Tuesday, June 8 – XChange in Australia, Asia and New Zealand
Dr. Shifalika Goenka will be presenting on:
Physical Activity Insecurity
Dr. Shifalika Goenka, Professor, Public Health Foundation of India leads the Physical Activity program at the Centre for Chronic Disease Control (CCDC) – a WHO Collaborating Centre for Surveillance Capacity Building, & Translational Research in Cardio-metabolic diseases. She has lead health promotion component( physical activity, nutrition, tobacco control) of the one of the largest worksite projects in multiple sites across India for prevention of Non- communicable diseases and obesity. She has worked in physical activity and health promotion including nutrition and tobacco in a variety of settings – community, school and primary health care setting. She strongly believes that the built environment, land use, the media, food pricing, urban design, social desirability & related policies have a huge impact on population behaviour.
Wednesday, June 9 – XChange in Europe and Africa
Meera Shekar is Global Lead for nutrition with the World Bank and Program Manager for the Power of Nutrition TF. She has led the repositioning of the nutrition agenda that led to the new global Scaling-up Nutrition (SUN) initiative, and was a key thought leader on the Catalytic Financing Facility for Nutrition that evolved in to the Power of Nutrition. Meera serves as the elected chair for the SUN executive committee and has been one of the principals for the aid-architecture for nutrition, and the G8 and G20 agenda-setting process for food security and nutrition over the last several years. She leads the costing and financing analyses, the first ever global Investment Framework for Nutrition and is the author of the World Bank’s first analytics on the Health and Economic consequences of obesity. She has also worked on the demographic dividend and population and development issues.
Meera has lived and worked across the globe and has extensive policy and operational experience in Asia, Africa, Latin America. Before joining the World Bank in 2003, she led UNICEF’s Health, Nutrition and Water Sanitation and ECD teams in Tanzania, the Philippines and Ethiopia. Meera has a PhD in international nutrition, epidemiology and population studies from Cornell University and is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Obesity co-led by the University of Auckland & GW University; co-author of the 2008 Lancet Undernutrition Series; Member of the Expert Advisory Group for UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children report; Member External advisory board at DNS (2012-18), Cornell University; Adjunct Professor Tufts University (2012-15); She is an Advisory panel member for Essential Living Standards index, Legatum Institute, UK; and a member of advisory group at the Cost of Obesity Group (CoAG), Gates Ventures (Exemplars in Global Health) and several others. She has authored several publications.
Dr. Meera Shekar will be presenting on:
Nutrition and Food System Transformation
Thursday, June 10 – XChange in North and South Americas
Dr. Emily Mendenhall will be presenting on:
Syndemics: A Five Study Search of Synergies among Trauma, Hunger, Distress, and Diabetes
Emily Mendenhall, PhD, MPH is a medical anthropologist and Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019, Cornell) and Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012, Routledge). She has written four dozen articles at the boundaries of anthropology, psychology, medicine, and public health and led a Series of articles on Syndemics in The Lancet. In 2017, Dr. Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology.