GAMA Advisory Group members, UN representatives and WHO Secretariat

Peter Azzopardi has over 10 years of experience in adolescent health programming, clinical medicine and research. Dr. Azzopardi is an adolescent physician by training and has worked across many settings in the Western Pacific region. He also recently completed his PhD, a project where he described the health and wellbeing of Indigenous adolescents living in Australia using national survey data, hospital data and mortality data.

Dr. Azzopardi contributed to the analysis of global burden of disease data for 188 countries to describe key health issues for adolescent health and wellbeing at a national, regional and global level for the Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing. He has extensive experience in supporting and advising Government and non-government organizations around population health research, specifically in the areas of adolescent health.

Dr. Azzopardi is a member of the consortium advisory group for the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, Australia’s largest and longest running birth cohort. He is also a member of the Global Burden of Disease collaborator network. In this role, Dr. Azzopardi has provided input and co-authored forthcoming publications arising from the Global Burden of Disease 2015 study.

Mariame Guèye Ba is Professor of Gynecology-Obstetrics and Researcher in the Faculty of Medicine, Pharmacy and Odontology at the University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) of Dakar, Sénégal. She holds a Medical Doctor and Gynecology-Obstetrics degree, a Health Services Management degree as well as a Master‘s in Public Health and a PhD in Educational Sciences Psychopedagogy.

Professsor Ba has over 30 years of experience in clinical practice, and in teaching, training, research and management as Faculty Member in UCAD since 1991. She has led also the Gynecology-Obstetrics Service in Abass Ndao Hospital Center (2011-2013), and the Maternal and Newborn Health Division in the Ministry of Health and Social Actions in Sénégal (2013-2018). She has been involved in many studies on adolescent pregnancy and childbirth, family planning and in promoting adolescent health. She has performed the evaluation of the first suburbs implemented adolescent health council centers in Sénégal, the first implemented school-based reproductive health project in Dakar, conducted the WHO Afrique ADO Reproductive Health Project as Principal Investigator in Sénégal and Health Intervention Advisor in the operation-research Adolescent Reproductive Health Project. Since 2008, Professor Ba is leading the training program for the adolescent health module in the Summer International Francophone University in Health Promotion.

Lucy is Global Focal Point for SDG 3 in the UN Major Group for Children and Youth (UN MGCY), and helps coordinate youth participation in health policy development, monitoring and review. She also chairs the Commonwealth Youth Health Network which partners with the Commonwealth Secretariat and member countries in achieving health-related development goals, with a particular focus on the needs of young people.

A public health specialist by background, Lucy has worked extensively in both policy and practice. Her experience includes developing strategic approaches to improve community health and well-being in London, coordinating international work on adolescent health and NCD risk factors, and working to address health system strengthening challenges across multiple countries and contexts. As a youth health advocate, she has also been actively involved in negotiating for health and well- being within the 2030 Agenda and related UN processes - particularly around NCDs and universal health coverage.

She is currently employed as the Principal Public Health Specialist for Public Health Wales where she is leading work on the health of vulnerable groups, especially migrants, and supporting implementation of the Future Generations Act which enshrines sustainable development in law and seeks to tackle Wales’ complex issues, for example the links between intergenerational poverty, disadvantage, economic inactivity and health inequalities.

Emmanuel Adebayo has been involved in adolescent health and development for more than ten years. He has experiences in project development, planning, implementation and evaluation. He’s education and experiences have harnessed his skills in management of public health programs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Human Anatomy, a Masters in Public Health (MPH) from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria, and a doctoral degree in Adolescent health from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.

He has international certificates in Adolescent health, Monitoring and Evaluation of Public Health programs and a certification in Project management among several others. He is a fellow of the Sexuality Leadership Development Fellowship Programme. He has conducted several researches, published papers in both local and international journals and has presented papers at both local and international scientific conferences.

