Dr. Amal Abd El-Hadi is a physician by training and is a human rights and feminist activist. She has worked on issues related to sexual violence - particularly Female Genital Mutilation in Egypt. She has also published several books in Egypt and contributed chapters to other publications. Her most recent research was on the response of the medico-legal system in Egypt to sexual violence. She is a board member of the New Woman Foundation, which is one of the few NGOs in Egypt to break the silence around issues of violence against women including Female Genital Cutting which are otherwise considered taboo.

Deborah L. Billings is a Senior Associate in Research and Evaluation, Ipas/Ipas Mexico, where she has worked since 1995 in Mexico, Bolivia, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa.  Over the years she has coordinated research and training workshops on abortion, post-abortion care, gender-based violence, sexual violence, and sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people.  Since 2000 she has collaborated with a group of Mexican NGOs to form the Alliance for the Right to Decide or andar (www.andar.org.mx), dedicated to improving women’s access to safe abortion services, including in the case of rape.  Dr. Billings has served as a consultant to Mexican state-and federal-level ministries of health working to initiate comprehensive care programs for survivors of gender-based violence as well as to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to develop a community-based lay health advisor program aimed at newly established Latino communities.  She is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, Maternal and Child Health and provides technical guidance to Masters and PhD students at the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico.  Dr. Billings is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. in Sociology.  Her research examined the process of Guatemalan women’s political organizing while in exile in southern Mexico, including their creation of a movement to respect women’s rights as human rights and to eradicate gender-based violence. IPAS Mexico

Mary Anne Burke, Health Analyst/Statistician, Global Forum for Health Research, Geneva, with responsibility for Resource Flows for Research for Health and Equity portfolios, and Assistant Professor Department of Sociology & Equity Studies in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (OISE/UT). Career positions include:
Director of Research, The Roeher Institute, York University, Toronto; Coordinator of the Gender-based Analysis (GBA) Initiative and Senior Policy Analyst, Health Canada;  Senior Analyst, Statistics Canada; Founding team member and editor of Canadian Social Trends, Statistics Canada; Policy Analyst, Status of Women Canada; Social Statistician, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence, Italy.
Published widely in the areas of public policy, social conditions and human rights. Developed Gender-based Analysis (GBA) tools and processes for the Government of Canada, and tools for studying the inclusiveness of public policies programmes and services. Recently developed the "BIAS FREE Framework", an analytical tool for examining and eliminating biases in health research that derive from social hierarchies based on gender, ability, race, age, class, caste, etc., with Margrit Eichler, Sociology & Equity Studies in Education OISE/UT.
Current work in this area, with the support of the Global Forum for Health Research, includes the development of publications and training curricula to encourage applications of the BIAS FREE Framework to enhance equity in health research. Also undertaking work focused on the tracking of global expenditures on research for health, aimed at promoting a more adequate allocation of resources to research for the health needs of low- and middle- income countries and to neglected populations and areas of research on health and how it is created and sustained. Global Forum for Health Research

Dr. Nata Duvvury is Director, Gender Violence and Rights at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) based in Washington, DC. She works extensively on domestic violence, HIV /AIDS and violence, women's property and inheritance rights and issues of gender equity and peacebuilding. Her current work also includes developing a framework for estimation of costs of violence. She led a multi-site research on links between women's property and inheritance rights and domestic violence including physical and sexual violence within the marital relationship. She has also developed a methodological framework for estimating cost of intimate partner violence and is currently implementing a multi-country study estimating costs of intimate partner violence at household and community levels. International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)

Mary Ellsberg is a Senior Advisor on Gender, Violence, and Human Rights at PATH, based in Washington, D.C. as well as Director of PATH’s Nicaragua office.  She coordinates the Inter-American Alliance for Gender Violence Prevention and Health, InterCambios, housed at PATH (www.alianzaintercambios.org). Dr. Ellsberg is a member of the Core Research Team of the WHO Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence, and has co-authored numerous articles on the prevalence and impact of domestic violence on the health of women and children in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, as well as ethical and methodological aspects of violence research. Together with Lori Heise, she authored the recent publication by PATH and WHO entitled Researching Violence Against Women: A Practical Guide for Researchers and Advocates. (www.path.org)

June Pagaduan-Lopez MD is a Professor of Psychiatry, at the University of the Philippines, Manila,  focusing on stress and trauma psychology.  She is presently the Department of Psychiatry's Training Officer, and works as a consultant for a WHO project to field test the WHO clinical guidelines on sexual assault. Her research work in the last 20 years has been in the areas of health and human rights, torture, sexual violence and the psychological consequences and rehabilitation in armed conflict and post-conflict areas. She has been a founder of several networks locally and internationally providing services for survivors of political and sexual violence. University of the Philippines