Roberto Venturini

Acting Manager, Systems Capacity Leadership and Engagement, Prevention and Population Health Branch, Department of Health and Human Services, State Government of Victoria, Australia

Roberto is a social change agent with a passion for creating healthy and active communities. For more than 20 years, he has worked across public, private and not-for-profit sectors in a variety of marketing and communication roles. With qualifications in international trade, marketing and Italian, Roberto has led marketing and branding efforts for the promotion of youth suicide prevention, food and beverage lines, and motor vehicle companies. He has worked for smaller communication and PR firms and large multinational sports marketing and advertising agencies. Most recently, his career has taken him back to government, where he is leading social marketing and engagement efforts – taking an innovative approach to reducing the rates of overweight and obesity in Victoria, Australia. Unique in the world, this approach connects local communities with statewide health initiatives by disrupting and connecting the complex systems that lie beneath health choices.

Adrian Bauman

Sesquicentenary Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney, Australia

Adrian Bauman  is the Sesquicentenary Professor  of Public  Health, University of Sydney, Australia.  He is Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Physical Activity, Nutrition and Obesity.  His research interests are in primary prevention of chronic disease.  He has a special interest in complex program evaluation, especially applied to evaluating social marketing and mass media campaigns.  He is well published in the peer reviewed literature [H index 68], of which over 50 publications are specific to social marketing and mass media campaign evaluation. These included evaluations and formative research around physical activity campaigns, tobacco campaigns, obesity prevention, asthma management, sun protection, and HIV/Hep C prevention mass campaigns.

Joel Bakan

Author of "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" and "Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children "

Joel Bakan is a professor of law at the University of British Columbia, and an internationally renowned legal scholar and commentator. A former Rhodes Scholar and law clerk to Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada, Bakan has law degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie, and Harvard. His critically acclaimed international hit, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), electrified readers around the world (it was published in over 20 languages), and became a bestseller in several countries. The book inspired a feature documentary film, The Corporation, written by Bakan and co-created with Mark Achbar, which won numerous awards, including best foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, and was a critical and box office success. Bakan’s highly regarded scholarly work includes Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (1997), as well as textbooks, edited collections, and numerous articles in leading legal and social science journals. His award-winning recent book, Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children (2012), has been translated into several languages and was recognized by the American Library Association as one of the top-ten business books of 2012. A frequent recipient of awards for both his writing and teaching, Bakan has worked on landmark legal cases and government policy, and serves regularly as a public speaker and media commentator. Also a professional jazz guitarist, Bakan lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife, Rebecca Jenkins, and their two children, Myim and Sadie.

Ashfaq Rahman

Managing Director, The Social Marketing Company (SMC,) Bangladesh

Ashfaq Rahman is the Managing Director of the Social Marketing Company (SMC) Bangladesh. He has over 25 years of experience in Social Marketing working extensively in Family Planning, Child Health, Nutrition and HIV/AIDS.  His core area of expertise includes strategic planning and management of programs particularly designed to achieve results focused on sustainability and involving significant private sector engagement.  Mr. Rahman has worked for the Social Marketing Company for over 18 years helping guide the organization to grow into one of the largest and most successful social marketing entities in family planning and child health globally, fully sustainable from its own resources. Mr. Rahman has also worked extensively in Pakistan, most recently with the Population Council as the Chief of Party of the USAID funded FALAH project. Between 2003 and 2007, he was the Chief of Party for the Futures Group managed Key Social Marketing project Pakistan where he implemented the Manufacturers Model, supporting the private sector manufacturers and suppliers to build a bigger and more attractive market for their contraceptive brands. Mr. Rahman has a Bachelor Degree in Chemistry and a MBA in Marketing.  He is married  with three children.

Irma Martam

Director of Pulih Foundation, Partner of Tulodo

Irma is Director of Pulih Foundation. She also a partner in Tulodo a new Social and Behavioral Change Consultant. She brings skills and experience in behavior change, qualitative research and psychology. After graduating from the University of Indonesia, she worked as a qualitative market researcher in Nielsen. She then started her own enterprise, specializing in qualitative research. She felt that managing commercial research alone was not fulfilling enough and so she joined Pulih Foundation, an Indonesian NGO focusing on psychosocial interventions to prevent violence and support recovery from trauma. Irma’s experience as a licensed psychologist, as well as in commercial marketing and community development led her to seek advanced training in social marketing through her master program at George Washington University, where she specialized in health communication and marketing. Her experience and training has seen Irma focus on prevention programs for social and behavioral change, with special interests in gender equality and violence issue.

Neelley Hicks

Director of ICT4D Church Initiatives at United Methodist Communications

Where technology and social good meet, you will find Neelley Hicks leading historic efforts in The United Methodist Church to apply ICTs for enhanced education, health and job-skills development in low-resource parts of the world.

As Director of ICT4D Church Initiatives at United Methodist Communications – the global communications agency of The United Methodist Church – Hicks manages a portfolio that spans nine African countries, the Philippines and other parts of the developing world. Her passion to build appropriate, affordable and accessible solutions for emerging nations has led to speaking engagements at the United Nations InfoPoverty World Conference in Geneva, Switzerland and New York, as well as teaching opportunities in Africa, Haiti and the Philippines.

