| Diane Levin-Zamir, Chair |
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| | Professor Diane Levin-Zamir is National Director of the Department of Health Education and Promotion of Clalit, Israel’s largest non-profit health-care organization, and Professor at the University of Haifa School of Public Health. She also teaches at the Tel Aviv University School of Public Health (Israel). She founded and leads the Health Literacy Global Working Group of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE), and the Israel Health Promoters/Educators Association, and chairs the Ministry of Health’s National Health Promotion Council. She is the Research Co-Chair for the WHO Action Network on Measuring Population and Organizational Health Literacy (M-POHL). Her expertise in cultural appropriateness, media/digital/population health literacy, health promotion action, and research and policy throughout the life course encompasses community, hospital and media settings. She is Principal Investigator for Israel’s National Survey on Health Literacy and Associate Editor of Global Health Promotion, and is active in the International Health Literacy Association. |
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| Robert Böhm, Vice-chair | |
| | Dr Robert Böhm is Professor of Psychology at the University of Vienna (Austria) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He was educated and trained at various universities in Germany, and his research connects theories and methods from psychology, economics and related disciplines. For more than 10 years, Dr Böhm has been investigating ways to explain and improve human decision-making in social interactions, particularly in response to global challenges such as infectious diseases, antibiotic resistance, conflict and violence, and climate change. His research findings have been published in the leading academic journals. He has extensive experience in bridging the gap between research and practice to improve human health and well-being. |
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| Karabi Acharya | |
| | Dr Karabi Acharya is Senior Director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest philanthropy organization in the United States of America dedicated solely to health. She leads the Global Ideas for US Solutions portfolio, which draws inspiration from ways in which other countries are achieving health and well-being for all members of society, and works to adapt them to the United States. She is a public health anthropologist with over 20 years of experience working on international health and development issues in more than 15 countries. Previously, Dr Acharya was Global Director of Ashoka, an international social entrepreneurship organization, and worked with the Academy for Educational Development on participatory approaches, local leadership, systems change and social entrepreneurship. |
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| Cornelia Betsch | |
| | Professor Cornelia Betsch is a trained psychologist and Professor of Health Communication at the University of Erfurt and the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM; Germany). She is the director of the Institute for Planetary Health Behaviour at the University of Erfurt and of the newly funded WHO Collaborating Center for Behavioural Research in Global Health, located at the BNITM. Her work aims at understanding principles of health behaviour by applying a judgment- and decision-making and strategic-interaction perspective to planetary health behaviour. During the pandemic, she was engaged in generating behavioural insights for crisis management and has served as a member of the Expert Council of the German Federal Government advising on the COVID-19 response. Professor Betsch works with national and international health organizations to transfer research into practice and foster evidence-based, behavioural insights-related individual and policy decisions. |
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| Oana Blaga | |
| | Dr Oana Blaga is Assistant Professor and Director of the Centre for Health Policy and Public Health at Babes-Bolyai University (Romania). She has more than 12 years of experience designing, implementing and evaluating behavioural change interventions in Romania, with a specific focus on randomized controlled trials in the area of maternal and child health. Her recent work includes the development and testing of mobile health (mHealth) interventions for smoking cessation during pregnancy, assessments of women’s experiences of labour and birth in state-owned and private hospitals across Romania, and evaluations of factors contributing to women’s decisions about various medical procedures performed in the perinatal period. |
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| Ignat Bogdan | |
| | Mr Ignat Bogdan is Head of the Medical and Sociological Research Division at the Research Institute for Healthcare Organization and Medical Management of the Moscow Healthcare Department. He holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in political psychology, and is the author of more than 190 research papers. Mr Bogdan has extensive knowledge in the fields of medicine, clinical psychology and data-analysis methodology, and has managed numerous projects for Russian health-care organizations, governing bodies and nongovernmental organizations. In 2020 and 2021, he was Principal Investigator for the Moscow-based project “Monitoring knowledge, risk perceptions, preventive behaviours and trust to inform pandemic outbreak response”, carried out with the support of WHO/Europe. He cofounded the Sociology of Health International Forum (2019–present). |
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| Marijn de Bruin | |
| | Professor Marijn de Bruin is currently Professor of Behavioural Medicine and Health Psychology at the Radboud University Medical Center (Kingdom of the Netherlands) and at the department of Behaviour and Health at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). His applied and methodological research focuses on monitoring and explaining health behaviours, producing high-quality evidence on behavioural interventions (individual level and context), and system changes to facilitate the uptake of behavioural intervention evidence. Professor de Bruin has set up scientific policy advisory groups of senior academics, leads the Be-Prepared pandemic preparedness consortium, and has frequently advised the national government on health policies and communication, in particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
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| Christopher Dye | |
| | Professor Christopher Dye trained as a biologist and ecologist, but postgraduate research on mosquitoes led to a career in epidemiology and public health, principally at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (United Kingdom) and at WHO. As WHO Director of Strategy from 2014 to 2018, he served as Science Adviser to the WHO Director-General, oversaw the production and dissemination of health information by WHO press and libraries, and coordinated WHO’s work on health and the Sustainable Development Goals. He is currently Professor of Epidemiology at Oxford University (United Kingdom). |
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| Daisy Fancourt | |
