Carmen Barroso
Regional Director, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Western Hemisphere Region
Carmen Barroso is a widely acknowledged leader in the field of sexual and reproductive health. Dr. Barroso served for twelve years as Director of Population and Reproductive Health at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Under her leadership, the foundation funded hundreds of NGOs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and helped to bring the voices of Third World women to international policy fora. In academia, she has been a Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor at Macalester College and professor of sociology at the University of Sao Paulo. As a senior researcher of the Chagas Foundation, Dr. Barroso had a pioneering role in creating Brazil’s first and foremost women’s studies center. Dr. Barroso was a founding member of DAWN, a network of Third World women, and of the Funder’s Network on Population, Reproductive Health and Rights, and serves on the board of Hispanics in Philanthropy. She holds a Ph.D in social psychology from Columbia University and has been a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University.
Charlotte Brody
National Field Director, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
Charlotte Brody is an expert on the nexus between the environment, health, and poverty. The Safer Chemicals/Healthy Families Campaign, for which she is the National Field Director, aims to fix our broken system of managing chemicals. Ms. Brody has also served as Director of Programs for Green For All, an organization dedicated to ending poverty and pollution, and as the Executive Director of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute. She is a founder and former Executive Director of Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition working to make health care more environmentally responsible and sustainable. A registered nurse and the mother of two sons, Ms. Brody has served as the Organizing Director for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in Falls Church, Virginia, the Executive Director of a Planned Parenthood affiliate in North Carolina and the Coordinator of the Carolina Brown Lung Association, an occupational safety and health organization focused on cotton textile workers.
Judith Bruce
Senior Associate and Policy Analyst, Population Council's Poverty, Gender, and Youth Program
Judith Bruce is a leader in policy analysis, research, and intervention design and evaluation for The Population Council, one of the premier international organizations conducting biomedical, public health, and social science research on population issues. Her areas of expertise include women’s roles and status, with a focus on intra-family dynamics, investments in children, and adolescence, especially vulnerable adolescent girls. Ms. Bruce has served as co-chair of the United Nation’s Expert Group Meeting on the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl-child and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1993, she received the Association for Women in Development’s bi-annual award for outstanding contributions to the field. A 1968 graduate of Harvard University, Bruce has written and lectured extensively on population policy, the quality of reproductive health services, adolescent girls’ status in the developing world, family and partnership dynamics, and women’s access to and control of resources inside and outside the household.
Susana Chávez
Director, PROMSEX
Susana Chávez is a public health specialist with expertise in sexual and reproductive health from a human and gender rights-based perspective. She is the Director of PROMSEX—El Centro de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos Sexuales y Reproductivos (Center for the Promotion and Defense of Sexual and Human Rights)—a Peruvian feminist organization that promotes and protects sexual and reproductive rights and health through policy reform with a focus on access to safe abortion. Ms. Chávez is a member of the Committee on Sexual and Reproductive Health of the Latin American Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics and the Advisory Committee for Global Doctors for Choice.
Ellen Chesler, Ph.D.
Distinguished Lecturer and Director, The Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Policy
Ellen Chesler is an internationally recognized scholar, author and activist in the field of women’s rights and is the Director of The Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative, a new public policy institute located at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has served as a senior fellow and program director at the Open Society Institute where she developed and executed the foundation’s multi-million dollar, global investments in reproductive health and women’s rights. Her books include Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (1992, 2007) and Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium (2005). Dr. Chesler has published numerous essays and articles in academic anthologies and in newspapers and periodicals. She chairs the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and serves on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and recently served as a U.S. public delegate to the 2009 meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Joel E. Cohen
Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations and head of the Laboratory of Populations, Rockefeller University and Columbia University, New York
Joel E. Cohen is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations and head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University, New York. At Columbia University, he holds appointments in the Earth Institute and in the Departments of International and Public Affairs; Earth and Environmental Sciences; and Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology. Cohen was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1989 in evolutionary and population biology and ecology, the American Philosophical Society in 1994 in the professions, arts, and affairs, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1997 in applied mathematical sciences. His research deals with the demography, ecology, epidemiology and social organization of human and non-human populations and with mathematical concepts useful in these fields. He earned doctorates in applied mathematics and population sciences and tropical public health from Harvard University. He has published 14 books (4 written as sole author, 4 co-authored, 5 edited, and one translated) and more than 350 papers and chapters. His most recent books are Educating All Children: A Global Agenda (co-edited with David E. Bloom and Martin Malin; MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007) and International Perspectives on the Goals of Universal Basic and Secondary Education (co-edited with Martin Malin; Routledge, New York, London, 2009). In March 1997, he was the first winner of the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award “for excellence in writing in the population sciences.” The Nordberg Prize recognized his book, How Many People Can the Earth Support? (W. W. Norton, New York, 1995), which has been translated into Japanese and Italian.
