Consortium

Debarati Guha-Sapir is the Director of CRED and a Professor at University of Louvain School of Public Health, in Brussels and Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Belgium. She founded EMDAT - international reference database on natural disasters. Trained in Calcutta University, Johns Hopkins University and University of Louvain, she has a PhD in epidemiology.

She is involved in field research and training in humanitarian aid issues, working closely with the World Health Organisation, UNHCR, UNDP and European Commission in various regions of the world, including China, Sudan, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Great Lakes, Somalia and Central America. Her research is focused on human impact of disasters and conflicts using Epidemiological methods. She is now researching global trends and patterns of human impact of disasters using several multidisciplinary datasets. Another area of her research is cause of mortality from crises events - a central theme for progress in the Sustainable Development Goals. Debarati collaborates with diverse researchers all over the world and is actively involved in field trials for effective measures of disaster risk reduction.

Lara worked for over two decades in social/behavioral community-based intervention research and health systems strengthening in conflict-affected settings. After fifteen years at the International Rescue Committee, she is now the Chief Operating Officer of the Dupont Clinic, an independent abortion care provider. Currently based in Washington, DC, Lara has lived and worked in Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Chad, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, and Switzerland. She holds an AB from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, a BSN from Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and an MHS and PhD from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Mohamad is an advocacy and communication expert whose experience focuses on humanitarian policy, protection of aid workers in Syria and neighboring countries. 

He is a licensed dentist, and a former relief worker, having worked to establish field hospitals, and support decaying local governance structures since the Syria conflict began.

Mohamad is a Research Fellow, Syria Impacts Study, University of California, Berkeley. School of Public Health.

Prof. Les Roberts is a Professor at Columbia University’s Program on Forced Migration and Health.  He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering and did a post-doctorate fellowship in epidemiology at the Centers for Disease Control’s Refugee Health Unit. Les was the Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee from 1999-2003.  He has been involved in the field work of over 50 mortality surveys in conflict settings including in DRC, Zimbabwe, CAR, and Iraq.  His present research focuses on developing statistically representative community-based surveillance methodologies.

Dr. Ataullah Saeedzai is the former Director General of Monitoring Evaluation and Health Information System (M&EHIS) in the Ministry of Public Health. He had previously worked in research, M&E and public health program management with different International NGOs and Universities in Afghanistan such as; Medical Sciences for Health, the Aga Khan Health Services, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Aga Khan University, and BRAC and has worked as consultant with KPMG the local fund agent for the Global Fund. Dr. Saeedzai has also been a lecturer at Kabul Medical University. He has many publications in National and International Journals.