Institution: Harvard University

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian contemporary social theorist, philosopher, politician, and law professor whose writings span the fields of social theory, philosophy of law, economics, religion, science, and general philosophy.

Unger was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement for a brief period in the late 1970s and 1980s. Unger has long been active in Brazilian and South American politics as a candidate, political activist, and advisor to world leaders.

Martha (Marty) Chen is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Founder, Emeritus International Coordinator, and Senior Advisor of the global network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, WIEGO.

Dr. Chen’s PhD is in South Asia Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She was awarded a high civilian award, the Padma Shri, by the Government of India; and a Friends of Bangladesh Liberation War Award by the Bangladesh Government.

Dr. Yousafzai is an Associate Professor of Global Health, Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests are the development and integration of interventions that promote early child development in existing health services, and implementation research on scaling-up early childhood interventions. She has extensive experience in evaluating early childhood interventions in south Asia, east Africa, and in central and east Europe. One of Dr. Yousafzai most significant studies is the Pakistan Early Child Development Scale-Up (PEDS) trial, a cluster randomized controlled trial evaluating responsive stimulation and nutrition interventions to strengthen early child development and growth outcomes. Dr. Yousafzai has written extensively about early childhood interventions in low- and middle-income countries including recent articles in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Annual Review of Psychology, Lancet, Lancet Global Health, and Pediatrics. She also serves on a number of Advisory Groups on early child development for international organizations including co-Chair for the Intervention Taskforce of the Early Childhood Development Action Network-ECDAN and an advisor on Home Visiting for the UNICEF CEECIS regional office.

Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D., is the Julius B. Richmond FAMRI Professor of Child Health and Development at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital; and Director of the university-wide Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. He currently serves as chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a group of distinguished scholars whose mission is to bring credible science to bear on public policy affecting young children, and chairs the JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress, which is developing new knowledge and measurement capacity to assess the biological, bio-behavioral, and health consequences of excessive stress system activation. In 2011, Dr. Shonkoff launched Frontiers of Innovation, a multi-sectoral collaboration among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, investors, and experts in systems change who are committed to developing more effective intervention strategies to catalyze breakthrough impacts on the development and health of young children and families experiencing significant adversity.

Dr. Richard Cash is a Visiting Professor in Public Health and an Advisor in Global Health at the Public Health Foundation of India. He has held several academic appointments at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, the Harvard Institute for International Development in Cambridge, the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health and the University of Maryland. He is also a visiting professor at the James P. Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2007, Dr. Cash was presented the Prince Mahidol Award in Public Health by Thailand for his work on Oral Rehydration Therapy. Dr. Cash is a member of the Health for All thematic group of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.