From Evidence to Action: Restoring Planetary Health with Science and Collaboration

Executive Director and Founder
Dr. Nicole de Paula was the first Klaus Töpfer Sustainability Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. For more than a decade, she has been globally connecting policymakers and researchers to create a public understanding on key issues related to sustainability, environment and public health. Previously she was the director of a think-tank in Bangkok, Thailand. She is the founder of the Women Leaders for Planetary Health and co-founder of an interdisciplinary research group on Planetary Health at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Jean-Claude Burgelman is professor of Open Science at the Free University of Brussels. He retired in 2020 from the European Commission where he was in charge, from 2014 onwards, of Open Science at DG RTD.

He and his team designed and developed the EC’s polices on open science, the European Open Science Cloud, open data and open access. He joined the European Commission in 1999 as a Visiting Scientist in the Joint Research Centre where he was in charge of socio economic research on digital technologies.

Till 2000 he was full professor of communication technology policy at the Free University of Brussels, as well as director of its Centre for Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication and was involved in science and technology assessment. He has been visiting professor at the University of Antwerp, the European College of Brughes and the University of South Africa and sits on several academic journals. He chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Innovation and was a member of its Science Advisory Committee.

He recently joined the advisory board of Open Knowledge Maps and became the editor in chief of Frontiers Policy Lab.

In  2022 he became the director of the Frontiers Planet Prize, a new prize to stimulate science that can save the planet.

Patrick Cramer studied chemistry at Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Bristol and Cambridge. After his doctorate at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble he joined Roger Kornberg as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. In 2001, he obtained a tenure-track professorship at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and became a full professor of biochemistry there in 2004. He served as director of the Gene Center Munich (2004-2013) and as Chair of EMBL Council (2016-2019). Since 2014 he is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

Prof Dakora obtained his BSc (Hons) degree in Agriculture from the University of Ghana in 1977, an MSc degree from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 1981, and a PhD in Botany from the University of Western Australia, Perth, 1989.

He currently holds a South African Research Chair in Agrochemurgy and Plant Symbioses at the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa; and is Fellow and President of the African Academy of Sciences.

Prof Dakora’s research has contributed to our current understanding of the signalling and protectant roles of legume molecules such as flavonoids, alkaloids, amino acids, terpenoids and isoflavonoid phytoalexins, as well as of rhizobial metabolites such as lumichrome, riboflavin and indole acetic acid, especially in plant functioning and the expression of bacterial nodulation genes.

Prof Dakora has published 427 papers (which comprise 119 peer-reviewed journal articles, 16 Book Chapters and 292 peer-reviewed Conference papers/abstracts) and a Book entitled: “Biological Nitrogen Fixation: Towards Poverty Alleviation through Sustainable Agriculture” published by Springer.

Dr. Abir Haddad was born in Baghdad, Iraq and immigrated to Germany at the age of 12. Abir studied law in Tübingen and received her doctorate from the faculty of international private law at the University of Cologne. During her doctorate, she worked on comparative law in different languages with research stays in various countries. The fascination for legal concepts and dogmatics has led her to combine comparative law and futurism and to look into the future of law to develop innovative solutions to challenges such as climate change and emerging technologies.

I want our global society to overcome the reactive and slow patterns of law-making to meet the needs of tomorrow’s challenges instead. I want this, because we need to be prepared for the challenges science is predicting in order to conquer them successfully. I can do this because I have been living and experiencing different systems and legal cultures and I fell in love with finding creative solutions for these problems and moreover I enjoy supporting people creating solutions out of the box. 

Dr. Phaedra Henley is an Assistant Professor and the Chair of the Center for One Health at the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda. Here, she oversees the development of its One Health research program, curriculum and community engagement. The mission of Center for One Health at UGHE is to train the next generation of leaders in Africa who will champion the One Health approach and work in collaborative, multi-sectoral partnerships to design and deliver innovative, equitable and evidence-based solutions to global challenges. For the past nine years Dr. Henley has led the development and implementation of Global Health and One Health graduate programs at universities in Canada and in Rwanda. She has taught several courses in these subject areas and conducted community-based research projects looking at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health. She has a PhD in Pathology, a Masters in Environment and Sustainability and Bachelor’s in Medical Sciences. Dr. Henley is motivated by implementing a transdisciplinary, evidence-based, and community-placed approach to training, research, and practice.