Since 2017, Kuvinda Kossinna has worked as a physician in Zurich, Switzerland, with clinical experience spanning acute somatic care and addiction medicine. He is a board-certified specialist physician with advanced training and a dedicated focus on addiction medicine. In October 2025, he was appointed Co–Chief of Medicine at “Sune Egge,” a specialized hospital for addiction and social medicine that provides low-threshold acute inpatient medical care for people with substance use disorders. Sune Egge is part of the Pfarrer Sieber Foundation, which supports marginalized and precariously housed individuals in the Zurich area through a broad range of services, including outreach street work, emergency shelters, inpatient care, supported housing, peer projects and access to affordable housing options.

Sanjana is postdoctoral fellow at the Centre on Drug Policy Evaluation. Sanjana is a skilled public health researcher whose work is informed by her interdisciplinary background. Her interests include harm reduction, health equity, and broadly the intersection of policy and health outcomes.

Gonçalo Henriques is a psychologist and Coordinator of the Lisbon Municipal Emergency Shelter – Associação Ares do Pinhal. For the past 20 years, he has worked in non-governmental health organizations supporting people experiencing homelessness. He oversees the health services of the facility and coordinates a multidisciplinary team composed of psychosocial support technicians, social workers, psychologists, nurses and physicians. The shelter operates within a structured Harm Reduction framework and includes a pilot drug consumption room (ECAD) and an Alcohol Managed Program exclusively for residents. With a total capacity of 126 places (26 designated for women and 8 for couples), the model integrates systematic Diagnostic and Testing protocols and reinforces Cascades of Care/Linkage to Care for highly vulnerable populations. He is currently a member of a research group dedicated to the assessment and diagnosis of the health status of people experiencing homelessness in Lisbon.

I am a Research Fellow in the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow. My research focuses on understanding and addressing health inequalities, evaluating public health and social policies, and applying advanced statistical methods to complex population-level data.

Leo is the current Acting Executive Director of the European Network of People who use Drugs. An independent harm reduction consultant, drug user activist and researcher based in Ireland, they hold a post grad diploma in Substance Use from Queen's University Belfast. Leo has worked in harm reduction and drug user advocacy for 15 years both in Canada and now in Ireland. Leo is a person with living experience of drug use, with strong commitment to intersectionality and class anaylsis when it comes to the harms of prohibitonist drug policy into peoples lives, and is especially interested in strengths based substance use research and community led monitoring.

Ms. N’Guessan Prisila is a lawyer and expert in human rights, advocacy, and gender issues with over seven years of professional experience working with key populations affected by HIV, including people who use drugs. As the designer and implementer of the legal clinic at the Center for Addiction Support and Care, she played an important role in civil society advocacy for the adoption of the new law on the fight against drugs in Côte d'Ivoire and the drafting of its implementing regulations. As a national trainer on drug use risk reduction, Ms. N'GUESSAN has developed on-site training modules tailored to the training of defense and security forces as well as healthcare providers on risk reduction.

Gillian Kolla is Assistant Professor of Population Health and Applied Health Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University. She is a public health researcher examining responses to the drug toxicity crisis in Canada.

Magdalena Cerdá is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at Yale University School of Public Health. Her work integrates approaches from social and psychiatric epidemiology to examine how social contexts and drug and health policies shape drug use and urban violence. Current funded research focuses on state and community-level policy and social drivers of opioid-related harms, including work on the impact of municipal harm reduction laws on overdose, and an evaluation of the first publicly recognized overdose prevention centers in the United States. Dr. Cerdá has also published extensively on the application of novel methods, including machine learning and agent-based modeling, to the prediction of overdose risk and the evaluation of social and policy drivers of overdose and violence. By conducting work in these areas, she hopes her research can inform evidence-based policies to improve population health.