Xiya is a plastic and reconstructive surgery resident at Université de Montréal (MD 2020, MSc 2018) with a passion for research, innovation and global health. She completed her thesis on peripheral nerve synaptogenesis, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and published over 20 peer-reviewed articles. Xiya led the International Student Surgical Network (InciSioN), the world's largest trainee-led global surgery organization with over 8,000 members in over 100 countries, for two years, through which she carried out high-level advocacy work at the World Health Assembly and organized the largest virtual global surgery symposium (InciSioN Global Surgery Symposium 2020). She represented the Canadian Medical Association at TEDMED 2018, the global community on innovation in health care, and curated the TEDMED 2020 program as a research scholar. Xiya is the recipient of the Mary and Brendan Calder Award from the Canadian Medical Hall Of Fame and the Canada 150th Anniversary Medal for Saint-Laurent for her leadership and community involvement.

Hloni Bookholane (MD, MPH) is a doctor from South Africa, and a graduate from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health while he was a Fulbright Scholar. He is the author of Becoming a Doctor: Learnings and unlearnings about life and the politics of medicine.

Dr. Joseline Haizel-Cobbina is a Program Manager at the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health.

She works with Dr Michael C. Dewan and the Vanderbilt Global Neurosurgery Program (VGNP).

Prior to joining VIGH, she was an International Health Fellow with Minnesota Department of

Health, where she worked on CDC’s Malaria Prevention Project to reduce the incidence of

imported malaria cases among the immigrant and refugee population in Minnesota. Originally from Ghana, Josie received her bachelor's degree in Human Biology and her medical degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in 2015 and worked as a medical officer in low-resource settings for 3 years before moving to the United States. She has a firsthand experience of challenges to access to medical and surgical care in low-resource settings and working to increase access to healthcare for underserved populations. She obtained her MPH degree in Public Health Administration and Policy with a minor in Health

Equity at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in 2018. Josie’s clinical and public

health interests are in global and pediatric neurosurgery and eliminating health disparities

which well aligns with her work as the Program Manager for the VGNP.

Dr. Saksham Gupta was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, and raised in New Delhi, India and Acton, Massachusetts. He is a neurosurgery resident at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Paul Farmer Global Surgery Fellow working with Dr. Kee Park and Dr. Nakul Raykar at the Program for Global Surgery and Social Change. He earned his MD from Harvard Medical School and is currently enrolled in the MPH program at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is passionate about resident/trainee education in neurosurgery worldwide and in quality monitoring in growing surgical systems.

Dr. Marissa Boeck is an Assistant Professor in the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Surgery, and serves as an acute care surgeon at the Parnassus campus and as an acute care and trauma surgeon and surgical critical care intensivist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (ZSFG). She is an Associate Director of the UCSF Center for Health Equity in Surgery and Anesthesia (CHESA). She is a faculty affiliate of the UCSF Institute for Global Health Sciences and the surgery lead of the UCSF WHO Collaborating Centre for Emergency, Critical, and Operative (ECO) Care. Her professional passions include global public health, especially as it relates to injury prevention (road traffic, gun violence), vulnerable populations, emergency response, and trauma and surgical system strengthening in low-resource settings. She also champions diversity in the surgical workforce, and the power of social media in medicine. Her research spans both domestic in the United States and abroad across multiple countries including Bolivia, Kenya, Cameroon, Nepal, Uganda, and Tanzania. Dr. Boeck earned her BA in Philosophy from the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, City University of New York, her MD from Weill Cornell Medical College, and her Master of Public Health degree at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a post-graduate fellow at the Brigham and Women’s Center for Surgery and Public Health and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s Center for Global Health, she spent a year in Santa Cruz, Bolivia working on hospital-based trauma registry implementation, and further developing the city's trauma and emergency response system. She completed her general surgery residency at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia and a two-year fellowship in Surgical Critical Care and Trauma Surgery at UCSF.

Dr. Emmanuel Bua is a specialist general surgeon at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital in Eastern Uganda and an honorary lecturer of Surgery at Busitema Univeresity Faculty of health sciences. Inspired by his mother, a nurse and midwife, he joined Makerere University medical school and graduated with an MBChB. He holds a Master’s degree in General Surgery from Mulago hospital, Makerere University in Kampala. He is a board-certified member and fellow of the College of surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa (COSECSA). He represents Eastern Uganda on the executive committee of the Association of Surgeons of Uganda (ASOU). He has worked with the underserved and impoverished communities of Uganda, Ethiopia, Zambia and Kenya where he has experienced first-hand the importance of the social determinants of health and the need for robust healthcare systems. He also had the opportunity to interact with patients in the USA and Netherlands which gave him a clear perspective of the healthcare systems in developed economies and the need for collaborations between local and international partners in addressing health care challenges in Africa. He is a strong advocate for global health equity and believes in building resilient communities through training for transformation and global partnerships. He is currently a global heath leadership fellow under the UCSF HEAL program as well as a CHESA fellow. He is currently involved in collaborative research under Globalsurg and one of the co-authors of the International Surgical Outcomes Study (ISOS) group. His other research interest includes barriers to safe surgery in LMICs, social justice, equity, medical education and innovation in medicine.

Dr. Matthew Kynes is a pediatric anesthesiologist who works at AIC Kijabe Hospital in Kijabe, Kenya and Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. He has focused his career on building anesthesia capacity and excellence in East Africa and educating trainees about global health equity. He is founder of the Global Leadership in Anesthesia Pathway for Vanderbilt anesthesia residents and director of the Vanderbilt Global Anesthesiology Fellowship Since 2021 he has been based primarily at a referral hospital in rural Kenya that hosts a nurse anesthesia training program, an anesthesiology residency training program, high-fidelity simulation course, and many other anesthesia training opportunities.

Currently, her academic appointments include Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, and Adjunct Instructor in Surgery, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. After 15 years as a theological librarian in Nigeria, Ms. Tarpley spent 15 years in surgery education at Vanderbilt and from 2016 to 2021 in Kenya, Rwanda, and Botswana working in surgery and medical education, assisting in research, manuscript preparation, and medical journal editing.  Special interests include medical ethics, global academic surgery, publishing, bibliographical research, and issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Malvikha Manoj, MSPH, is the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director at the International Working Group for Health Systems Strengthening (IWG), a global community of action committed to convening emerging public health changemakers and catalyzing efforts towards local and global health systems strengthening. Her day job is as a Consultant at UNICEF, working for both UNICEF’s Headquarters and the Middle East and North Africa Regional Office. She is also a Research Associate in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research interests include the politics of health policy, health governance and leadership, and youth mental health systems and policy research.