Emmanuel teaches child and adolescent development and health at the child development and family studies unit of the Home science and management department, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria. He’s devoted and committed to the development of the African Youth.

Krishna Bose, PhD, MPH, is a public health scientist and researcher with extensive experience in adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health with a focus on monitoring and evaluation of ‘real world’ program experience in low- and middle-income countries.

Dr. Bose’s current assignment as the Senior Technical Advisor for AYSRH for The Challenge Initiative is focused on leading the Technical Assistance for establishing AYSRH programs in Urban Settings in 7 countries in Africa and in India, to facilitate improved access to and uptake of contraception among Adolescents and Youth in deprived Urban Communities.

Prior to re-joining Johns Hopkins University at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr Bose served for two decades as a Scientist and subsequently International Consultant in the WHO Adolescent and Youth Health and Development Program. There, her work included supporting national governments, local UN offices, NGO partners and Adolescents and Youth, in implementing strategic approaches to programming.

Prior to joining WHO, Dr Bose served at UNICEF Headquarters as a Senior Evaluation Officer in the Office of Evaluation, Policy and Planning, and before that as a US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Epidemic Intelligence Services (EIS) Officer, where her focus was on smoking and other adolescent risk behaviors. Dr Bose’s basic training includes a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Carnegie-Mellon University and an MPH from the University of Michigan and serving as a Child Survival Fellow with Johns Hopkins University’s Department of International Health and the Institute for International Programs, posted with CARE India.

Dr. Saeed Dastgiri is a faculty member in the department of family and community medicine in Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Iran. As a senior public health scientist, he has been closely involved with the works of adolescent health over the past few years under a community campaign programme for family health history in young population in the northwest of the country. He established/led the first registry of congenital anomalies in Iran in 2002. Some control and preventive measures are also implemented since 2011 for children under 12 in this programme as they need. In addition, Dr. Saeed Dastgiri is a founding/steering committee member of AZAR Cohort. Since 2014, this epidemiological programme has registered 14933 individuals in the area to follow up on chronic diseases.

With an academic background in the social sciences, economics and public policy, I was fortunate to work at the cutting edge of developments in the field of adolescent health for over 30 years while working at the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva. During this time, I was involved in policy development for WHO and Member States; nurtured strategic partnerships with other UN organizations, NGOs and academic institutions for the development of technical guidelines, research agendas and programme support tools, including those related to measurement; and provided technical support to countries and partners in all regions of the world, consistently championing the need for better measurement for the furtherance of adolescent health. From 2015-2017, I was employed by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, based at the Africa Health Research Institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I am now an independent consultant on adolescent health, predominantly with country focused assignments.

Ann Hagell is Research Lead at the Association for Young People's Health in London, and a chartered psychologist by background. She has a specific interest in young people, currently working in the charity sector in the UK to raise the profile of young people's health needs and youth friendly health services. She has a masters in public health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a PhD from London's Institute of Psychiatry, and was a Fulbright Scholar in the USA. She has published widely on adolescent health and has worked with a range of funders, think tanks and universities in the field of adolescent development. She is passionate about communicating research evidence in a user-friendly way to improve policy & practice. Ann is also Consulting Editor for the international Journal of Adolescence and an ad-hoc reviewer for a range of journals and funders in the field.

Dr. Jo Inchley is public health researcher, specialising in child and adolescent health and health promotion. Her research interests include health inequalities, gender and health, social determinants of health, developmental perspectives and international comparisons. She has published widely in the areas of school health, mental health, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, obesity, sleep, alcohol use, spiritual health and chronic conditions. In February 2019, she took up post as Reader at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow where she leads a programme of research on school health. She has been involved in international work on adolescent health for over 20 years and is currently elected International Coordinator of the Health Behaviour of School-aged Children (HBSC) WHO Collaborative Cross-national study, the largest study of adolescent health and wellbeing in Europe.

