Dr. Cristina Dominguez is a civil engineer from Guatemala whose research and leadership advance sustainable energy access and SDG7 across Latin America and beyond. She pioneered geospatial modelling to forecast rural energy demand, led the development of open-source energy access modelling tools, and has delivered capacity building for policymakers, researchers, community members, women and youth. Cristina is a full member and former Executive Committee Secretary of OWSD Guatemala, committed to bridging science, policy, and community action for access to clean, affordable energy.

Dr. Duleeka Sandamali Gunarathne is a chemical and process engineer from Sri Lanka, specializing in bioenergy systems. Her research focuses on biomass thermochemical conversion technologies, and she is committed to sustainable energy education. Duleeka has pioneered practical solutions for clean energy, mentored future professionals, and contributed as a technical expert to national and international energy initiatives.

Dr. Fadia Alhaj Hussien is an organic chemist from Syria, specializing in green and sustainable chemistry. Her research focuses on recycling steel industry waste into catalysts for clean hydrogen and biofuel production, advancing affordable and sustainable energy solutions. Fadia mentors students in AI-assisted catalyst design, collaborates with industry, and leads environmental awareness initiatives, empowering her community toward a more sustainable future.

Dr. Tabitha Awuor Amollo is a physicist and materials scientist from Kenya, specializing in solar energy conversion and thin film technology. Her research focuses on developing cost-effective, high-performance solar cells and translating these innovations into community solutions, such as solar-powered refrigeration for rural health centers. Tabitha mentors women and students in STEM, leads a photovoltaics research lab, and collaborates internationally to drive affordable, clean energy for Africa.

Dr. Victoire Ghafi Kondi Akara is a Togolese climate–energy scientist based in Kigali, Rwanda. With over 11 years’ experience, her work focuses on electricity-demand modelling, renewable integration, and energy-sector MRV systems supporting SDG7 in Africa. She is a Resident Researcher at AIMS-RIC, contributes to national and regional energy policies, supports African Union efficiency initiatives, and mentors emerging STEM leaders. Her work bridges science, policy, and community impact to advance reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy solutions.

Alejandra Paniagua-Avila is a Guatemalan medical doctor and early career scientist dedicated to advancing access to recovery-oriented mental health services for all. She has a particular interest in addressing the health and social needs of people living with serious mental conditions associated with psychosis, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Her research is done in partnership with Maya Indigenous populations and other populations that experience health disparities due to historical discrimination and social exclusion. Her work draws from participatory qualitative approaches, epidemiology, and implementation research to design, implement and evaluate mental health interventions in rural Guatemala and other under-resourced settings. Dr. Paniagua-Avila has published more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and presented research findings at multiple scientific conferences. Her work has been published in high-impact journals, including The Lancet – Regional Health Americas. She is a steering committee member of RedeAmericas, a network of mental health researchers and practitioners across Latin America. She is also a co-founder of Asociación para la Salud Mental, a recently established nonprofit that promotes the recovery of people living with serious mental illnesses in Guatemala through research, capacity strengthening, and program development. She is committed to strengthening research capacity for mental health in Guatemala and has mentored more than 10 students and trainees, many of whom have pursued public health and research careers.

Halima Twabi is a biostatistician from Malawi who employs advanced statistical methodologies and data-driven approaches to understand health issues. Through these approaches, her work identifies factors contributing to health disparities among vulnerable populations such as women and children and assesses intervention effectiveness, especially those affected by HIV infection, in socio-economically disadvantaged communities. Her previous work has examined the effects of maternal HIV on adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as low birth weight and perinatal mortality. Her research has also utilized innovative statistical methods to investigate the influence of unhealthy food consumption on childhood overweight, a growing challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2023, she was named a Young Affiliate of The World Academy of Sciences and received the 2020 L’Oréal-UNESCO Young Talent Award for Sub-Saharan Africa. She is a fellow of the DELTAS Sub-Saharan Africa Consortium on the Advancement of Biostatistics (SSACAB) program and a founding member of the Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (Gi-STEAM) network. She currently serves as the Treasurer for both the International Biometric Society’s Sub-Saharan Africa Network (IBS-SUSAN) and its Malawi region. She is currently collaborating on a project ‘Strengthening Women’s Research Network and Capacity to Address Women’s Health in Sub-Saharan Africa’ project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Grand Challenges as a country lead for Malawi.