An ordained deacon in The United Methodist Church, Hicks holds a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Belhaven College.

Dr Sinead Duane

National University of Ireland, Galway

Dr Sinead Duane has worked in the field of social marketing for the last six years and specialises in partnership research, M-health engagement and systems thinking. Upon completion of her Masters in Business Studies at National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) in 2008, Dr Duane was awarded a Research Fellowship with safefood, the Food Safety Promotions Board on the island of Ireland. During this time Dr Duane project managed safefood’s first social marketing pilot initiative which aimed to tackle the issue of male obesity on the island of Ireland. As part of this Research Fellowship, Dr Duane completed her PhD in the development of a social marketing partnership model. This research bridged the gap between the practical implementation of social marketing partnerships and its theoretical development. Dr Duane joined the Discipline of General Practice in NUIG in 2012, as the Social Marketing Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the SIMPle Project. The SIMPle project is an interdisciplinary programme between the disciplines of social marketing, epidemiology, microbiology, health economics and general practice. SIMPle assessed the impact of a complex intervention designed to increase the quality of antibiotic prescribing in primary care and is one on the largest non-pharmaceutical trials ever conducted in Ireland.

Dr. Gavin Macgregor-Skinner

Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences, Penn State Hershey Medical Center

Gavin Macgregor-Skinner is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at Penn State Hershey Medical Center and teaches three graduate courses on Public Health Preparedness for Disasters and Terrorist Emergencies. He is an adjunct professor at Harvard Medical School and teaches graduate students in the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Fellowship program.

Dr. Macgregor-Skinner was invited by and funded by the Nigerian Government to lead a team from the Elizabeth R. Griffin Foundation to conduct seminars and training workshops and establish Hospital Ebola Isolation Suites. At the invitation of US State Departments of Health, he has conducted onsite biorisk management risk assessments for Ebola and seminars and workshops at hospitals in the States of California, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Tennessee. He had three trips to West Africa for U.S. Government Agencies and United Nations Agencies treating Ebola patients and implementing whole community approaches in Liberia, Nigeria, and at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, USA. He has provided expert opinions on Ebola in TV interviews on CNN, BBC, Aljazeera, C-SPAN Canada CTV, Australia ABC that are available at http://www.ergriffinresearch.org/about/news.php

Dr. Macgregor-Skinner has degrees in veterinary medicine and surgery from the University of Queensland, Australia, a master of science in emerging infectious and zoonotic diseases from the University of London, England, and a master of public health in epidemiology and international health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in England. His passion is engaging networks of experts who share knowledge and experiences to increase the global understanding of risk and preparedness.

Kathleen Chell

PhD student at QUT

Kathleen Chell is a final year PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research focuses on online donor appreciation through social networking sites as a means for donor identity development and repeat donation behaviour, and has published in the International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing as well as local and international conference proceedings. Kathleen currently works as a research assistant with the Donor and Community Research team at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, Sessional Academic at QUT and is theEvent Coordinator and Student Representative on the Australian Association of Social Marketing management committee.

Dr. Thomas Anker

University of Glasgow

Thomas Boysen Anker is a philosopher and social marketer. He holds a PhD in marketing ethics from the University of Copenhagen and is currently employed as a lecturer and researcher at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. His interest in social marketing spans critical social marketing, social marketing ethics and the application of non-conventional theory and new business models to the strategic development of social marketing campaigns and interventions. Thomas’ academic work has been published in journals such as Marketing Theory, Journal of Social Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics and European Journal of Marketing. Currently, he is working on a research monograph on truth in marketing (Routledge). Thomas has run a series of social marketing workshops for public health practitioners and taught social marketing at undergraduate and postgraduate level. During his PhD he stayed two years as a visiting researcher at the Institute for Social Marketing, University of Stirling. You can follow Thomas up-dates on social marketing on Twitter @BoysenAnker.

Yvonne MacPherson

Director, BBC Media Action USA

Yvonne MacPherson is Director of BBC Media Action USA (formally BBC World Service Trust USA). Yvonne represents BBC Media Action in the US, and most recently, led the development of the popular radio drama for Ebola prevention in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Prior to this, Yvonne was Country Director of the BBC World Service Trust in India. In this role she was responsible for all strategic, program, financial and technical aspects of the Trust’s operations in India. While working for the Trust in India from 2004-2011, Yvonne designed and managed behavior change initiatives on HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, gender equality and livelihoods, among others. These programs where locally produced, using radio, television, online and mobile phones combined with community outreach to provide vital information to people in need. Yvonne’s experience covers the breadth of communication formats, from drama, interactive discussion programs, public service advertisements, reality television shows, competitions, outdoor advertising to mobile ring tones, job aids and continuing education content. Prior to joining the BBC, she managed health projects in Africa and Asia for NGOs and UN agencies and was a healthcare Business Analyst in London. She holds a MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA (Hons) from McGill University, Montreal Canada, and has completed many short courses, including one on Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, USA. Yvonne was nominated for the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights in 2008 and was selected as an Asia Society Young Leader in 2011.

