BIO

Dr. Claudia S. Morrissey, MD, MPH, is an Advisory Board Member at AISE Consulting. Claudia has over 20 years’ experience in Leading maternal and Child health programmes and Sexual and reproductive health interventions across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia.

She is a former Senior Director at Save the Children, US., where she headed the Technical Leadership and Support unit for the Gates-funded Saving Newborn Lives project. Dr. Morrissey also worked at the World Health Organization in the Department of Gender, Women and Health. She has also held positions at the United States Agency for International Development (Senior Technical Advisor within the Division of Nutrition and Maternal Health), John Snow Incorporated (Senior Technical Advisor for an integrated family health project in Bangladesh and Deputy Director of the JSI Center for Women’s Health), and the University of Illinois (faculty member at the School of Public Health, Assistant Dean at the College of Medicine, and Deputy Director of the Center for Research on Women and Gender).

Prior to receiving her MD degree and board certification in Internal Medicine and practicing primary care medicine, Dr. Morrissey trained and worked as a community organizer in poor communities in both the US and in Mexico. She earned her MPH in health policy and management from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Morrissey’s life work has centred on increasing gender equity and improving women’s health and well-being both domestically and internationally. Her technical foci include maternal mortality and morbidity reduction, female genital mutilation eradication, breastfeeding promotion, and saving the lives of newborns.

BIO

Professor Maya Unnithan is a Social and Medical Anthropologist and Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies & Health (CORTH). Maya received a Ph.D (1991) in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and holds degrees in Sociology (MA) and Economics (BA Hons). She has taught at the University of Sussex since 1991.  Over the past thirty years Maya has been conducting research in India, with a particular focus on reproductive health and rights. Her long-term research in North-West India is on caste, kinship and gender inequalities further specializing in childbirth, infertility, sex selective abortion, surrogacy, migrant reproductive health, maternal health inequalities and sexual reproductive health rights. Her recent, ongoing work is on blood related conditions such as anaemia in India and on prenatal sex-selection among Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi families in the UK.  

Maya is currently the qualitative lead on a major Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) funded study of son preference and reproductive-decision making among British South Asian families. This research explores how gender values migrate across borders and shift over generations, and the implications this has for access to reproductive healthcare in the UK. From 2018-2020 Maya is co-ordinating a CORTH-led international network on Narrating Blood, along with Professor Janet Boddy (CIRCY, Sussex). The network aims to develop cross-cultural research and intervention into blood-related reproductive and adolescent health and care-economies in India, Bangladesh, Ghana and the UK. Linked to this network Maya is co-investigator on an ESRC standard grant on ‘Inherited blood disorders, globalisation and the promise of genomics: An Indian case-study’ (2016-2019). Previously Maya has been principle investigator of an ESRC funded research project on civil society understandings of human rights as applied to sexual, maternal and reproductive health in India (2009-2012).

 External to the University, Maya has served as a member of the WHO steering committee on the impact of human rights-based evidence on maternal and child health (2012-2013) and as a member of the WHO expert meeting on Law, Policy and Human Rights in the Safe Abortion Guidance (2018). Maya is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and member of Council. She is currently Chair of the Medical Anthropology Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 

BIO

Mr. Jürgen Menze is a Trilingual human rights and socio-economic development professional with 10+ years of international experience in multi- and bilateral development cooperation agencies in East Africa, South East Asia and Central America . Jürgen is currently a Disability Inclusion Officer in the Gender, Equality and Diversity Branch of the ILO. His responsibilities include the mainstreaming of disability issues into ILO programming, development cooperation projects, internal policies and practices as well as the development and dissemination of disability-specific knowledge products. He forms part of the Secretariat of the ILO Global Business and Disability Network, too.

Jürgen has worked for the ILO both in its headquarters and its office for Central America. Before he joined the ILO, he worked for the Austrian federation of blind people, the Western Pacific Regional Office of the WHO in the Philippines as well as for GIZ in Kenya.

BIO

Javier Ocampo is a Trade Policy Analyst in the Agriculture and Commodities Division at the World Trade Organization. He has worked in a variety of areas including the implementation of the Agreement on Agriculture, the Agreement on the application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures as well as agriculture negotiations. Prior to working at the WTO he has worked for the food safety departments of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Javier also has served as a consultant for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.

Javier completed his MSc in food safety at the Wageningen University in the Netherlands; and has a BA in international trade of agricultural products from the Agricultural University of Chapingo in Mexico. He has contributed to various WTO reports including the trade monitoring reports covering developments in WTO members' agricultural policies.