Kathleen Ryan is a Research Fellow at Alfred Health. Kathleen has over 5 years experience evaluating HIV prevention programs including community based testing and PrEP. Kathleen is a junior co-convener of this years conference.

Associate Professor Dr Jason Ong is a sexual health physician and health economist based at Melbourne Sexual Health Centre. His work focuses on the public control of sexually transmitted infections, and he is passionate about improving access to sexual health services in Australia and beyond.

Dagmawi Woubshet is the Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A scholar of African American literature and art, he works at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ, and African studies. These overlapping areas of inquiry inform his scholarship and research, including his book The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), and the co-edited volume Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo (2010). His writings have appeared in various publications including Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Atlantic, and African Lives: An Anthology. He is currently completing a book on James Baldwin’s late style and the first English translation of Sebhat Gebre Egziabher’s 1966 Amharic novel, ሰባተኛው መላክ Säbatägnaw Mälak [The Seventh Angel]. Woubshet is an associate editor of Callaloo and has served on the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has been a fellow at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, and, as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Modern Art Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he curated Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show (2016). He was selected as the inaugural senior fellow of the Africa Institute in Sharjah, UAE, where he will be in residence in 2020-21. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, Woubshet taught at Cornell University where he was named one of “The 10 Best Professors at Cornell.” He received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and his B.A. in Political Science and History from Duke University.

Lisa McDaid is Professor of Social Science and Health at The University of Queensland, where she leads on health research at the Institute for Social Science Research. She retains a Professorship at the University of Glasgow and is also an Associate Director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, a consortium research centre based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Lisa has expertise in intervention development and evaluation, health improvement research, and qualitative methods. Her research has explored sexual health inequalities among young people, LGBTQ+ communities, and men and women living in socio-economically deprived areas. Lisa’s most recent research focuses on syndemics - understanding the complex interplay and co-occurrence of sexual, physical and mental health problems and the social contexts that drive these. Most importantly, she is working with communities to understand how to counter syndemics and improve health via assets and strengths-based approaches.