External Advisory Board

Dr. Olga Idriss Davis

Dr. Olga Idriss Davis is Full Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University and Principal Investigator of Health Literacy and Community Engagement with the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC), a NIH/National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities P20 Center of Excellence for the Study of Health Disparities in the Southwest at Arizona State University. Davis’s research area is in the domain of critical cultural studies and health communication. Her work explores the socio-cultural determinants of health and the impact of identity on health of the African Diaspora. Involved in community health issues for the past decade, Davis was appointed in 2008 by former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to serve on the Commission on Women’s and Children’s Health. Davis served as Chair for the Cultural Health Initiative of the American Heart Association Tempe Affiliate (2006-2008); is a founding coalition member of Maricopa Integrated Health System’s Refugee Women’s Health Clinic (2008-present); and is among the advisory team of the Phoenix-based Coalition of Blacks Against Breast Cancer (CBBC) (2009-present). Additionally, Davis is Lead Research Investigator on an NIH/NIMHD health literacy demonstration project—a community based collaborative of African American barbers and SIRC to address cardiovascular disease through culturally-centered health literacy among African American men in partnership with Black barbershops in Phoenix, Arizona. As an alumna of The Juilliard School, she weaves oral history, communication, and storytelling to explore cultural issues of health and well-being. Central to her work in health communication is the study of narrative—how narrative empowers, creates, and fosters cultural awareness to provide a space for social change. Her current health literacy project entitled, The Journey: Living Cancer Out Loud, is a narrative performance based on interviews of the lived experience of African American women and men survivors and caregivers living with breast cancer. She has numerous essays published in interdisciplinary academic journals and is co-editor of Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies of Discourse published by Hampton Press. She is President and CEO of Davis Communication Group, LLC, a communication and multimedia consulting company located in Phoenix, Arizona.

Prof. Dr. Ira Helsloot

Prof. Dr. Ira Helsloot has over 15 years of experience in research on crisis management and the politics of safety in different kinds of research positions. He is one of the few Dutch professors in the field of crisis and disaster management. He conducted numerous literature studies in this field. He is author of several scientific peer reviewed publications on citizen response to disaster. Furthermore, he is involved in many crisis and fire evaluations with national impact. He combines an overall view on crisis management organization with specific research on topics like resilience, human behaviour during crisis and crisis communication.

Dr. Robert Munro

Robert is a computational linguist working in communication technologies. This covers a broad area of technology and development, from crowdsourcing and machine-learning for extracting rich information from natural language to the installation of supporting infrastructures.

He has lived in many diverse environments, from Sierra Leone and the Amazon to London, Sydney and Silicon Valley and holds a PhD from Stanford University.