| | Dr Daisy Fancourt is Associate Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London (United Kingdom). Her research focuses on the effects of social factors such as loneliness and social isolation on health, social and community assets, arts and cultural engagement, and social prescribing. Her work includes behavioural studies, clinical trials of new psychosocial interventions within the National Health Service, and epidemiological analyses. Dr Fancourt is Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health, a member of the Technical Advisory Group on the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the WHO European Region, an Expert Scientific Adviser to the Government of the United Kingdom, a member of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a BBC New Generation Thinker, and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper. |
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| Edward Fischer | |
| | Dr Edward (Ted) Fischer is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Anthropology, Management, and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University (United States). He directs the Vanderbilt Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing Initiative (CCH), which builds directly on the work of the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Unit, producing policy briefs on topics such as pandemic response and obesity. In 2009, he founded Maní+, a social enterprise in Guatemala that develops locally sourced foods to fight childhood malnutrition. His research focuses on values, well-being and the cultural contexts of health. |
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| John Kinsman | |
| | Dr John Kinsman has conducted social and behaviour change research globally since 1996, including on the social determinants of health, health systems strengthening, public health emergency preparedness, and the prevention and control of specific diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika and poliomyelitis. Dr Kinsman joined the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control early in 2019 to work on promoting vaccination acceptance and preventing antibiotic resistance in the European Union. During the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, his focus shifted to addressing pandemic fatigue, supporting socially vulnerable populations, promoting COVID-19 vaccination, and countering online vaccination misinformation. Current work includes the development of a community of practice for the prevention of communicable diseases in the European Union/European Economic Area through the use of social and behavioural sciences. |
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| Manon Parry | |
| | Dr Manon Parry is a public historian of medicine specializing in the uses of the humanities for health and well-being. She is Professor of Medical and Nursing History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Associate Professor of American Studies and Public History at the University of Amsterdam (Kingdom of the Netherlands). She has curated exhibitions for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and advised on exhibition projects at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, United States; the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, United States; the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem) in Marseille, France; and Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden, Kingdom of the Netherlands. Dr Parry’s research focuses on the history of health communication, and the role of history heritage, and museums in medical and nursing education and public health. |
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| Marc Suhrcke | |
| | Professor Marc Suhrcke heads the Research Programme on Health and Health Systems at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, and is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York (United Kingdom). Previously, he was Professor of Global Health Economics at the University of York, Professor of Public Health Economics at the University of East Anglia (United Kingdom), and had held research positions with WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the University of Hamburg (Germany), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Centre for European Policy Studies, the European Commission, and the Hamburg Institute of International Economics. Professor Suhrcke’s research focuses on aspects of health economics, including the socioeconomic determinants and consequences of health and health inequalities, the economics of health behaviours, and the evaluation of the impact of population- and system-level policies on health. |
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| Felicity Thomas | |
| | Dr Felicity Thomas is an Associate Professor of Culture and Health Inequalities and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Culture and Health at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom). Her work examines how cultures, encompassing societal values and norms, clinical working practice, and regulatory and research cultures, intersect to impact health- and social-care delivery, particularly for marginalized population groups. She is especially interested in the intersections between poverty, mental health and medicalization, and in promoting cultural competence within health care. Dr Thomas works closely with service users, patients, and health- and social-care providers to co-create more ethical and sustainable health- and social-care interventions. |
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| Vesna Trifunović | |
| | Dr Vesna Trifunović is Research Associate at the Institute of Ethnography at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She completed doctoral studies in ethnology and anthropology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia). Her field of research is anthropology of medicine and public health, and her expertise lies in qualitative methods and sociocultural and political aspects of vaccines and vaccination. She has published the results of her work on vaccine scepticism, vaccination communication and vaccine production in national and international journals, participated in numerous international conferences, symposiums and workshops, and collaborated on the project Tailoring Immunization Programmes (TIP) in Serbia as an associate of WHO/Europe. |
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| Stephan Van den Broucke | |
| | Dr Stephan Van den Broucke is Professor and former Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and at the Psychological Sciences Research Institute of the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He is a member of the Executive Board of IUHPE, currently holding the conferences portfolio. He has been coordinator or principal investigator of more than 30 large-scale national and international collaborative projects on health promotion, preventive health behaviour change, chronic disease self-management, health literacy and public health capacity-building, including the European Health Literacy Survey, Diabetes Literacy and IC-Health, and has published widely on these subjects. He is a member of the editorial board of various scientific journals, and serves as an expert adviser for the Belgian Superior Health Council, the King Baudouin Foundation, and the Social Research Methods and Advice Working Group of the European Food Safety Authority. |
