Advisory Board

Medha Devare is Senior Research Fellow and Module Lead of CGIAR’s Big Data Platform, based at the CGIAR System Office in Montpellier, France. She is a Cropping Systems Agronomist and Microbial Ecologist with significant experience working on and leading projects addressing food and nutritional security and sustainable resource management in South Asia. Medha also has substantial experience in data and knowledge management, including ontologies, vocabularies, and other semantic web-related tools. Before she moved to France, Medha was Scientist and Knowledge Management Specialist at CGIAR’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), based in Kathmandu, Nepal. In Nepal, she led the USAID-funded Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia in Nepal (CSISA-NP) to increase productivity and profitability of small farmers, and the sustainability of farming systems in western Nepal. Prior to her position at CIMMYT, Medha was a Life Sciences Librarian and Bioinformatics Specialist at Cornell University, where she also received her PhD and conducted post-doctoral research.

Dr. Carl Hensman is a Senior Program Officer in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

At the Gates Foundation, Carl operates broadly across investments in the WSH Program Strategy, but specializes in technology discovery and development for the Transformative Technology and Commercialization initiative. Carl also spends time building cross-strategy relationships with internal and external partners and is especially interested in bringing a-typical knowledge experts into the sanitation sector.

Before joining the foundation in 2012, Carl was an Energy Program Manager for King County, WA, focusing on resource recovery in the Wastewater Treatment Division; Chief Technology Officer for Asemblon a start-up developing energy storage technology; Chief Scientist/Engineer, Principal, and Director on the Board of Frontier Geosciences Inc. where he focused on remediation and mitigation of contamination from energy producing industries. Carl has been an employee for DowElanco, Exxon and British Coal.

Carl was educated at the University of Strathclyde in Industrial Chemistry and holds postgraduate degrees in Process Analytical Chemistry and Process Control and Analytical Chemistry. He received his doctorate from New Mexico State University in Analytical Chemistry and spent two and a half years as a postdoctoral fellow at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi is the Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), a position she was recently appointed to after serving as the Center’s Director of Research. The Center is a premier African institution conducting policy relevant research on population, health and development and translating that research into evidence for policy decisions and actions. Catherine is charged with overseeing the work of three programmatic departments conducting research, supporting the translation of research into evidence and facilitating its uptake by decision makers, and programs to strengthen the capacity the next generation of African research leaders.

Catherine is an accomplished researcher and leader who has been a principal investigator on more than 20 projects. She has more than ten years of experience conducting research in Africa, specifically in the epidemiology of non-communicable diseases (NCD) and their interface with the health care delivery system. Catherine has passion for evidence playing a role in decision making and has worked with decision makers at different levels to make evidence count is their decisions whenever possible.

Catherine is an Alumna of the University of Heidelberg having completed her doctoral studies in Epidemiology in the then Department of Tropical Hygiene and Public Health, under the auspices of the Graduertienkolleg 793 in April 2006. She also obtained a Master of Science degree in Community Health and Health Management in 2002 from the same department. Prior to her graduate studies, Catherine studied Medicine at Makerere University, Kampala after which she worked as a medical officer at Rushere hospital, a rural health facility in Western Uganda for three years. Before and during her graduate studies, she was an Assistant Lecturer and later a Lecturer in the Department of Community Health at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology.

Claude Pirmez is a Senior Researcher at Fiocruz and is the Program Manager of Grand Challenges Brazil. Claude began working at Fiocruz in 1986 and has held the following positions: Head of the Laboratory of Immunopathology (1992–2000), Head of the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (2000–2003), Vice Director of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (2005–2008) and Vice President of Research & Reference Laboratories (2009–2013). Her scientific experience is mainly in the eld of immunopathology of infectious diseases, focused on leishmaniasis. She has published more than 70 papers in the field. She is actually the Editor in Chief of the centenary biomedical journal, the Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz.

Trained as a medical doctor and public health professional, Dr. Jean Christophe’s work has been in clinical practice, public health advocacy and research. He is currently a Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He leads the demographic dividend work of the institute and co-chairs the Scientific and Demographic Dividend Subcommittees of the International Conference on Family Planning, which happens every two years, bringing together more than 4000 professionals working in the domain of family planning and population health. In the past, he has worked as a clinician in different hospitals in Rwanda before joining the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to pursue his Master of Public Health as a Sommer Scholar. He is one of the first 40 awardees of the 120 Under 40: The New Generation of Family Planning Leaders recognizing his public health practice work through the Healthy People Rwanda, a local non-profit that he founded, and the International Youth Alliance for Family Planning that he co-founded. His current work focuses on promoting evidence-based public health practice and youth leadership in family planning and reproductive health in the developing world, particularly the integration of men in family planning and the demographic dividend concept in public health research, planning and practice.

Carly is Program Manager for Open Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Throughout her career, she has been an open science advocate working at the interface of researchers and those who support them. Before CZI, Carly held positions at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the California Digital Library. Carly received a BA in Marine Science and a PhD in Biological Oceanography from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program. For more information, please see this website.

Dr Vasee Moorthy is an internal medicine/infectious disease subspecialty physician with a PhD in malaria immunology. He spent 5 years working as a physician scientist in sub-Saharan Africa (Kwazulu/Natal, South Africa and The Gambia), 2 years at PATH in Bethesda, MD and then had a post as a clinical lecturer at the University of Oxford, UK. Since 2008 he has worked in positions of increasing responsibility at WHO. During this time he has coordinated consultations that have led to WHOs policy on malaria vaccines, the WHO position on public disclosure of results from clinical trials and is a keen supporter of facilitating access to information be it registries of research studies, methods, summary results or underlying data. His current role includes support to the WHO network of clinical trial registries (ICTRP) and the team leading development of the Global Observatory on Health R&D. He is also a member of the R&D Blueprint team for action to prevent epidemics, following his work coordinating phase 1-2 Ebola vaccine trials globally in 2014-2015.