Dr. Hassaan Zahid spent his early years in the Middle East and later Pakistan. He went to medical school at Dow Medical College, Karachi. While volunteering for earthquake and flood relief in Pakistan, he developed a taste for humanitarian work . Later he volunteered in south Turkey during the Syrian refugee crisis. In Karachi, he helped develop an emergency tele-health psychiatry centre for mental health support to remote villages in Chitral during the 2015 earthquake. In 2016, Karachi’s first 3D-printed prosthetic limb centre was established which was his brain-child. The centre now provides services to upper limb amputees free of cost. He now works for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Hepatitis C project in Karachi in developing operational strategy and is passionate about provision of free, accessible healthcare within low and middle income countries.

Dr. Elin Hoffmann Dahl grew up in Norway and attended medical school in Bergen. Throughout her training she was actively involved in the international student organisation Universities Allied for Essential Medicine where she worked to improve health equity worldwide by improving access to lifesaving drugs. As a clinician, she focused on holistic approaches for treatment of psychiatric illness, and volunteered in Greece during the ongoing refugee crisis. In 2017 she ran the MSF Hepatitis C clinic in Karachi for six months where she was responsible for the development and implementation of the programmatic protocol for Hepatitis C treatment within a decentralized clinic. She is passionate about access to medicines and healthcare as a basic human right. Her areas of interest include public health policy and health economics, particularly applied to viral hepatitis.

Nance Cunningham studied International Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and has been doing humanitarian work ever since. She started out working in HIV/AIDS prevention in South-east Asia. Later she worked for MSF on prevention, treatment delivery, and better understanding the epidemic of Hepatitis C in a marginalized community of Karachi, Pakistan. She is currently working on a PhD in the Experimental Medicine Department, University of British Columbia. Follow her on twitter: @NanceCunningham

Sandra Smiley is a communications and advocacy specialist from Canada with degrees from McGill University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Sandra’s work in humanitarian aid has taken her to West, East, Southern and Central Africa; Western and Eastern Europe; and most recently, South Asia. She has grappled with health policy challenges in some very complex and volatile settings: for example, in outbreaks of highly virulent disease (as in the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic) and in zones of active conflict (as in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic). Sandra has a particular interest in public health policy, especially as applied to communicable illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Hepatitis C, and in addressing the healthcare needs of marginalized groups. Follow her on Twitter @sandraqsmiley.