From 1987-2017, Dr. Laura Kann worked in the Division of Adolescent and School Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where she was a Senior Scientist and Chief of the School-Based Surveillance Branch. She managed four large surveillance systems (the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, the School Health Policies and Practices Study, School Health Profiles, and the Global School-based Student Health Survey) and a staff of 20 scientists. In addition, Dr. Kann authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications and made more than 160 national and international peer-reviewed presentations. She is now an independent consultant and resides in Princeton, Illinois. Her primary area of interest is domestic and international school-based survey research.

Dr. Sunil Mehra, MD, is a practicing pediatrician with more than 35 years’ experience and a keen interest for the Health and Development sector. He is a Founder and Executive Director of MAMTA-HIMC. Under his leadership, the institution has grown into a global institution. As a committed health and development professional, he has a strong interest in advocacy, training, evaluation and research in the field of adolescent health and development, with a focus on RMNCAH, SRHR, HIV/AIDS & TB and Non-communicable diseases. He has been part of Technical Steering Committee on Child and Adolescent Health (CAH), WHO, Geneva (2003–05), the Strategic Technical Advisory Committee for HIV and AIDS department, WHO Geneva (2007-09), the International Prevention Reference Group of UNAIDS (2010-11), and, the Regional Expert Group on Pre-conception Care for SEARO, WHO (2013). He has been the convener and professional designate of Working Group on Gender, Adolescent, Youth and Children for National AIDS Control Programme, Phase – III (2006) and National RKSK program for adolescents. He was also selected to be the Co-Chair of 3rd Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (APCRSHR), (2009) Hyderabad, India. He has authored and edited various research and working papers, reports, and books on adolescents and young people’s reproductive and sexual health and rights and HIV.

Elizabeth Saewyc, PhD, RN, FSAHM, FCAHS, FAAN, is Professor and the Director of the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada; she also leads the multidisciplinary Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre. She is a Fellow in the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and in the American Academy of Nursing. For over 20 years, her research and public health nursing practice has focused on how stigma, violence, and trauma influence adolescents’ health and coping behaviours, and what protective factors can foster resilience and improve health equity for marginalized young people, especially LGBTQ youth, homeless, runaway and street-involved adolescents, sexually abused/exploited teens, immigrants and refugees, and Indigenous young people in several countries.

Dr. Kun Tang is an Assistant Professor at the Research Center for Public Health, Tsinghua University. He has also served in the Chinese Delegation to the World Health Assembly and WHO Executive Board since 2014. He is a global health researcher and practitioner, with a research interest of global health policy, development aid for health, regional health issues and maternal and child health. Prior to his current functions, Dr. Tang was the Founding Director of the China Youth Network, a first-ever youth NGO working to promote sexual and reproductive health and rights in China. He is the National Standing Council Member of the China Family Planning Association, and the Governing Council Member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Dr. Tang has worked on a number of global health programs in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Congo, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea. He obtained his M.B.B.S. from Peking University, a Master’s in Global Health and Population from Harvard University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.

Dr. Alison Morgan, MBBS DTM&H DRANZCOG PhD, is currently the Head of the Maternal, Sexual and Reproductive Health Unit at the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne and is one of the co-chairs of the Mothers and Newborns Indicators for Tracking Outcomes and Results (MoNITOR) on which GAMA is modelled..

While her main area of research has been on maternal health care quality and metrics, she has had a long interest in adolescent sexual and reproductive health, youth friendly health services, and how health systems can be strengthened to meet the needs of young people. Really looking forward to what GAMA can achieve and how to link it with the work of MoNITOR and CHAT.

Charity Giyava is a young woman from Zimbabwe who advocates for Sexual Reproductive Health Rights for young people. She has a BSc Honours in Psychology and an MSc Public Health – Health Promotion from Leeds Beckett University. Charity plays an active role in advocating for access to comprehensive youth-friendly SRH services; access to comprehensive information and meaningful participation of young people in decision making. She is an active advocate for Youth-led Data-driven Accountability on SRHR, HIV and SDG in Zimbabwe. Charity Is also a Women Deliver Young Leader for 2018 and she currently works for Youth Engage as a Programmes Officer.

