Scientific Committee

Biographies

Indira Nath

India

Indira Nath (Co-Chair) is Raja Ramanna Fellow & Emeritus Professor, National Institute of Pathology (ICMR), Safdarjung Hospital Campus, New Delhi, India. She received an MBBS and MD from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, and later served on the Faculty of AIIMS in various capacities culminating as Head of a new Department of Biotechnology. She has made contributions to cellular immune responses in human leprosy, identified immunologically recognized Lsr 2 protein of the bacillus, with a view to search for bio-markers for leprosy reactions. Radiometric in vitro assays to check viability of the leprosy bacillus and drug resistance were also devised as this bacillus is not cultivable by conventional means. She has also mentored many students and made contributions to education, medical and science policies and Women Scientists' Issues. She was Member, Scientific Advisory Committee to Cabinet, Foreign Secretary INSA (1995-97), Council Member (1992-94, 1998-2006) and Vice President (2001-03) of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, and Chairperson, Women Scientists Programme, DST (2003). She was conferred both professional and civilian awards: Padmashri (1999), Chevalier Ordre National du Merite, France (2003), Silver Banner, Tuscanny, Italy (2003), R C Merhotra award for life time achievements at the 99^th Science Congress (2012), L'Oreal UNESCO Award for Women in Science (Asia Pacific) (2002), SS Bhatnagar Award (1983), and the Basanti Devi Amir Chand Award by ICMR (1994). She was elected Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, Delhi; National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad (1988); Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (1990); National Academy of Medical Sciences (India) (1992); Royal College of Pathology (1992); and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) (1995). She was conferred a DSc (hc) 2002, by Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, France.

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Hany M. Ayad

Egypt

Hany M. Ayad is a Professor of regional and urban planning. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from the same University as a joint venture with the Illinois Institute of Technology, USA. He has been on Alexandria University in the Department of Architecture since 1987.

Prof. Ayad research focuses on the dynamics of urban growth in developing countries as well as the study of cities’ morphologies and evolution. He was involved in several projects with the UN-Habitat and UNDP in Egypt and Syria, and participated in the preparation of urban strategic and participatory guidelines and plans for several Egyptian cities and villages. In 2006, He received the Egyptian National Incentive Award for his work in the renovation of the Pharos area, one of the most important historical parts of Alexandria city. Prof. Ayad was also involved with the ISDF (Informal Settlements Development Facility) in delineating and preparing intervention action plans for several unsafe areas in Egypt.

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Anthony Capon

Australia

Anthony Capon is professor of public health at the University of Canberra and visiting professor in the healthy built environments program at the University of New South Wales.  He is a public health physician – a medical graduate with a PhD in child health and specialist training in public health medicine.  Tony is an authority on health promotion and environmental health, with research interests in urban futures, sustainability and human health.  He was a contributing author for Hidden Cities – the 2010 joint WHO/UN-HABITAT global report on unmasking and overcoming health inequities in urban settings.  He is a member of the international advisory board for the Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University.   During 2008-2010, Tony was a member of the science planning group for this new ICSU health and wellbeing program and, during 2010-2011, he was also a member of the ICSU ROAP team developing an implementation plan for Asia and the Pacific Region.  Tony has held National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) and World Health Organization fellowships and has also held a diverse range of leadership roles, including with the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine and the International Society for Urban Health.

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Ana Diez Roux

USA

Ana Diez Roux is Professor and Chair of Epidemiology and director of the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.  She is also a research professor in the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Diez Roux has been an international leader in the investigation of the social determinants of health, the application of multilevel analysis in health research, and the study of neighborhood health effects.  Her research areas include social epidemiology and health disparities, environmental health effects, urban health, psychosocial factors in health, and cardiovascular disease epidemiology.  Recent areas of work include social environment-gene interactions and the use of complex systems approaches in population health.

Diez Roux serves on numerous review and advisory committees and was awarded the Wade Hampton Frost Award for her contributions to public health by the American Public Health Association. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

Dr. Diez Roux received an MD from the University of Buenos Aires, a master’s degree in public health and doctorate in health policy from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

Christl Donnelly

UK

Christl Donnelly is Professor of Statistical Epidemiology at the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London. She moved to the UK after receiving her doctorate in biostatistics from Harvard School of Public Health. She has studied SARS, influenza, malaria, variant CJD as well as animal diseases including BSE, foot and mouth disease and bovine TB and she collaborates with mathematical modelers, ecologists, clinicians and veterinarians. She was deputy chair of the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB which designed, oversaw and analyzed the £50-million Randomised Badger Culling Trial to test the effectiveness of badger-culling-based policies to control bovine TB. She is particularly interested in both the science-public policy interface and public engagement in science. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers and two books (Statistical Aspects of BSE and vCJD: Models for Epidemics, with Neil Ferguson 1999, and Principles of Applied Statistics, with Sir David Cox 2011).