Roger-Mark De Souza
Director of Foundation and Corporate Relations, Sierra Club
Roger-Mark De Souza is a leading program developer in the field of population, health, and the environment. At the Sierra Club, the largest and oldest grassroots environmental organization in the United States, he plans, directs and implements the foundation and corporate fundraising program, supporting work at the local, regional, national, and international levels. Prior to coming to the Sierra Club, Mr. De Souza held leadership positions with the Population Reference Bureau, where he provided strategic planning, technical oversight, and outreach for programs in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the World Resources Institute and the Pan American Development Foundation. Mr. De Souza is a frequent speaker and author on population and environment linkages, sustainable development, and a range of demographic topics, especially Caribbean migration and development.
Robert Engelman
Vice President for Programs, Worldwatch Institute
Robert Engelman is an award-winning author and specialist in issues of population, reproductive health, global public health, climate change, and food security. Before joining Worldwatch, a globally focused environmental research organization, Mr. Engelman was vice president for research at Population Action International where he directed its program on population and the environment. His book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, won the Population Institute’s 2008 Global Media Award for Individual Reporting on Population. A former newspaper reporter specializing in politics, science, health, and the environment, Engelman has served on the faculty of Yale University as a visiting lecturer and was founding secretary of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Engelman’s writing has appeared in scientific and news media including Nature, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor.
Martha Farnsworth Riche
Lecturer and Consultant
Martha Farnsworth Riche consults, writes, and lectures on demographic changes and their effects on policies, programs, and products. She is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University, and an affiliate of the Cornell Population Center. Dr. Farnsworth Riche served as Director of the U.S. Census Bureau between 1994 and 1998. She was a founding editor of American Demographics, the nation’s first magazine devoted to interpreting demographic and economic statistics for corporate and public executives. In 1991, she became Director of Policy Studies for the Population Reference Bureau—a nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the demographic component of policy issues. There she was instrumental in developing “the Cairo Consensus,” a research-based conceptual framework for linking population, environment, and economic sustainability policies.
Lynne Gaffikin
Founder, Evaluation and Research Technologies for Health (EARTH) Inc.
Lynne Gaffikin has worked for over twenty-five years to improve maternal and child health in developing countries. Her expertise is the interface between human and wildlife health and, more recently, the broader concept of ecosystem health. Dr. Gaffikin received her doctorate of public health in 1988 before serving as senior advisor to the Kenya Ministry of Health in health information and planning systems. In 1991, she became Director of Research and Evaluation at a Johns Hopkins University affiliate and in 1996 founded her own organization, Evaluation and Research Technologies for Health (EARTH) Inc. to provide technical assistance to initiatives focusing on broader ecosystem health initiatives. To gain more insights from the field, Dr. Gaffikin undertook a PHI fellowship in Madagascar between 2004 – 2006, strengthening linkages between family planning, health and conservation initiatives and she serves as advisor to a number of “one health” oriented organizations including the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project.
Adrienne Germain
President, International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC)
Since the 1970s, Adrienne Germain has reshaped global policy and revolutionized the way the world views population policy and funding by making women’s sexual and reproductive rights and health central. Under her leadership, IWHC has created international policy innovations, led global advocacy for sexual and reproductive rights and health, and helped build local organizations in countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. She is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the editorial board of Reproductive Health Matters, the United Nations Development Program’s Expert Group on Gender and AIDS Responses, the International Health Partnership’s Monitoring and Evaluation Advisory Group, and the Commission on the Federal Leadership in U.S. Health and Medicine: Charting Future Directions at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. She served on the Millennium Development Goals Project Task Force on Child Mortality and Maternal Health; received an Honorary Doctorate from Bard College in 2001; and was named a Woman of Distinction by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York in 2005. She speaks and publishes extensively.
John Harte
Professor of Environmental Science, University of California, Berkeley
John Harte is an internationally-renowned scientist whose research interests include climate-ecosystem interactions, theoretical ecology, and environmental policy. He is the recipient of a Pew Scholars Prize in Conservation and the Environment, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2001 Leo Szilard prize from the American Physical Society, the 2004 UC Berkeley Graduate Mentorship Award, a Miller Professorship, and is a co-recipient of the 2006 George Polk award in journalism. He is an elected Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society. Dr. Harte has served on six National Academy of Sciences committees and has authored over 180 scientific publications, including six books. One of those books, “Consider a Spherical Cow,” is a widely used textbook on environmental modeling.