Manal Badrasawi is a clinical nutrition scientist from Palestine whose expertise lies in clinical nutrition, women’s health, geriatric nutrition, and public health. As a prolific researcher, she has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals, covering topics such as dietary behaviors, nutritional epidemiology, chronic disease management, and the psychosocial aspects of health. Her work frequently integrates innovative approaches, such as machine learning, to analyze complex nutritional and health data. Dr. Badrasawi has been instrumental in advancing research on food insecurity, aging, and nutritional health in Palestine. She has led and participated in several funded projects, including the Pal-Age Project, which focuses on aging populations, and the development of the Palestinian Food Atlas, a tool for improving nutrition assessment and education. Her commitment to community-oriented research is further exemplified by her role as the principal investigator in studies addressing food insecurity and malnutrition among vulnerable populations. In addition to her academic and research contributions, Dr. Badrasawi has developed educational resources, including illustrated food exchange lists, nutritional modules for specific patient populations, and a photographic food atlas. These tools are widely recognized for their cultural relevance and practical application in clinical practice and public health interventions.

Reem Obaydo is a Syrian pharmaceutical analytical chemist and educator who, despite the hardships of war, economic constraints, and a lack of research infrastructure, remains committed to advancing scientific knowledge and mentoring young researchers, particularly women. Her research focuses on green analytical chemistry, where she develops sustainable, eco-friendly methods for pharmaceutical analysis. By reducing the use of hazardous chemicals in drug testing, her work ensures the safety and efficacy of medicines while minimizing environmental and health risks. She also integrates sustainability assessment tools to evaluate the environmental and health impact of her analytical methods, ensuring they adhere to green chemistry principles. Dr. Obaydo’s research plays a vital role in improving public health by reducing exposure to harmful substances in pharmaceuticals. By developing greener quality control techniques, she enhances drug safety and prevents the introduction of toxic residues into the environment. Her work also fosters safer laboratory environments by reducing researchers’ exposure to hazardous chemicals. Beyond pharmaceutical sustainability, Dr. Obaydo has supported Syrian women in conflict-affected areas by providing digital guidance on mental health management, ensuring accessible care for those in need. She has fostered international collaborations with researchers from Egypt, Turkey, India, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Kingdom. Due to travel restrictions imposed on Syrian scholars, she has participated in international conferences online to promote green analytical chemistry, advocating for sustainable scientific research and safer practices in pharmaceutical laboratories worldwide.

Sarmila Tandukar is an environmental engineer from Nepal whose research bridges the gap between environmental microbiology and public health and helps to improve infectious disease preparedness, build public health infrastructure, and advance global health security. Her research mostly focuses on environmental monitoring, wastewater surveillance, and public health microbiology, with a particular focus on detecting and identifying pathogens in water systems. She tracks disease-causing microorganisms and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes to identify emerging health threats in wastewater, sewage, river water, and drinking water sources, using molecular techniques like genomics, metagenomics, and qPCR-based detection methods. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, bridging microbiology, environmental science, epidemiology, and public health to provide critical insights into disease transmission dynamics and waterborne health risks. Her work ensures early detection of emerging infectious diseases and mitigation techniques to reduce disease burden by producing high-resolution epidemiological data, which enables evidence-based decision-making for public health actions. Furthermore, her research provides scientific evidence for policymakers, contributing to the development of water safety regulations, wastewater treatment guidelines, and disease control strategies at both national and global levels.

Dr Augustina Clara Alexander is a civil and water resources engineer from Tanzania. Her research focuses on the areas of water supply and treatment, hydrological modeling, climate change and land-use impact assessment, and water resources evaluation and management. Augustina is part of Unlocking Resilient Benefits from African water resources (RESBEN), a project looking for a holistic understanding of processes and relationships of factors involved in sustainable water resource management and development while focusing on a novel research theory, methodologies and practice.

