Kim Rygiel is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is Co-Director of Laurier’s International Migration Research Centre (IMRC) and Co–Chief Editor of Citizenship Studies. Her research examines critical migration, citizenship, and border politics, including migrant- and refugee-led social movements and solidarity struggles for migrant rights in North America and Europe. Rygiel earned a PhD from York University (2006) and an MA from Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (1996). She held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University and previously taught at Trent University. She is the author of Globalizing Citizenship (UBC Press, 2010), co-winner of the 2011 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award, and co-author of Migration, Cosmopolitanism and Civil Society (Routledge, 2024) and The Precarious Lives of Syrians (MQUP, 2021). Her work appears in leading journals across migration and political sociology.

Lara Gautier is an Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal School of Public Health (Department of Management, Evaluation and Health Policy). She is affiliated with the CIUSSS Nord-de-l’île-de-Montréal Research Centre and the Centre de recherche en santé publique (CReSP). Her research focuses on program and health services evaluation, participatory and qualitative methods, health systems analysis, and the social determinants of health, with particular attention to immigration and migration in Canada, France, Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Gautier holds graduate training in political science (Sciences Po Rennes) and health economics and social policy (Université Paris-Dauphine–PSL), and completed dual doctorates in public health (Université de Montréal) and economics (Université de Paris) in 2019. She teaches evaluation methods and supervises graduate research on migrant health and equity-focused public policy.

Felicia Clement is a PhD candidate in the Global Governance program at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research examines how trust and mistrust shape refugees’ journeys and integration, focusing on Syrian refugees resettled in advanced economies through UNHCR pathways. Building on her MA in Global Governance (2020), she has conducted primary research with privately sponsored Syrian refugees in the Kitchener–Waterloo region, centring refugees’ narratives to better understand how generalized and institutional trust influence decision-making in times of crisis and interactions with resettlement workers and host communities. Her work aims to generate practical insights for strengthening resettlement policy and practice. Felicia graduated with High Distinction from Wilfrid Laurier University in Honours Anthropology and Global Studies. She has completed human rights-focused research internships, including with the European Training and Research Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (University of Graz) and the Human Rights Advocacy Centre in Ghana.

Monica Nivelo is the Coordinator of the Postgraduate Family Medicine Specialist Program in the Faculty of Medicine at the Universidad de Chile. Her work sits at the intersection of primary care training, health systems improvement, and equity-oriented care, with contributions spanning program quality and accreditation as well as broader public health and ageing-related policy discussions. Her scholarly outputs include work on the accreditation process for family medicine specialist training in Chile and research on cardiovascular risk and mortality in Chilean adults. She has also contributed to interdisciplinary scholarship on ageing, gender, and public policy, as well as to discussions on quaternary prevention—an approach that emphasizes ethics, efficiency, and person-centred care while avoiding unnecessary medical interventions. She has been involved in international conversations on learning health systems and dementia care to strengthen resilience and advance health equity.

Lana Gonzalez Balyk is a PhD Candidate in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo. Her research draws upon critical migration and border studies, emphasizing gendered perspectives and experiences. Using an intersectional feminist lens, her dissertation examines how migration governance policies and practices shape the lived experiences and community-building efforts of migrant women in Portugal. Lana has published co-authored work in Forced Migration Review, the Journal of Refugee Studies, and Studies in Social Justice. Her doctoral research is supported by a BSIA fellowship and consecutive Ontario Graduate Scholarships (2022–2025). She is also a research assistant on a multi-year SSHRC-funded project in Cyprus with Drs. Ilcan and Daǧtaș, and has held roles at the University of Waterloo supporting conference coordination and the Migration, Mobilities and Social Policy (MMSP) Research Cluster. Previously, Lana worked with Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board, served as a refugee case manager, and taught ESL, with earlier experience in program management and research roles in Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Annalee Coakley is Medical Director of the MOSAIC Refugee Clinic in Calgary, Alberta, providing trauma-informed, culturally responsive care for refugees and newcomer populations. Her expertise includes immigrant and refugee health in the Canadian health-care system, social determinants of health, mental health, and settlement supports, with focus on asylum seekers, temporary foreign workers, people with disabilities, rural newcomers, women, and children and youth. Dr. Coakley earned her MD from Queen’s University (2001) and completed Family Medicine residency (2003). After practicing emergency and outpatient family medicine across Ontario and Nova Scotia, including remote communities, she moved to Calgary in 2008. She joined MOSAIC in 2009 and became Medical Director in 2012, while also practicing at the East Calgary Family Care Clinic. She advocates for access to care for uninsured and precariously insured patients, supports community responses to newcomer arrivals, and teaches immigrant and refugee health at the University of Calgary.