Priscilla Huang
Policy and Programs Director, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF)
Priscilla Huang oversees NAPAWF’s federal policy advocacy and reproductive justice, anti-trafficking and emerging immigrant rights programs. She was a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy fellow and the recipient of Choice USA’s 2007 “Courting Justice” Generation Award. She has worked on gender-based employment discrimination cases at Equal Rights Advocates, performed policy work at the National Abortion Federation, and worked as a child case manager at a transitional housing program for families with a history of homelessness and domestic violence. Ms. Huang currently sits on the board of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, and is an Advisory Board member of Law Students for Reproductive Justice and Raising Women’s Voices. She holds a law degree from American University, Washington College of Law, where she was a Public Interest/Public Service Scholar, and her writings have appeared in the Harvard Law and Public Policy Review, AlterNet, Feministing.com, RH Reality Check and other publications.
Frances Kissling
Visiting Scholar, Center for Bio-ethics at the University of Pennsylvania
Frances Kissling was the founding director of Catholics for Choice, a position she held for twenty-five years, and was once dubbed the “philosopher of the pro-choice movement” by Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman. As a 2008 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, her work combined advocacy and scholarship on issues at the intersection of religious ethics, reproduction and public policy. Ms. Kissling has testified before parliamentary committees in the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Parliament, Brazil, Portugal and Uruguay, and was a keynote speaker at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. She has published more than 120 articles in international journals, magazines, and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, The Nation, and The New York Times, and she is a regular columnist for Salon.com and Religion Dispatches.
Vicky Markham
Director, Center for Environment and Population
Vicky Markham has over twenty-five years experience in the fields of environment and population science, policy, and public outreach. She is founding director of the Center for Environment and Population, a project of the Tides Center, and started and directed the American Association for the Advancement of Science International Directorate’s Program on Population and Sustainable Development. Prior to that Ms. Markham directed World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International’s Population Program in Switzerland, was head of WWF’s delegation to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and a member of the WWF delegation to the UN International Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. Ms. Markham has broad program development, management and implementation experience, and is the author and editor of numerous books and publications, including Human Population, Biodiversity and Protected Areas: Science and Policy Issues; Water and Population Dynamics: Case Studies and Policy Implications; U.S. National Report on Population and the Environment and U.S. Population, Energy & Climate Change. She was Executive Editor of the AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment, winner of the American Library Association’s national award for “Outstanding Reference Source,” and co-editor of the Yale Bulletin-Human Population and Freshwater Resources: U.S. Cases and International Perspectives.
Laurie Mazur
Director of the Population Justice Project
Laurie Mazur, Director of the Population Justice Project, is an independent writer and consultant specializing in population, environment, and sexual and reproductive health and rights issues. Her clients have included the Environmental Grantmakers Association, the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative, the Rockefeller Foundation, Communications Consortium Media Center, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Ford Foundation. She is the editor of A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice & The Environmental Challenge (Island Press, 2009). She is also the editor of Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment (Island Press, 1994), a contributed volume that explored and articulated the Cairo consensus. With Michael Jacobson, she co-authored Marketing Madness: A Survival Guide to a Consumer Society (Westview Press, 1995), an indictment of excesses in advertising and marketing. Mazur founded and, for several years, directed the Funders Network on Population, Reproductive Health and Rights, an association of grantmakers that seeks to improve communication, foster collaboration, increase resources and enhance the overall effectiveness of grantmakers in this field.
Jim Martin-Schramm
Research Chair, Luther Center for Ethics and Public Life, Luther College
Jim Martin-Schramm is an ordained member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and holds a doctorate in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Most of his scholarship has focused on issues related to ethics and public policy. He is the author of Population Perils and the Churches’ Response and the co-author of Christian Environmental Ethics: A Case-Method Approach. His new book, Climate Justice: Ethics, Energy, and Public Policy, will be published in January 2010. Dr. Martin-Schramm attended the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 and subsequently he served as a member of the Population and Consumption task force of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development during the Clinton Administration.
