Ella Chan is in her second year at UBC Medicine in Vancouver, BC. She is an advocate for increasing science and health literacy. She started a YouTube channel, Sci Files, when she was twelve, dedicated to encouraging all to pursue degrees in STEAM fields. She is a member of the UNESCO Youth Advisory Group in the Natural Sciences, where she coordinated the development of a White Paper on Open Science.

Dr. Aled Edwards leads the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), counted among the world’s most successful public-private partnership in the pharmaceutical sector. The SGC generates research tools and knowledge to support basic science and early-stage drug discovery, and since 2004 has placed all its research output into the public domain without restriction, including without patents as a core principle. Dr. Edwards is also a Professor and Temerty Nexus Chair of Health Innovation and Technology at the University Toronto.

Kris Noakes is a citizen of the Anishinabek Nation, a member of Nipissing First Nation living with ALS.  She has been an Indigenous advocate at the Municipal, Provincial, Federal levels. Currently, Kris is a member of the Board of Directors for the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic, a member of the Federal Judicial Advisory Committee for the GTA, a member of ALS Canada’s Board of Directors and a member of ALS Canada’s Revolution Ride Committee.

Dr. Jo Anne Stratton is an Assistant Professor at The Neuro and the Scientific Chair of the Grassroots Committee at the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute (TOSI GRC). She is a neuroscientist working with clinical material derived from the open science tissue repository (C-BIG) at The Neuro and specialised in applying single-cell technologies to these samples to better understand and treat neurological diseases. Dr. Stratton also sits on the C-BIG Tissue and Data Committee to ensure the responsible and ethical use of samples obtained from this open science resource. She is also a part of the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) network – which is an organization dedicated to transparency, open access data sharing, and collaboration to accelerate the pace of discovery, and inform the path to a cure for Parkinson’s.

Dr. Susan Bartels is a Clinician-Scientist and Canada Research Chair in Humanitarian Health Equity at Queen’s University. In addition to practicing emergency medicine, she conducts public health research focused on how women and children are impacted by humanitarian crises. Dr. Bartels’s interests lie in using innovative methods to improve the social determinants of health in settings of armed conflict and natural disasters. She completed fellowship and graduate training at Harvard University before joining Queen’s as faculty in 2014.

Dr. Jane Heffernan is a Full Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at York University, where she leads the Modelling Infection & Immunity Lab. She is a co-Director of the Canadian Centre for Disease Modelling, and President-Elect of the international Society of Mathematical Biology. Dr Heffernan is a member of the Canadian Immunization Research Network, and the Royal Society of Canada’s, College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She is a scientific advisor to the COVID Immunity Task Force and Health Canada.

Dr. Kelly Skinner is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo and was awarded a CIHR Applied Public Health Chair. She is a social scientist and engages in interdisciplinary, community-based, and collaborative research and evaluation with northern communities, partners, and governments. Her team captures community-led food initiatives in adapting to climate change and improving food security, northern food systems and environments, health equity, self-determination, and well-being.