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Carlos Dora

Switzerland

Dr Carlos Dora manages WHO's global programme of work on health impact assessment (HIA) and health in sector policies, including housing, transport, energy, and the extractive industries.  His unit – Interventions for Healthy Environments - is responsible for the Organization's work on occupational health and environmental health hazards associated with radiation and air pollution.  His unit is also responsible for mainstreaming environmental performance criteria into the design and delivery of health care activities, including for WHO's own technical work in countries.

Prior to this position, Dr Dora worked as a senior policy advisor for Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland while she was Director-General of WHO.

Dr Dora was an early champion of HIA when he worked at the WHO European Regional Office and managed a programme on transport, health and the environment that was established following the European Inter-Ministerial Conference in 1999. Dr Dora was also instrumental in the negotiations to include provisions for HIA and health systems engagement in the UNECE Protocol on SEA (2004).

Before joining WHO, Dr Dora worked on environmental epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and before that in community medicine in Southern Brazil.  He is a medical doctor, has a Master’s degree and a PhD in epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

His publications include numerous articles on HIA and health in sustainable development, a book on health risk communications and another on the health impacts of transport policies.  More recently he led a series of analyses on the health co-benefits of policies to mitigate climate change in different sectors of the economy. He has been a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Transportation Sciences.

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Keisuke Hanaki

Japan

Keisuke Hanaki is Professor at Department of Urban Engineering and Adjunct Professor at Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S), The University of Tokyo (UT).

After completed doctoral program at UT in 1980, he has worked at Tohoku University (1980-1983), Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand (1985-1987) and UT (1983 -1985, and 1987 to now).  His research field is holistic environmental management in urban area for sustainability.  Integrated analysis of emission reduction of green house gas from urban activity, mitigation of urban heat island, solid waste and wastewater management for lower environmental loading, and quality of life in urban area are his research field.

He has published 50 books and 176 peer-reviewed papers in the field of urban environmental engineering, and gave 180 talks at various academic meetings or at panel discussion.

He was an editor of Journal Water Research, President of Japan Society on Water Environment, and currently a vice president of Society of Environmental Science, Japan. He was a lead author in water chapter of IPCC 2nd and 3rd assessment report.

He was an Member of Science Council of Japan (2006 - 2011), and has been its Council Member since October 2011.

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Saroj Jayasinghe

Sri Lanka

Professor Jayasinghe, qualified with MBBS honours from University of Colombo in 1979 and joined the University of Colombo as a lecturer in 1982.

He was an advisor to the National Development Council (1997-1999) and a member of the Presidential Task Force on Health Policy (1997-1999). In 2005 he initiated Sri Lanka’s partnership with the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health (SDH) and helped establish the Working Group on SDH in Sri Lanka. He is a steering committee member of an Asia-Pacific health equity network (HealthGAEN) and chairs the Sri Lanka Medical Association’s committee on Health Equity. He is a member of the Research Panel on Health, of the National Science Foundation and a former committee member of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (Section A on Health).

His research interests include newer approaches to clinical teaching, health equity and social determinants of health (SDH), and application of complexity science to health. Recent publications include the role of complexity science in population health (http://www.ete-online.com/content/8/1/2) and in clinical medicine (http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0025-6196/PIIS002561961200211X.pdf).

He has wide teaching and clinical experience in the UK and in Malaysia. He is currently a consultant physician at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka, a professor and head of Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Colombo.

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Susan Parnell

South Africa

Susan Parnell an urban geography in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences and is the Director of the ‘CityLab’ at the University of Cape Town (UCT) African Centre for Cities. Prior to her appointment at UCT she taught in the Wits University Geography Department (Johannesburg) and the School of Oriental African Studies (London). She is the author of over 80 academic papers, 4 edited volumes and 2 co-authored books. She is on the Editorial boards of 11 academic journals.

Her early academic research was in the area of urban historical geography and focussed on the rise of racial residential segregation and the impact of colonialism on urbanisation and town planning in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1994 and democracy in South Africa her work has shifted to contemporary urban policy research (local government, poverty reduction and urban environmental justice). By its nature this research is not been purely academic, but has involved liasing with local and national government and international donors. Sue is also on the boards of several local NGOs concerned with poverty alleviation, sustainability and gender equity in post-apartheid South Africa. She serves on a number of national and international advisory research panels relating to urban reconstruction.

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Luuk Reitveld

The Netherlands

Louis Cornelis (Luuk) Rietveld is full professor Drinking Water and Urban Water Cycle Technology at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Department of Water management.