Dakshitha Wickremarathne is a development practitioner from Sri Lanka. His work in the areas of health, gender and reconciliation lead him to be appointed by the UN Secretary-General as the youngest member of the Every Woman Every Child Independent Accountability Panel.

As the Co-Founder and the Programme Director of Youth Advocacy Network Sri Lanka, Dakshitha works on designing and delivering both policies and programmes on adolescent health and well-being. He is a Board Member of Women Deliver and alumnus of it’ young leaders programme. Dakshitha was a Commissioner in the Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Well Being and a Youth Advisor to UN Women’s Global Civil Society Advisory Group.

Diana Yeung is a young public health researcher committed to improving child and adolescent health data in low-and-middle-income settings, in order to inform policy and programming. She has more than 5 years of experience in maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health; mental health; and health systems in North America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. She has applied mixed methods to validate mortality data and to evaluate the scale-up of national programs. Currently, she is working on projects to estimate adolescent causes of death at the global and regional level, particularly in countries with inadequate civil registration and vital statistics systems.

Liliana Carvajal, MA, MSc Epi, works as Statistics and Monitoring Specialist at the Data and Analytics Section of the Division of Data Research and Policy at UNICEF. She is an epidemiologist with over 10 years of experience in global health. Liliana currently coordinates the data and analysis work in the areas of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health. Over the past two years, Liliana has been leading the measurement work on mental health among adolescents at the population level. Liliana was recently on assignment in Senegal contributing to the coordination and M&E work of the multi-country Child Friendly Communities/ Real Time Monitoring project. She has been working over the years on global, regional and national M&E priorities including data analysis and methodological development of data collection methods.

Howard Friedman leads many research initiatives at UNFPA focusing on data analytics, costing and cost-benefit estimation. He recently led the Adolescent Investment Case work that was published in The Journal of Adolescent Health (2019) and has authored/co-authored over 100 scientific papers, book chapters, textbooks and lay-audience books in his career. He previously served as the Secretariat of the UN Working Group on Costing. In addition to his work at UNFPA, Friedman teaches at Statistics, Program Evaluation and Machine Learning courses at Columbia University. Before coming to the United Nations, he was a Director of Data Modeling and Analytics in the private sector. He holds a Masters in Statistics and a Ph.D, in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Yongfeng Liu joined UNESCO Headquarters in 2009 as Programme Specialist at the Section of Health and Education, to provide technical support for UNESCO’s activities in education for health and well-being, focusing on the areas of school-based comprehensive sexuality education and school violence and bullying. He contributed to the development of global guidelines for the construction and use of core indicators to measure education sector responses to HIV and AIDS, as well as the SDG Thematic Indicators on HIV and sexuality education and bullying.  Before joining UNESCO, he had worked for the Chinese National Family Planning Commission and China Family Planning Association, where he gained over 20 years of experiences in development, management and monitoring and evaluation of national education programmes and projects for family planning and adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Mr Liu holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and postgraduate certificates in Mass Communication and Global Health Policy.

Regina Guthold, PhD, is a Scientist working on adolescent health monitoring and evaluation in the Department for Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health at the World Health Organization. She holds a PhD in Health Sciences, along with two Master’s degrees (Public Health and Sport Science). 

Kid Kohl is currently working as a Technical Officer in adolescent health at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Besides being part of the secretariat of the GAMA advisory group, she also works on various school health projects, coordinates formative research on adolescent health check-ups and builds country capacity on adolescent health programming. Since she joined WHO in 2015, Kid has worked at headquarters in Geneva and in 2 Regional offices, EMRO in Cairo and AFRO in Brazzaville. Before joining WHO, she worked as a research assistant and associate at the University of Lausanne, where she had also completed her PhD.