Professor Patrick Bodenmann is Vice-Dean for Teaching and Diversity in the Faculty of Biology and Medicine and holds the Chair of Population Medicine at the University of Lausanne (since 2016). At Unisanté, he is co–medical director and heads the Department of Vulnerabilities and Social Medicine, which provides care for disadvantaged populations in the fields of asylum, clandestinity prisons, the emergency sector, and those who give up care due to financial reasons. His research and clinical work focus on equity of care and health equity for people in vulnerable situations. Professor Bodenmann has developed undergraduate teaching across the medical curriculum on community and social determinants of health, precariousness, racism, and transcultural clinical skills. He is editor of Vulnerabilities, Equity and Health (2018) and the second edition, Vulnerabilities, Diversities and Equity in Health (2022), published by Éditions Médecine et Hygiène.

Alena Kamenshchikova (MS, MA, PhD) is a public health researcher based in Maastricht, Netherlands, with a background in social sciences and political philosophy. Her work focuses on infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance, primarily using qualitative approaches such as ethnography and discourse analysis. Her research interests include knowledge production practices, multi-species communication, and transdisciplinary methodologies. She has experience working in international and transdisciplinary teams in Russia and the Netherlands. Alena also contributes to teaching in bachelor’s and master’s programs in European Public Health and Global Health, and supervises Master’s thesis projects in Global Health.

Maria van den Muijsenbergh is the chair of the EFPC, the European Forum for Primary Care, and an active member of its working group on migrant and refugee health. Working for many years as a General Practitioner for vulnerable groups like refugees and other migrants, low literate and homeless patients, researcher at the department of Primary and Community care at Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and at Pharos, the Dutch Centre of expertise on health disparities. Her chair on “health disparities and person-centred integrated primary care” focuses on the possible role of primary care in reducing existing socio-economic and ethnic health disparities and on how healthcare can best be tailored to the needs of vulnerable patients, such as migrants or persons with limited health literacy. She is involved in national and international community-oriented research projects and has ample experience in (participatory) research with vulnerable groups, with a focus on refugees and other migrants.  external advisor for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and founder and chair for 10 years of the WONCA special interest group on migrant care and international health, and member of the NAPCRG special interest group on refugee and immigrant healthcare. She was one of the founders of Praktijk Buitenzorg – a practice for outreaching social-medical care for homeless people, (undocumented) migrants and other uninsured persons in Nijmegen, where she still practices as a GP once a week.

Laura Nellums is Professor of Global Health and Assistant Dean of Education, College of Population Health, was born and grew up in Albuquerque,  New Mexico.  She obtained her BA in Spanish and International Relations from Wellesley College, followed by her MSc in Medical Anthropology (University of Oxford), and PhD in Public Health (King’s College London).  She is the past chair of the American Public Health Association Caucus for Refugee and Immigrant Health. Expertise in migration and health, with a focus on forced migration and undocumented migrants. Research areas include infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance, women’s health, mental health, and wider disparities in access to care and health outcomes in migrant and ethnic minority communities. Methodological expertise in qualitative and quantitative methods; systematic reviews. Key interests in community engagement in research, participatory research methods, cross-language methods, social inequalities, economic inequalities, stigma and discrimination, and social justice issues led me to direct my focus towards migrant and refugee studies.

Dr. Stauffer is formally trained in public health, internal medicine, pediatrics, pediatric emergency medicine, tropical medicine, and infectious diseases. He recently served as Executive Site Director for Consortium AMPATH-Kenya and as the Stephanie and Craig Brater Endowed Professor at the Indiana University Center for Global Health. An expert in refugee health and travel/tropical medicine, he works across clinical care, surveillance, and policy with a focus on how human mobility affects health. From 2005–2019, he served as Lead Medical Advisor to the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, leading U.S. refugee health screening guidelines and contributing to the CDC Yellow Book. He founded the UMN/CDC Global Health Course and initiated the UMN Global Medicine Program (2005). He has led major migration health initiatives, advised WHO, ECDC, and multiple governments, and published over 150 peer-reviewed articles.