Dr Rivera is a biologist from Honduras. She has a multidisciplinary research background that ranges from analyzing the management of larval dispersal, to the use of perception research to assess the adaptive capacity of coastal communities. Her Mesoamerican Reef Regional Water Quality Monitoring Program —an initiative across three countries, 90 sites and over 20 institutions — established a unified monitoring protocol and provided invaluable data on key contaminants in principal tourist zones. Currently, Antonella works on generating research to support science-based decision-making in fisheries and water quality.

Dr Tasrina Rabia Choudhury is a chemist from Bangladesh with expertise ranging from water quality improvement to environmental restoration, from climate change to risk assessment and environmental modeling, and more. She is working to pioneer novel approaches in the remediation techniques of toxic elements from wastewater and drinking water, ensuring the delivery of safe drinking water to underserved communities. Tasrina has actively engaged with local communities, implementing awareness campaigns that educate them about the importance of hygiene and efficient water use.

Dr Tasrina Rabia Choudhury is a chemist from Bangladesh with expertise ranging from water quality improvement to environmental restoration, from climate change to risk assessment and environmental modeling, and more. She is working to pioneer novel approaches in the remediation techniques of toxic elements from wastewater and drinking water, ensuring the delivery of safe drinking water to underserved communities. Tasrina has actively engaged with local communities, implementing awareness campaigns that educate them about the importance of hygiene and efficient water use.

Dr Zubeda Ukundimana is a chemical and environmental engineer from Rwanda, working as lecturer and environmental impact assessment consultant in Uganda. Her research has focused on assessing the wetland vulnerability to wastewater and developing treatment processes for abating pollutants concentration to protect receiving water bodies. Currently, Zubeda coordinates the North-South Alliance for Inclusive Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (ALL4WASH) — bringing together international partners to confront challenges of water supply and sanitation through mutual cooperation.

Carla Fabiana Crespo Melgar is a biochemist focused on increasing agricultural productivity as a crucial step to alleviate hunger. With her research, she is investigating the potential of using beneficial microorganisms and application protocols as biocontrollers, biofertilizers, bioinoculants and growth promoters for crop production in Bolivia and the region, with the aim of exploring ways that they can be produced locally by communities or small companies, once the technology and application protocols are validated.

Eugenie Kayitesi is a food scientist, who is trying to improve nutrition, diet diversity and food security in Africa developing unique products from underutilized food sources, as well as improving their nutritional composition and health promoting constituents. The core of her research relates to indigenous, underutilized African plant-based foods, such as legumes, cereals, green leafy vegetables and fruits. Her work has highlighted the importance of using readily available and affordable food crops to create food products with improved nutritional, functional and sensory quality.

Haneen Dwaib has a background in Nutrition and Public Health, and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences. She is investigating dietary interventions to tackle obesity as a case of disguised hunger, since the lack of a decent, well-balanced diet causes deficits in the majority of micronutrients and occasionally macronutrients. Her research focuses on studying the gut microbiota and to find non-invasive early detection biomarkers of premature cardiovascular dysfunction and adipose tissue inflammation in pre-diabetic laboratory rats.

Munkhjargal Tserendorj is a Veterinary Doctor with a PhD in Animal and Food Hygiene, who is helping Mongolia to control economically important tick-borne diseases. She has conducted national and international projects for strengthening capacities in the diagnosis and treatment of animal diseases, especially vector-borne diseases, leading to the development of effective strategies to decrease severe economic losses in the small ruminants’ population in Mongolia. Data from these studies is now used as base information for initiating prevention and control programs.

Renuka Attanayake is a plant pathologist working on crop disease identification and management in Sri Lanka. Her projects include the optimization of a rapid detection method of coconut phytoplasma in Sri Lanka, and the identification of genetic diversity of white mold pathogen on cabbage and black mold on onions. With her work, she is contributing to the development of resistant inducer treatments and farmers’ education to reduce the negative effects of some of the most common crop diseases in her country.

