Violaine Mitchell is Director, Health Funds and Partnerships, Global Delivery Programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She oversees a team that works to empower country governments to sustainably finance and manage their primary health care systems. 

Before joining the foundation in 2010, she worked as the coordinator of the Gavi Financing Task Force under contract to the World Bank, where she was responsible for coordinating the vaccine alliance’s early work on national financial sustainability planning and global innovative financing. Earlier, she worked at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, where she was the study director for a study on the Children’s Vaccine Initiative and assistant study director for the IOM Study on Malaria Prevention and Control.  

Violaine spent a number of years working on integrated community development projects, including three years working with traditional refuse collectors in Cairo, Egypt, on child health, animal health and production, and income generation projects funded by Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, and UNICEF, among others. She is the co-founder of Small Farm Canada, an award-winning national Canadian magazine for small-scale producers. She has a B.A. in development studies from Brown University and an M.Sc. in tropical public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. 

Violaine represents the Gates Foundation on the Global Financing Facility Investors Group and serves as an Alternate Board Member on the Gavi Board and, additionally, as a member of the Gavi Program and Policy Committee.

Zulfiqar Bhutta is the Founding Director of the Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health at the Aga Khan University; the Inaugural Robert Harding Chair in Global Child Health, Co-Director, and Director of Research at the Centre for Global Child Health at The Hospital for Sick Children; Chairman of The Coalition of Centres in Global Child Health and President of the International Pediatrics Association. Dr. Bhutta also holds adjunct professorships at several leading Universities including the Schools of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Tufts University, the University of Alberta and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Dr. Bhutta was educated at the University of Peshawar (MBBS) and obtained his PhD from the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh and London), the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health (London), American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pakistan Academy of Sciences. He has been associated with the Aga Khan University since 1986 and heads a large research team working on issues of maternal, newborn and child survival and nutrition regionally and globally.

Mickey Chopra is the Global Solutions Lead for Service Delivery in the Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice of the World Bank. He leads its work around the organization, management and quality of health services. 

Previous to this he was the Chief of Health and Associate Director of Programs at UNICEF’s New York Headquarters. Additionally, he has chaired the Evaluation and Research Group at the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria to ensure that their investments are reaching those most in need and chaired the Special Committee for Large Countries for GAVI that worked on ensuring increased coverage of vaccines for Nigeria and India in particular. He led the technical team that oversaw the UN Commission on Essential Medicines and Commodities.

Dr. Chopra is qualified as a medical doctor with an additional degree in medical sociology from the University of Southampton, England, MPH (Primary Health in Developing Countries) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Kate O’Brien is Director of the Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals Department at the World Health Organization where she is responsible for leading the overall work and strategy of the Department to advance the vision of reducing the health, social and economic burden of vaccine preventable diseases. 

Prior to joining WHO she was Professor of International Health and Epidemiology and Executive Director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her scientific and policy work domestically and globally has focused on vaccine preventable illnesses, among both children and adults. The work has included surveillance, epidemiology, and vaccine clinical trials of pneumococcal disease; rotavirus; Haemophilus influenzae type b; respiratory syncytial virus and influenza vaccines. She has worked extensively with American Indian populations and in Africa and south Asia, partnering with local scientists and country program staff to develop rigorous scientific evidence and bring it into the vaccine policy arena, thereby accelerating the use and access to life-saving vaccines for children living in low resource countries and settings. She has been honored with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award, the Sabin Vaccine Institute Young Investigator Award, the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE). She served on the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization for 6 years and on the Gavi Board. 

Dr. O’Brien trained as a pediatric infectious disease physician, epidemiologist and vaccinologist. She earned her BSc in chemistry from University of Toronto (Canada), her MD from McGill University (Canada), and her MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (US) before completing her training at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an Epidemic Intelligence Officer, in the Respiratory Diseases Branch. 

Rachel Tolhurst is a social scientist with a background in gender, development and health. Her research interests and experience centre on qualitative research on gender and equity in health systems strengthening and the social determinants of health. Her research has included a focus on a range of health areas including maternal and child health, sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender based violence, antimicrobial resistance and communicable and chronic disease (including malaria, tuberculosis, lung disease and HIV). 

Rachel is currently the Social Sciences lead for the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Lung Health and Tuberculosis in Africa at LSTM, and for the Drivers of Antimicrobial Resistance (DRUM) consortium (GCRF).  She also leads the gender equitable careers theme on the DELTAS Learning Research Programme, in collaboration with the Capacity Research Unit.

Recent previous research has included leading LSTM’s contributions to two EU-funded consortia - MATIND, which evaluated two demand-side financing approaches to improving maternal health in India, and INPAC, which aimed to test an intervention to improve post-abortion family planning in China - as well as leading MRC-funded social science research exploring the drivers of child marriage in Sudan.