices and thought leadership in policy making that shapes access to medicines and innovation.

She returned to MSF in March 2017 as the Executive Director of the Access Campaign, leading for three years a global analysis and advocacy team working to ensure that appropriate medicines, vaccines and diagnostics are developed, available, affordable and adapted to people’s needs.

She is a Science Honorary Fellow at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) since 2016, and serves on the Board of the AGORA Open Science Trust, since January 2019. She’s also a member of the Reference Advisory Group of the Health Justice Initiative, a new public health and law initiative in South Africa addressing the intersection between racial and gender inequality and COVID-19, with a special focus on access to life saving diagnostics, treatment and vaccines (since July 2020). She also served as a Board member for DNDi from 2011-2016. Over the years, she’s been guest lecturer in different post-graduate courses at the Brussels University, the Antwerp University, the Antwerp Tropical Medicine Institute, the Swiss Tropical Medicine Institute, and Columbia University.

Sonia Trigueros

Sonia Trigueros is a Professor in the field of Nanomedicine. She has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from IBMB-CSIC and Universidad de Barcelona. She has been a researcher at Harvard and Oxford Universities. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona (Genetics department) and an Associated Researcher at the Biology Department at the University of Oxford.  Sonia is the Co-founder and former director of the Oxford Martin School Institute of Nanomedicine at the University of Oxford. In 2021 she found her first international company NIVD www.nivd.word and she act as Founder and CSO.

Peiling Yap 

Dr. Yap is HealthAI's Chief Scientist, where she is currently co-steering the scientific and technical direction of HealthAI. She works with partners across the world on research topics such as pandemic preparedness and response, open health, antimicrobial resistance, and maternal and child health. Her recent research focuses on using mixed methodology in implementing and evaluating both analogue and digital public health interventions.