Dr Yeyinou Laura Estelle Loko is an entomologist with a PhD in plant genetic resources and crop protection committed to the reduction of losses caused by insect pests. She develops control methods that respect human health and the environment, favoring the use of naturally resistant varieties, medicinal plants with insecticidal properties, entomopathogenic microorganisms, and predators. She is also working on the development of a digital toolbox and an intelligent monitoring system adapted to smallholder farmers for effective pest management in Benin.

Dr Abeer Ahmed Qaed Ahmed is a biologist investigating several different microbiology- and nanotechnology-based solutions to problems such as carbon emissions, drug-resistant pathogens, and fossil fuel dependence. She has studied the use of microbial inoculants in agricultural land to increase the carbon sequestration effect and improve soil quality for agriculture, as well as the use of microbes to convert lignocellulosic biomass into pharmaceuticals and other chemical products, as a more sustainable alternative to fossil-based products. Dr. Ahmed also works on understanding the effects of differing environmental and nutritional conditions on microbial biological processes. This can lead to novel methods to treat, attenuate, and diagnose multi-drug resistant microorganisms.

Dr. Ahmed has held research fellowships at North-West University, South Africa (2015) and the University of South Africa (2016-2017). She was selected for the BioVision.Nxt fellowship programme in Lyon France in 2013, and for TWAS/BioVisionAlexandria.NXT in Alexandria, Egypt in 2014. She is an active member of the Water Institute of Southern Africa (WISA), and an executive member of the Yemen Women Association for Science & Technology (YWAST). In addition, she is a full member of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD).

Dr Ashani Savinda Ranathunga is focused on turning industrial and agricultural waste into anthropogenic (man-made) soil for geotechnical engineering-related applications. She is a proponent of the “waste to wealth” concept, which is to produce green and value-added products from waste for sustainable and greener applications. Her research findings enable the effective utilization of locally available waste as secondary raw materials for economical and ecofriendly construction and development projects.

Specifically, she is using industrial waste products like fly ash and calcium carbide residues, and agricultural waste products like paddy husk ash and corn cob ash, to stabilize soft soil that is otherwise too weak for construction, contributing to greater longevity of infrastructure. She is also using the same waste products to rehabilitate degraded land and soil in abandoned mines, reducing environmental pollution and adverse social impacts. In addition, she looks at the effective utilization of shallow geothermal resources for energy production in rural areas of Sri Lanka.

Dr Ranathunga completed her undergraduate degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Ruhuna in 2013, graduating at the top of her class. She received her PhD from Monash University, Australia, in 2017, where she won the best PhD thesis award and the postgraduate publication award for her work on enhancing extraction of coal bed methane from deep underground coal seams by injecting CO2. Her findings demonstrated the opportunities of using low-rank coal for CO2-Enhanced Coal Bed Methane (CO2-ECBM).After completing her PhD, she joined the University of Moratuwa as a Lecturer in the Department of Civil Engineering.

Dr Flor de Mayo González Miranda is trying to engineer better landslide prevention for vulnerable areas in Guatemala. Climate change is causing increasingly strong periods of rain in the country, where much of the terrain is rugged. Due to poverty and the lack of governmental and private programs for decent housing, many people live in settlements on the slopes of ravines, where rain and other events make landslides more frequent. Landslides obstruct roads and sometimes bury entire communities.

Dr González Miranda is investigating how a specific grass in the vetiver family, Chrysopogon Zizaniodes, can help to prevent landslides. Through soil tests, X-ray diffraction and other techniques, she has shown how the plants’ roots alter the chemical, physical and mechanical behavior of the soil, reducing the speed of soil infiltration as well as soil plasticity. In addition to this work, Dr. González Miranda has also studied the flow of fresh water into Guatemala’s ports, and the thermal behavior of sand sericite as a precursor to mullite material.