After finalizing his studies Civil Engineering at Delft University of Technology in 1987, he worked until 1991 as Assistant and later as Associate expert for the Dutch Directorate General for International Co-operation in Mozambique. In that period he was employed as Assistant Professor Sanitary Engineering at the Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique. In the period 1991 until 1994 he worked at the Management Centre for International Co-operation, Delft University of Technology. From 1994 he has been working at the Department of Water Management, section Sanitary Engineering of Delft University of Technology. In 2005 Luuk Rietveld defended his PhD thesis entitled “Improving Operation of Drinking Water Treatment through Modeling”. In his present position, that he obtained in 2010, he focusses his research on closing loops in the urban water cycle, the removal of organic micro-pollutants, treatment of brackish groundwater, recovery of energy from water and optimization of water processes and systems with IT. He supervises more than 20 PhD students working on the mentioned topics.

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Pierre Ritchie

Canada

Pierre L.-J. Ritchie, is Full Professor, School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Canada where he is Director of the Centre for Psychological Services and Research. He is the Secretary-General of the International Union of Psychological Science and psychology’s main representative to the World Health Organization. Professor Ritchie served on the Committee on Scientific Planning and Review of the International Council for Science (2002-2009). Dr. Ritchie is also Executive Director of the Canadian Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology. His clinical expertise focuses on differential diagnosis. His scholarly interests address health policy as well as ethics in health practice and in research involving human participants. He has published widely on these subjects and been extensively involved in national and international professional and scientific organizations.

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Gérard Salem

France

Pr. Gérard Salem after completing the equivalent of a B.A. and M.A. degree in geography (University of Paris 1 – Sorbonne), he went on to receive a Ph.D. in African Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (E.H.E.S.S.) in Paris. Additionally, he completed a two-year degree (D.E.S.S.) at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (with a focus on urbanization and national and regional development), and a degree in epidemiology from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. As a researcher with ORSTOM, he worked from 1980-1988 in Senegal, as part of a primary health care program, and then he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Montreal from 1989-1992 where he taught Geography of Africa and Medical Geography. Since 1997 he has been a Professor of Geography at the University of Paris-Nanterre where he is Director of the Master’s program in Medical Geography and of the research program “Space, Health and Territories.”

His domains are thus the environment, geography of health, and social geography in general, with a particular interest in urban geography in all geographic areas. I has published more than 200 articles, chapters and books. Every year he takes frequent professional trips to Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa,

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Ilene Speizer

U.S.A.

Ilene S. Speizer, is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She has led research and evaluation studies on family planning, HIV prevention, and adolescent reproductive health programs.  Her primary research interests focus on barriers to family planning use, adolescent sexual behaviors, the meaning and measurement of unintended pregnancy, intra-household decision-making in diverse settings, and the role of intimate partner violence on reproductive health outcomes.  Dr. Speizer is the co-principal investigator and Technical Deputy Director on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded Measurement, Learning, and Evaluation (MLE) for the Urban Reproductive Health Initiative project.  Speizer and colleagues are designing comprehensive impact evaluations of urban family programs in Uttar Pradesh India, Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal while at the same time building local capacity to undertake monitoring and evaluation and disseminating findings nationally, regionally, and globally.  Using data from the MLE project, she is examining the role of the urban environment (slum/non-slum settings) and poverty on fertility and family planning outcomes in project cities across the four countries.

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Yongguan Zhu

China

Yongguan Zhu, Professor of Soil Environmental Sciences and Environmental Biology, currently works in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), he is the director general of the Institute of Urban Environment in Xiamen. He has been working on soil-plant interactions, with special emphasis on rhizosphere microbiology, biogeochemistry of nutrients, metals and emerging chemicals (antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes). Before joined CAS in 2002, he was working as a postdoctoral fellow in The University of Adelaide, Australia. He obtained his BSc in soil science from the former Zhejiang Agricultural University in 1989, and MSc in soil science from the Institute of Soil Science, CAS in 1992, and then a PhD in environmental biology from Imperial College, London in 1998.

Dr Zhu serves as a Member, Standing Advisory Group of Nuclear Applications, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); Associate Editor, Environmental Pollution; Advisory Editorial Board, Trends in Plant Science; Advisor, New Phytologist and Editorial board, Environment International, Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

Professor Zhu has published extensively in the last 20 years, so far over 160 papers have been published in international journals, including Lancet, Environmental Science and Technology, Plant Physiology, Environmental Microbiology, Trends in Plant Science, New Phytologist, Environmental Pollution etc. These publications have attracted nearly 4000 citations with an H-index of 34.

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