Helen Epstein (co-director) is Visiting Professor of Global Health and Human Rights at Bard College. She has served as a public health consultant for various organizations including UNICEF, the World Bank, and Human Rights Watch. She also writes frequently about Africa, global health, and other subjects for the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and other publications and is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror (Columbia Global Reports 2017) and The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight against AIDS in Africa (Picador 2008). Some of her recent writings can be found here: https://easternafricatransparency.org. You can reach her at hepstein@bard.edu

Joshua Bardfield, MPH, (co-director) has spent his career in public service, working for a variety of domestic and international global health programs spanning the non-profit, civil-service, academic, and private sectors. He is Chief Operating Officer for Sky High Farm – a food justice initiative based in New York’s Hudson Valley – where he also served as a founding Board member. He previously served as Director in the Office of Institutional Support at Bard College, while also teaching courses in public health and infectious disease program design.

Prior to Bard, he spent over a decade as Knowledge Management Director for HEALTHQUAL, at the University of California San Francisco’s Institute for Global Health Sciences, a global HIV/AIDS initiative. He has researched and authored numerous academic publications focused on public health capacity building, maternal child health, and HIV in low- and middle-income countries. Josh earned his Master's Degree in Public Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from Bard College. You can reach him at jbardfield@bard.edu

Jonas Ecke has conducted extensive research on complex humanitarian crises in Liberia, Ghana, and South Sudan and currently, an Operational Research Coordinator, with the Mentor Initiative in Yemen. His applied work focuses on local perceptions of malaria, dengue fever, and, in the past, Covid-19 and Ebola, and how such views and lived realities could inform policy. His academic research addresses how geopolitics, as well as inequities, policies, and ideologies on the local and global levels, interact with such crises.

He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Purdue University (USA), which addressed displacement and post-return integration of Liberian refugees based on fieldwork in Ghana and Liberia. He writes for academic and journalistic sources. His writing appeared, among other outlets, in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Anthropology, Refugee Survey Quarterly, Global Policy Journal, Al Jazeera, and Salon.com. You can reach him at j_ecke@yahoo.com

Dr. Maha Nubani Husseini is an assistant professor of Public Health and Health Promotion at the faculty of the School of Public Health and the School of Medicine at Al-Quds University. She joined the faculty in 2002. She is currently the Chair of the Department of Public Health Nutrition and the head of the Scientific Research Club of the School of Public Health. She teaches many courses such as; Introduction to Public Health, Demography, Community Nutrition, Nutrition Education, and Research Methodology as well as supervising Master’s Thesis for master’s students in Public Health. You can reach her at mhusseini@staff.alquds.edu

Jia Kangbai was a William J. Fulbright (USA) and DAAD (Germany) Fellow with a Ph.D. degree in Medical Research – International Health from the Ludwig Maximillian University in Germany and a Masters in Public Health degree (Epidemiology and Biostatics option) from the University of Kentucky in the US. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine; and also teaches public health courses at the Njala University in Sierra Leone.

He has more than 43 scientific publications in high-impact journals and has also conducted several top-notch consultancies on issues ranging from environmental impact assessment to infectious diseases treatment and environmental health sanitation. He has been the Principal Investigator for dozens of international grants mostly on infectious diseases and treatment outcome studies in Sierra Leone. Jia is a member of several international and national scientific groupings including the International Society of Infectious Diseases (ISID), USA, Health Equity Group; World Federation of Public Health Association (WFPHA), Geneva, Switzerland, and the Sierra Leone Biomedical Health Research Group, Sierra Leone. You can contact him at jia.Kangbai@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

Elena Kim is a professor of Social Sciences at the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She is currently a visiting psychology professor at Bard College, New York. Elena’s teaching and research focus is on gender and international development, gender-based violence, and gender politics in Central Asia. More specifically, her ethnographies concerned practices such as child marriage, bride kidnapping, and foreign-funded crisis intervention in Kyrgyzstan.

Elena has served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environmental Program, and UN Women on matters of investigating intersections between gender, women, and violence. Her publications include chapters in several books and articles including the Child Indicators Research, Violence against Women, Journal of Gender Studies, Gender, Technology and Development, Central Asian Survey, Rural Society, and Women and Therapy. You can contact her at ekim@bard.edu

Elena Molchanova, MD-PhD in psychiatry, currently works as a Professor of Psychology in the Social Science Department at American University in Central Asia and as a scientific adviser of the Kyrgyz Psychiatric Association in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She has extensive training in Clinical and Counselling Psychology and had been involved in numerous international research projects, resulting in more than 80 publications and clinical manuals both for students and specialists in the mental health sphere. Her research interests include cultural representation of the symptoms of mental disorders, PTSD, and, recently, the consequences of the globalization of mental health. You can reach her at molchanova_e@auca.kg