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

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