Anne Jachmann is a physician, researcher, and lecturer specializing in migration and refugee health. She is committed to improving equitable access to safe, high-quality healthcare by identifying and addressing barriers that migrants and refugees face. Recognizing that traditional medical training often does not fully prepare clinicians to care for people affected by migration and crisis, she has expanded her own competencies in this field and works to develop and implement new teaching concepts and courses for medical students and healthcare professionals. Her approach emphasizes evidence-informed prevention and treatment, alongside clinical care, to better understand migrants’ health needs and the obstacles to accessing services. Through research, education, and public health-oriented collaboration, she aims to support locally responsive strategies that promote the health and wellbeing of migrant and refugee communities.

Sarah Clarke is the Executive Director of the Society of Refugee Healthcare Providers, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to improving health outcomes for refugees and newcomers through education and the dissemination of best practices. In this role, she co-organizes the International Refugee & Migration Health Conference, the largest refugee health conference, which brings together 1,000+ attendees each year. Sarah is also a global health consultant with over a decade of public health experience across the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mali. Her expertise includes refugee health and resettlement, qualitative research, and nonprofit leadership, strategy, evaluation, and communications. Her previous roles include Technical Advisor for Health Promotion at the International Rescue Committee, Program Manager for Refugee Health YYC at the University of Calgary, and Monitoring, Evaluation, and Communications Officer at C3 Collaborating for Health. She holds an MSPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Certificate in Global Mental Health: Trauma & Recovery from the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma.

After over a decade immersed in South Africa’s healthcare sector as a medical doctor, Dr. Robyn Gouweloos (Hyman) has transitioned to a non-clinical role as Junior Coordinator at the European Forum for Primary Care in Utrecht, The Netherlands. In this capacity, she supports the forum by planning and organizing activities, projects, and conferences, as well as fostering and maintaining partnerships. Her responsibilities also include managing the Forum’s professional presence in a variety of ongoing EU-funded projects, ensuring Primary Care principles are integrated into new policies and research.

Michaela Hynie is a professor in the Department of Psychology and resident faculty in the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University. Dr. Hynie conducts interdisciplinary multi-method community-based research on social determinants of health with communities experiencing social conflict, social exclusion, or forced displacement and migration. This work includes the development and evaluation of social, institutional and/or policy interventions that can improve mental health and well-being. Funded by CIHR, Grand Challenges Canada, IDRC, and SSHRC, her work has been situated in Canada, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Kenya Liberia, Nepal, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and South Africa. Recent projects include research on maternal mental health in Rwanda; access to health care for refugees in Canada and in South Africa; and the relationship between state refugee policies and health and well-being in Canada, Germany and South Africa. Dr. Hynie is the past president of the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.

Gabriel Fabreau is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Community Health Sciences, and an active member of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary. He co-founded and co-leads the Refugee Health YYC research, innovation and education platform. Clinically, he has worked as an embedded Internal Medicine specialist at the Mosaic Refugee Health Clinic (MRHC) since 2014, as well as an inpatient physician at the Peter Lougheed Centre. He completed an MPH in Clinical Effectiveness at the Harvard School of Public Health and an academic fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. His research interests include health services, clinical and public health research with a focus on the health of recently arrived refugees, socially vulnerable populations and complex chronic disease.

Charlotte is Senior Lecturer in Education and Sociology with specialisms in gender and sexuality, higher education and feminist theory and pedagogies. She joined the University of Portsmouth in January 2020. Research interests relate to higher education cultures and gendered lives across the domains of work, care, intimacy and education. She is committed to inclusive, social justice orientated practices and pedagogies in higher education. She is a member of the Sociology and Social Theory, Higher Education and Women and Gender Studies research groups at the university and, with Dr Ann Emerson, leads the Education, Social Justice and Transformation research group. Charlotte is currently serving as an external examiner on Masters Education programmes at the University of Glasgow and University of York. She is also a School Governor with a focus on inclusion at a local Primary School. She previously taught across Sociology, Education and Gender Studies at the University of Sussex (2014 – 2020) where she completed a PhD Gender Studies in the Department of Sociology in 2014.

