Karine Bertrand is a professor in the Addiction Intervention Studies program at the University of Sherbrooke and Scientific Director of the Addiction Research Institute in Quebec, Canada. Her participatory research program brings stakeholders together to improve addiction services and reduce health inequities by taking gender and diversity into account.

Katy oversees operations across the research and peer engagement work at SDF. She has 20 years’ experience of working in a variety of social care settings including substance use, criminal justice, mental health, LGBT+ services, homelessness & learning disabilities. Katy is qualified in health and social care, learning and development, psychotherapy and child and adolescent mental health. She currently provides one to one counselling within a trauma and homelessness charity and has extensive experience of delivering and researching substance use treatment and support within residential services, community-based settings, at music festivals and the wider nighttime economy.

Dr. Samuels is an emergency and addiction medicine physician and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at UCLA . She completed her emergency medicine training at the Brown Emergency Medicine Residency Program, a health services research and health policy fellowship at the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program, and is board certified in Emergency Medicine and Addiction Medicine. Her work focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of health equity initiatives, including community health worker/peer recovery programs, low barrier substance use disorder treatment programs, expansion of harm reduction services, and emergency department programs to address health related social needs.

Dr. Aung Than Oo, MD, MPH, MPA, is a Myanmar public health leader, researcher, and peacebuilding practitioner working at the intersection of community health, humanitarian action, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion. He has more than seven years of experience across local and international non-governmental organizations and United Nations–linked initiatives, including work related to community-based health services, communicable-disease prevention, humanitarian programming, and support for vulnerable and conflict-affected populations.

Harsh Amipara is a BSc LLB (Hons) student at Gujarat National Law University (GNLU), Gandhinagar — one of few researchers in India bridging the hard sciences and constitutional law to address public health inequity. As a Student Research Associate at G-HELP (GNLU Centre for Healthcare, Ethics, Legal Advocacy and Policy Research), he conducted a WHO-collaborative meta-analysis on healthcare worker safety in India. He manages the GNLU Issues in Science, Law and Ethics blog and has co-authored a book examining legal and ethical fault lines in biosciences during pandemics. His research on epigenetics, environmental jurisprudence and criminal law has been presented at the IUCN Colloquium, GNLU MEDLAWCON and international climate litigation forums. He has been awarded a scholarship to present at the World Congress of Bioethics 2026, where he will present research on AI in mass casualty triage and brain organoids and legal personhood.

Dr. Geoff Bardwell's research is situated in the field of drug policy with a focus on community drug strategies and related public health interventions. Most of his research takes place within smaller urban, rural, remote, Northern, and Indigenous communities. He has expertise in qualitative, mixed methods, and community-based research.

Professor Peter Vickerman has 30 years’ experience of infectious disease modelling. His research focuses on using modelling to help understand the transmission of infectious diseases and impact/cost-effectiveness of prevention measures amongst people who inject drugs. He has a particular interest in the impact of structural factors.

Dr. Patel is an epidemiologist who studies the epidemiology and prevention of HIV and HCV among people who inject drugs in the United States and India. His work focuses on understanding and addressing the role of social and structural determinants of health, particularly stigma, in shaping the risk of drug-related harms and access to prevention and care among people who inject drugs.

Charles is with the Burnet Institute as a community engagement coordinator contributing to community-research partnerships on national efforts in hepatitis C elimination and co-design and leadership efforts in community participatory research. He is undertaking a PhD in a community-led, descriptive qualitative research study on long-acting injectable buprenorphine. He has held performed several roles in Australia and New Zealand in peer-led drug user organisations. These roles include front-facing needle/syringe and other harm reduction supplies distribution, outreach education and knowledge-transfer and several management positions, including the New Zealand Needle Exchange Program national director role for 15 years. Central in this work has been the living experience perspective connecting to injection drug use, opioid treatment and hepatitis C, and he remains committed to collective efforts in the crucial mission of improving the lives and rights of people who inject/use illicit drugs.

I employ innovative qualitative and ethnographic approaches to understand how social, environmental, and structural factors shape the health and health inequity of people who use drugs. My recent work has focused on the ongoing drug toxicity crisis, including studies exploring the impact of safer supply interventions on the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs.