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Jill Astbury is Adjunct Principal Research Fellow in the School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Australia. Her research has focused on identifying the determinants of women's mental health using a gender and human rights perspective. In particular, she is concerned with exploring the relationship between gender based violence including sexual violence and gender disparities in mental health including increased rates of depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder. Her publications include ‘Crazy for You: The making of women's madness' (Oxford University Press, 1996), ‘Women's mental health: an evidence based review' (WHO, 2000) and ‘Gender disparities in Mental Health (WHO, 2001). 

Gary Barker, PhD, is the International Director of Promundo-DC, the US office of Instituto Promundo, a Brazilian NGO, based in Rio de Janeiro, that works locally, nationally and internationally to promote gender equity and to reduce violence against children, women and youth. He has more than twenty years of program and research experience in the areas of violence prevention, adolescent and youth health, HIV/AIDS prevention, and sexual and reproductive health.  He is also a leading researcher, advocate, and program development expert in engaging boys and men in gender equality and preventing gender-based violence.  He has held consultancies with the World Bank, UNAIDS, UNICEF, UNFPA, ICRW, numerous international foundations and the World Health Organization on engaging men and boys in violence prevention.  Mr. Barker is currently an “Innovator for the Public” fellow with Ashoka and on the board of Instituto PAPAI in Brazil, Advocates for Youth in the US and Sonke Gender Justice in South Africa.   He holds a PhD in child and adolescent development from Loyola University – Chicago and an MA in public policy from Duke University.   He is also co-coordinator of the MenEngage Alliance, an international network of NGOs and UN partners working to engage men and boys in gender equality and ending violence against women.

Alessandra Guedes (MA and MSc) has worked in the public health field for several years, always involved in cutting edge reproductive health issues that are at the heart of the nexus of reproductive health and human rights, including adolescent reproductive health, safe abortion, gender-based violence and emergency contraception.  She has worked in many different capacities -- providing direct services to both victims and perpetrators of violence, implementing and managing a UN-funded adolescent SRH program in Brazil, researching Brazilian abortion policy and designing, implementing, managing and evaluating a multi-country initiative in gender-based violence in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Peru and Venezuela.  She has spent the last decade working intensively in the area of gender violence, first as a Senior Program Officer at the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Western Hemisphere Region (NY, EUA) and more recently as a freelance consultant based in Brasília, Brazil.  She has held consultancies for numerous organizations, including: WHO, Unifem, USAID, Path, Oxfam, Jhpiego, among others.  She holds a MSc degree in Public Health for Developing Countries from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has published widely on the topic of violence, including Improving the Health Sector Response to Gender-Based Violence: A Resource Manual for Health Care Professionals in Developing Countries (Bott, Guedes, Claramunt and Guezmes, 2004).

Dr. Khan is the Regional Associate Director & Senior Program Associate, Asia and Near East Region, FRONTIERS Program, for the Population Council and a Visiting Professor, Department of Economics, Jamia Milia University, Delhi. He is widely published and has many years experience working in operations research in reproductive health, family planning, STD and HIV/ AIDS, gender based violence, adolescent sexuality and male involvement, population and health policy research and Capacity Building. Population Council

Dr. Nduku Kilonzo is the Director of Liverpool VCT, Care & Treatment, a Kenyan NGO that provides HIV counselling to about 200,000 per annum, care & ART treatment to over 16,000 Kenyans, responds to targeted vulnerabilities in HIV – MSM/Prisons, Youth, People with Disabilities and Survivors of Sexual Violence and undertakes operational research to inform HIV service delivery practice and policy formulation in Kenya.  Nduku has experience, knowledge and practical skills in policy, planning and delivery HIV prevention and treatment services with a focus on sexual violence services.  Her areas of research interest include quality assurance in HIV services delivery and HIV vulnerabilities and gender issues.  Her primary research work has been in the area of Sexual Violence and HIV.  Her work has provided evidence for the development of integrated public health facility Post Rape Care services that are currently offered in 16 public health facilities in Kenya, having provided care to 3,000 survivors in the last 4 years.  Nduku has acted in the capacity of Technical Advisor to two WHO Committees; 1) the Development of International Policy & Guidelines on occupational & non-occupational PEP and; 2) on HIV Counselling and Testing and Violence Against Women.  Currently is a member of the Coordinating Group of the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI).  She has published on sexual violence and gender issues. LVCT