Jacqueline Nolley Echegaray
Associate for International Programs, Moriah Fund
Jacqueline Nolley Echegaray is Associate for International Programs at the Moriah Fund, a family foundation based in Washington, DC. Promoting human rights, social justice, and grassroots empowerment are priorities across Moriah’s five program areas; in 2008, grants made by the foundation totaled $9.8 million. Ms. Nolley’s work at the foundation includes three program areas: Women’s Rights and Health, Guatemala, and International Development and Trade. In each, Moriah supports greater transparency and fairness in public policy, increased access to power and self-determination for marginalized populations, and the generation and promotion of community-based alternatives to one-size-fits-all, top-down policies and practices. Prior to joining Moriah in 2005, Ms. Nolley worked for two years in the Washington office of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a regional NGO dedicated to promoting human rights in the Americas through international litigation and advocacy. Ms. Nolley graduated from Northwestern University in 2003 with a BA in political science and history.
Rachel Nugent
Deputy Director for Global Health, Center for Global Development
Rachel Nugent has twenty-five years of experience as a development economist, managing and carrying out research and policy analysis in the fields of health, agriculture and the environment. She heads two major initiatives at the Center for Global Development (CGD): Demographics and Development in the 21st Century; and Drug Resistance and Global Health, and conducts research on other global health topics. Prior to joining CGD, Dr. Nugent worked at the Population Reference Bureau, the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Her publications cover a range of topics, from the cost-effectiveness of non-communicable disease interventions and health impacts of fiscal policies to impacts of microcredit on the environment in developing countries.
Kate M. Ott
Association Director, Religious Institute
Dr. Kate M. Ott is Associate Director of the Religious Institute, a multi-faith organization dedicated to advocating for sexual health, education, and justice in faith communities and society. Dr. Ott teaches ethics and sexuality related courses in university and seminary settings, and offers workshops for sexual and reproductive health organizations as well as congregations on sexuality issues in faith-based contexts. She currently serves as project director for the national “Sex and the Seminary: Preparing Ministers for Sexual Justice and Health” project. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, Dr. Ott is author of the second edition of A Time to Speak: Faith Communities and Sexuality Education, The Age of AIDS: A Guide for Faith-based Communities, and A Time to Be Born: A Guide for Faith Communities on Assisted Reproductive Technologies (forthcoming fall 2009). She is also the co-editor of the recently released Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Riotous Difference. She holds a doctorate in Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Suzanne Petroni
Senior Program Officer, The Summit Foundation
Suzanne Petroni is an expert on population and reproductive health and rights. She manages the Global Population and Youth Leadership program for the Summit Foundation, directing its resources to improve access by young people to sexual and reproductive health globally. Ms. Petroni serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Funders Network on Population, Reproductive Health and Rights, a network of some 60 grantmakers. Prior to joining the Foundation, Ms. Petroni worked for the U.S. State Department and worked on a range of global issues, including population, health, the environment, women and refugees. She served as the U.S. government’s “Officer in Charge” for the five-year review of the International Conference on Population and Development and worked closely with international and non-governmental organizations to support and monitor a wide range of reproductive health programs.
Sandra Postel
Director, Global Water Policy Project
Sandra Postel is a leading authority on international fresh water issues and is the founding director of the independent Global Water Policy Project. She is the author of several acclaimed books more than one hundred articles for both popular and scholarly publications. Her books include Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity, which has been translated into eight languages and was the basis for a 1997 PBS documentary, and of Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?, which has been selected for course use at more than 130 colleges and universities. Her article “Troubled Waters” was selected for inclusion in the 2001 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing. Ms. Postel is a fellow of the California-based Post Carbon Institute and an advisor to American Rivers. A 1995 Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment, she has been awarded two honorary Doctor of Science degrees and, in 2002, was named one of the “Scientific American 50″ for her contributions to water policy.
Shira Saperstein
Deputy Director and Program Director, Women's Rights and Reproductive Health, The Moriah Fund
Shira Saperstein is a researcher and advocate in the field of women’s rights and health. At the Moriah Fund, a private foundation operating in the United States and internationally, she oversees grants to organizations working on women’s rights and health, economic justice in the United States, international trade and development, human rights and social justice in Guatemala, and pluralism and equal rights in Israel. Moriah’s Women’s Rights program seeks to enable women and adolescents to manage their own fertility and protect and promote their sexual and reproductive health; and to transform the legal, political, economic and cultural structures that sustain gender discrimination and violence and that limit women’s full participation in society. Ms. Saperstein was the founding co-chair of the Funders’ Network for Population, Reproductive Rights and Health and currently serves on the boards of the Summit Foundation and the Management Assistance Group, on the Steering Committee of the Global Campaign for Microbicides, and as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.