Joan Young

CEO, Colmar Brunton

Joan is the CEO of Colmar Brunton and her focus is on adding value to the research and consultancy CB delivers. She maintains an active role in key projects and provides strategic consultancy to government agencies seeking to create effective policy, communications, services, products and programmes.

Joan first joined Colmar Brunton 24 years ago to establish the Wellington Qualitative Unit and The Social Research Agency. She was made Joint Managing Director of the Wellington office in 1996. In 1998 Joan obtained an International Certificate in Social Marketing from Georgetown University and moved to Australia to establish our government research business which is now a leading supplier of social research for Australian government and not-for-profit agencies.
Joan is recognised as a leading strategic social marketing and evaluation consultant internationally and regularly speaks and runs workshops at national and international conferences including most recently the World Social Marketing Conference in Toronto and the AMI Government Marketing conference in Melbourne and the Australian Association of Social Marketing Seminar in Brisbane. The research Joan coordinated for the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Let’s Read Campaign won the best Poster Session at the World Social Marketing Conference and the South Australian Regional Road Safety Campaign was short-listed for the International Research Effectiveness Awards in Atlanta last year. Joan has extensive experience in the health sector having served on the ACT Health promotion Board from 1999 to 2002 and coordinated social marketing research into reducing risky drinking behaviours, increasing physical activity, reducing obesity, mental health and social connectedness, aged care, dementia, diabetes.

Dr Ross Gordon

Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Macquarie University, Sydney

Ross is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Macquarie University in Sydney. He previously worked at and remains a member of the Centre for Health Initiatives at the University of Wollongong, and also worked at the Institute for Social Marketing at The Open University (ISM-Open) and prior to that the ISM at the University of Stirling. He is also a member of the management committee of the Australian Association of Social Marketing (AASM). His expertise lies in social marketing, consumer cultures, and critical marketing teaching and research. He has been a principal or named investigator on projects attracting over $6.5m in research funds in Australia, UK, Europe and India.

He has extensive experience managing and conducting research using mixed methodologies including longitudinal quantitative surveys, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, focus groups, depth interviews, observation research, ethnography, content analysis, and experimental studies. His current research interests include, social marketing theory and practice, strategic and systems level social marketing, consumer cultures, critical social marketing, sustainability, marketing ethics, and critical marketing. Ross is also a specialist on the topic of alcohol marketing. He has acted an expert advisor to the Scottish Government, the European Commission, Cancer Institute, and a range of other NGOs on various social marketing topics.

He has published 60 academic journals, book chapters and conference papers, including in outlets such as the European Journal of Marketing, Marketing Theory, and the Journal of Social Marketing, and has delivered numerous client reports and invited speaking engagements. He is an academic co-chair of the 2015 World Social Marketing Conference, is guest editing a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management on Advancing Theory and Research in Social Marketing, and is the incoming new president of the Australian Association of Social Marketing. He will also be co-authoring a textbook on strategic social marketing with Jeff French due for completion in late 2014. Ross is a keen player and follower of sports including football, tennis and cycling, loves travelling, enjoys current affairs, and is a big music fan and occasional techno DJ.

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=npZ4I3gAAAAJ&hl=en

Linkedin: http://au.linkedin.com/pub/dr-ross-gordon/4a/25b/38a

Professor Jeff French

Conference Chair

Jeff French is a recognised global leader in the application of behaviour change and social marketing. Jeff has extensive experience of developing leading and evaluating behaviour change projects, social marketing programmes and the development of communication strategies at international, national, regional and local level.

With over 30 years experience at the interface between government, public, private and NGO sectors Jeff has a broad practical and theoretical understanding of national and international health and social development issues.

Jeff and has published over 70 chapters, articles and books in the fields of behaviour change, social marketing, community development, health promotion and communications. Jeff is a visiting professor at Brunel University and Brighton University and a Fellow at Kings College University London and teaches at four other Universities in the UK.

Jeff was the Director of Communication and Policy at the Health Development Agency for five years from 2000 – 2005. In March 2005 From July 2006 through to July 2009 Jeff set up and managed the National Social Marketing Centre for England. In August 2009 Jeff became the Chief Executive of Strategic Social Marketing Ltd.

Strategic Social Marketing works with clients from all over the world in the private, NGO and public sector on the development and evaluation of social behaviour change programmes. Strategic Social Marketing also provides consultancy services to some of the world’s biggest corporate communications and research companies.

Jeff continues to act as the principle adviser to the National Social Marketing Centre and the Department of Health behaviour Change and Social Marketing policy team. Jeff also acts as an advisor to a number of national policy committees, the EUCDC Knowledge and Resource Centre in Health Communication project, and is a member of the organising committee of the Global Social Marketer’s network. Jeff is a member of the editorial Boards of the International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing and the Journal of Social Marketing.

Jeff is Conference Chair of the World Social Marketing Conference. His new book ‘Social Marketing and Public Health Theory and Practice’, published by Oxford University Press is now available. Jeff is also the author of the NSMC’s new guide to procuring and managing the delivery of social marketing service.