Dr. Garcia-Moreno is a physician from Mexico with a masters in community medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has over 25 years of experience in health care delivery, research and policy, working in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Increasingly her work has  focused on sexual and reproductive health, women's health and gender in health.  For the last 15 years she has been leading the World Health Organization's (WHO) work on gender and women's health,  violence against women and HIV/AIDS in women and girls and currently leads the team on Gender, Reproductive Rights, Sexual Health and Adolescence in the Department of Reproductive Health and Research, WHO. She is coordinator of the WHO Multi-Country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence Against Women, a large research initiative involving  now over 15  countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. She is a founder and coordinating group member of the SVRI and on the Steering Committee of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS.

Dr Samir is a physician and public health professional with nearly two decades of experience in addressing public health issues that affect women, including ending female genital mutilation and improving the quality and availability of medical care. She has lead several projects to educate Cairo’s youth about reproductive health and reduce the incidence of dangerous practices such as unsafe sex and self-induced abortions. An Ashoka fellow, Samir started both Tadros El Meshreky Association and Al-Anba Mossa Al-Aswad Association and also served for a number of years on the board of the Near East Foundation, a ProLiteracy partner in Morocco. Dr Samir was awarded the prestigious Ann C. Michel Women in Literacy Award 2011 for her literacy and sexuality education projects with vulnerable youth and parents in Cairo. Centre for Development Services, Near East Foundation: http://www.neareast.org/main/cds/default.aspx

Linda M. Williams, Ph.D., Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology, at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, Center for Research in Criminology and Criminal Law. She served on the National Research Councils’ Panel on Violence Against Women and was Director of Research at the Stone Center, Wellesley Centers for Women. For the past 38 years she has directed research on victim issues including rape and sexual exploitation of women and children, fatal child abuse, trauma and memory, and human trafficking. She has conducted research on prevention and response to victimization in military families, among homeless youth and in institutional settings. Author of several books and numerous scholarly publications, she has lectured in the US and internationally. Her work is interdisciplinary, highly collaborative and takes a global perspective. As 2011 Visiting International Fellow, Sociology Department, University of Surrey (UK) and as a member of the Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Working Group on Modern-Day Slavery and Human Trafficking, she continues her qualitative research and writing on commercial sexual exploitation of girls and young women. She recently interviewed homeless, runaway and domestically trafficked teens with funding from a U.S. Department of Justice grant. Professor Williams teaches courses on crime victim issues, research methods, and gender, race and crime.  She has been principal investigator on 15 U.S. federally funded research projects and, as part of a multi-campus CDC-funded grant, is studying the use of social marketing and in-person training programs to enhance bystander behaviors to prevent sexual violence on college campuses.

Rachel Jewkes is the Director of the MRC Gender & Health Research Unit in Pretoria and Secretary of the SVRI. Recognised as a leading international scholar in the field of gender and health, she is a public health physician who has a background in epidemiology and medical anthropology. She has spent the last two decades researching gender and sexuality in South Africa, contributing to the literature of epidemiology, medical anthropology, and health systems research. She is best known for her research on gender-based violence and particularly sexual violence. Her work has followed a public health approach, with an emphasis on describing the scale and nature of the problem of gender-based violence in South Africa through epidemiology, understanding its context and the dimensions and dynamics of gender inequity in relationships using qualitative methods, and developing and evaluating interventions for responses in the health, education and NGO sectors. She has spent many years developing the health sector response to rape in South Africa, through research and policy development. She is a member of the WHO Secretary General’s Expert Advisory Panel on Injury and Violence Prevention and Control, the WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Committee for HIV-AIDS, and the PEPFAR Scientific Advisory Board. She is currently a senior technical advisor to the ‘Gender-based violence and masculinities research project’ of UNDP’s Partners for Prevention Programme, in Asia Pacific Region.  Gender and Health Research Unit, MRC South Africa.

Liz is a health specialist with over 12 years research, public policy and project management experience. She has worked for the Department's of Health in Western Australia and South Africa, has worked as a researcher at the Center for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; and was Senior Programme Manager for AMREF South Africa. Liz has a Post-graduate Degree in Psychology from Curtin University in Australia and a Masters in Science (Medicine) from the University of the Witwatersrand. She is currently the SVRI Programme Officer.