Lynne Griffiths-Fulton is a humanitarian leader with over 25 years of experience in the non-profit, government, and NGO sectors, with expertise in program development and evaluation, project management, policy analysis, and advocacy. Lynne spent 17 years in senior leadership at Reception House Waterloo Region, serving the local refugee community and supporting the settlement and integration of thousands of newcomers. During the Syrian and Afghan refugee resettlement initiatives, she played a pivotal role in building cross-sector partnerships among health providers, settlement agencies, and community institutions to improve access to services for newly arrived refugees. She was also instrumental in establishing Waterloo Region’s first dedicated refugee health clinic, helping to develop a coordinated model of care addressing the complex physical, mental health, and social needs of refugees arriving through Canada’s resettlement program. Lynne holds an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

Hadi Rasooli is a board-certified psychiatrist from Afghanistan with more than a decade of experience, specializing in trauma and anxiety disorders. He has held academic appointments as an Assistant Professor at Herat University, Ghalib University, and Eshraq University, contributing to psychiatry through teaching and research focused on psychosocial wellbeing in conflict-affected settings. Dr. Rasooli has also served as a Senior Technical Advisor with Wilfrid Laurier University and the City University of New York, where he helped develop a Bachelor of Counseling program at Herat and Kabul Universities. In this role, he supported curriculum design, teaching materials, faculty development, and program quality, and contributed to establishing a University Counseling Center at Kabul University. Clinically, he has worked as a consultant psychiatrist at Sehat-e-Sabz Hospital and as a mental health specialist trainer with the International Assistance Mission, advancing mental health care and capacity building in Afghanistan and beyond.

Maissaa Almustafa is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at Glendon College, York University, working on Whole-COMM, a Horizon 2020–funded project on migrant integration in Europe and Canada. She is also an Adjunct Professor in Political Science at the University of Waterloo, teaching courses on Middle East politics and global governance. Dr. Almustafa earned her PhD in Global Governance and an MA in International Public Policy at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research examines the lived experiences of refugees and the politics of marginalization in the Middle East and in diasporic communities in Europe and Canada. Her award-winning doctoral study on Syrian displacement analyzed refugee protection governance and the interplay between exclusionary border practices and refugees’ agency, with findings published in leading journals.

Anna Triandafyllidou holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, at Toronto Metropolitan University, and is the Founding Director of TMU’s newly launched Global Migration Institute. She is also the Scientific Director of a $98.4 mln multi-University and multi-partner Program entitled Bridging Divides funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. Prior to joining TMU in 2019, she held a Robert Schuman Chair at the European University Institute, in Florence, Italy. Anna chairs the Metropolis International Migration Network and is Editor of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. In 2021, the University of Liège awarded Triandafyllidou a doctorate honoris causa in recognition of her contribution to migration scholarship. Anna has published widely in the field of migration governance, migration and national identity, and migrant integration in comparative perspectives. She was part of the OECD Network of International Migration Experts from 2010 to 2018 and has provided expert opinions for the Senate of Canada, Immigration Refuges and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the European Parliament and the European Commission.

Jessica Kwik is the Director of the Peel Newcomer Strategy Group (PNSG), the local immigration partnership in Peel region based at United Way Greater Toronto in Ontario, Canada. Local partners collectively support newcomer settlement, refugee resettlement and inclusion through: research and service integration, community consultation and coordinated planning. Previously, Jessica supported the development of equity approaches at Peel Public Health and as part of the COVID-19 response; and, brings background in applied health sciences, environmental studies and mental health promotion.

Tara Bedard is the Executive Director of the Waterloo Region Immigration Partnership where she provides strategic leadership to local migration governance and the engagement of public, private and non-profit organizations in building an inclusive community where immigrants and refugees thrive and contribute to shared prosperity. Previously, she was a senior leader with the European Roma Rights Centre, an international public interest law organization where she built a renowned international policy and research program that contributed to significant legal precedents, policy transformation, service innovation and infrastructure investment benefiting Europe’s most marginalized population. She has extensive experience working from municipal to intergovernmental levels. She actively volunteers on several boards of directors and recently published two comprehensive, co-edited volumes Social Resilience and International Migration in the Canadian City and Social Resilience and the Urban Migrant Experience.