AbdelHalim AbdAllah (Halim) is the Crisis Communications Officer for the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa. He is leading the setup and coordination of the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (AIRA) and its social media arm Viral Facts. He is also part of WHO's COVID-19 vaccine demand and readiness task force in the region and is supporting with crisis communications for the rollout of the novel oral polio vaccine.

As a journalist, Halim worked with the Daily News Egypt and Agence France-Presse. As a communications professional, he worked with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the field in Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Nigeria, and was also the former Head of Communications for MSF Lebanon.

Alyssa background is audience engagement and editorial innovation. she was previously a Managing Editor at Barron's where she accelerated the nearly 100-year old magazine’s digital transformation, including the integration of print and digital teams, a redesign of Barrons.com, the launch of podcasts and an award-winning newsletter. Alyssa work led to record audience and subscription numbers for Barron’s. At the Financial Times, she was a founding member of the Audience Engagement and Communities teams, ushering in the use of data in the newsroom as well as unprecedented collaboration across the company.  

She has a M.Sc. in Management from London Business School and a B.A. with distinction in Psychology and Economics from McGill University.

Carlos Gonçalo das Neves graduated in Veterinary Medicine, from the Technical University of Lisbon in 2004, and obtained his doctorate (PhD) in veterinary science, specialty Virology in 2009 from the Norwegian School of Veterinary Sciences.

With scientific papers published in international scientific journals and extensive experience of scientific project coordination Dr. Carlos das Neves is currently the Director of Research and Internationalization at the Norwegian Veterinary Institute in Oslo, responsible for coordination of research staff of more than 150 researchers working in more than 20 different disciplines.

He served previously for three years as Head of Virology and two years as Head of Food Safety & Emerging Threats at the Norwegian Veterinary Institute. He holds a joint position on ONE HEALTH and wildlife at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of Tromsø, and has been promoted to research professor in 2018.

Prof. das Neves has developed his scientific research in the field of virology in wildlife species and accumulated over these years extensive experience of fieldwork across the Arctic.  We works mostly today with topics related to ONE HEALTH and emerging threats, especially viral zoonosis and antimicrobial resistance, also with a focus on LMICs.

In 2013 he obtained the diploma of specialist of the European College of Zoological Medicine in the area of Wildlife Population Health and was appointed by the Norwegian Government in 2014 as an expert in animal welfare and health of the National Food Safety Committee.

He is currently the President of the Wildlife Disease Association and the Wildlife Population Health specialty chair for the European College of Zoological Medicine. In 2020 Prof. das Neves was also appointed by Norway to join the group of international experts at IPBES working on the relation between biodiversity and pandemics.

Dr. Carlos das Neves has also served as Honorary Consul of Portugal in Norway between 2010 and 2017.

David Walmsley has held leadership positions at four major Canadian news organizations. After working for newspapers across Britain, including the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, he moved to Canada for the launch of the National Post in 1998 and worked at CBC News and the Toronto Star before joining The Globe in 2006. He is editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail since March 2014.

Fergus Bell is the founder and CEO of Fathm, an independent news lab and consultancy. He is an experienced journalist, editor and leading expert in digital newsgathering, verification, newsroom innovation and collaborative journalism projects.

Fergus’ experience spans both the business and editorial sides of the news industry. He spent eight years at the Associated Press, where he became their first International Social Media and UGC Editor. He then headed up newsroom partnerships and innovation for digital newsgathering start-up, SAM Desk.

In 2015 Fergus founded Dig Deeper Media, advising broadcasters, publishers and start-ups on social and digital newsgathering, newsroom transformation and innovation.

In 2017 he co-founded Pop-Up Newsroom, a framework for collaborative journalism projects that has already seen success in the US, UK, India, Sweden and with the multi-award winning “Verificado” – an initiative designed to monitor for misinformation during the Mexican elections. In 2019 Pop-Up Newsroom was a core architect and partner of India’s ground-breaking Checkpoint initiative that innovated heavily with WhatsApp to tackle misinformation in the world’s largest election.

Fergus has been a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow and is a graduate of the University of Leeds.

Paul Richards worked in mainstream media for 20 years before joining the Australian Academy of Science where he is now Director of Communications and Outreach.

He worked for Australia’s number one breakfast TV show, Sunrise for more than ten years. He spent most of that decade as Supervising Producer, delivering 18 hours of TV a week before joining The Australian Academy of Science.

Paul joined the Academy to establish a video team, which has helped grow the organisation’s social media following to over 2.4 million. He is passionate about telling stories of substance in an engaging way.

Suzanne Franks is Professor of Journalism at City, University of London where she was, until 2019, head of the Journalism department. This is the oldest and largest Journalism School in the UK, educating over 500 students annually who originate from over 40 countries. Suzanne joined BBC TV as a trainee in the 1980s and later worked as a journalist in news and current affairs on programmes including Panorama, Newsnight, Watchdog and the Money Programme and rose to become an executive producer in the area of political coverage. She subsequently set up an independent production company which won commissions from broadcasters including Sky News, Channel 4 and the BBC. Her company also won the first contract to televise the UK Parliament. Suzanne later sold the company and in 2007 she completed a Phd. Suzanne’s academic work has focussed upon Humanitarian Communication. She teaches a module on this topic and has published widely on crisis reporting and the coverage of international news. Her books include Africa’s Media Image in the Twenty First Century: From Heart of Darkness to Africa Rising (Routledge) and Reporting Disasters: Famine, Aid, Politics and the Media. (Hurst/OUP) She is currently writing a book for Palgrave on the reporting of humanitarian crises and is a Principal Investigator on an EU Horizon project which focuses on science communication and the reporting of Climate Change. Her other specialist area is in gender and journalism. Her books include Having None of it: Women, Men and the Future of Work (Granta) and Women and Journalism published in association with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford, where she was a visiting fellow. Suzanne has written many articles on women in the media and regularly broadcasts and speaks on this topic. She leads a research project at City University on the role of women experts in the broadcast media.