Dr González Miranda earned a certification as a production control technician from Rafael Landivar University in 1986, and a bachelor’s degree  in industrial engineering from San Carlos University in 2002. She holds two master’s degrees in environmental science: from San Carlos University (2008) and Cadiz University in Spain (2009). She has worked as an engineer in various capacities, including as an environmental adviser for the company Superingenieria. In 2019, she earned her PhD in industrial and environmental engineering from the University of Almería, Spain. She is currently a researcher and Lecturer in the School of Industrial Mechanics at San Carlos University.

Dr González Miranda is very active in public outreach, training and awareness raising. She has collaborated with the National Council of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education of Guatemala on the TIC-STEAM project to provide training in programming, robotics and environmental care to girls in rural areas. She has conducted free trainings for women, youth and community leaders on manufacturing simple products, safety and industrial hygiene, and best practices for manufacturing, among other topics. She has also been interviewed in the newspaper Prensa Libre to provide expert analysis on Guatemala’s multi-million dollar Chimaltenango Bypass, which gave rise to a corruption case related to the project.

Gabriela Montenegro-Bethancourt is a nutritionist and food scientist whose work contributes to strengthen primary health care in rural Guatemala. She works in the most impoverished communities in Guatemala’s to provide health care in Mayan languages and contribute to reducing maternal mortality and child malnutrition, overcoming barriers to the treatment of complex medical conditions, providing optimal care to children and adults with chronic conditions, and promoting access to clean water. Her research is designed to take into consideration nutrition’s broad strategic possibilities, such as empowering women, increasing the availability of nutrient-rich foods, improving access to health services, and design effective policies.

Dr Gawsia Wahidunnessa Chowdhury is committed to conserving the aquatic ecosystems and threatened species of Bangladesh. In particular, she focuses on assessing the extent of and the risks from plastic pollution, which is closely linked to climate change. Microplastics and other plastics enter the waterways in Bangladesh from fishing nets, among other sources, and are harmful to threatened species and habitats. Dr Chowdhury is leading an effort to educate women in poor and marginalized fishing communities about how discarded Nylon-6 fishing nets can be turned into value-added products such as carpets and clothing, creating an alternative income source for the communities while protecting the wetland habitats.

Dr Chowdhury received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Zoology from the University of Dhaka and joined Noakhali Science and Technology University in 2006. She was awarded the prestigious Commonwealth Academic Staff Scholarship to study for her PhD in Zoology at the University of Cambridge, completing it in 2012. Since 2013 she has worked at the University of Dhaka, teaching animal diversity, wetland ecology and other topics in zoology.

She has received many awards and grants, including a Wildlife Conservation Society Fellowship. She is a board member of the conservation organization WildTeam and member of the Zoological Society of Bangladesh, and has been appointed regional co-chair of the South Asian Invertebrate Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). She is also a member of the Commission on Education and Communication and the IUCN Species Survival Commission. She is an alumna of the Aquatic Ecology Group, University of Cambridge.

Dr Chowdhury was the country lead for the National Geographic “Sea to Source: Ganges” expedition in 2019–2020. She was responsible for assembling a research team and organizing stakeholder meetings and for all national operations and logistics. Following the expedition, she led a World Bank-funded pilot project to turn the research findings from the expedition into a community-based solution involving several international technical partners. Dr Chowdhury aspires to get more women engaged in science education and conservation efforts in Bangladesh, and to make scientific findings understandable to the public:

Dr Heyddy Calderon is working to provide secure and sustainable water sources for vulnerable populations in a region of Central America known as the Dry Corridor, spanning Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. About 3.5 million people out of 10.5 million in the region need humanitarian assistance, and 1.6 million suffer food insecurity. Precipitation can be scarce for long periods, exacerbated by climate change. To better understand climate threats and vulnerability in the region, Dr Calderon and colleagues formed a network of Central American water, social, and economic scientists who are committed to improving the population’s capacity to cope with climate variability and climate change, and to providing information that can help decision-makers and local stakeholders plan and prepare for the future.

Dr Calderon’s first became interested in sustainable water management as an undergraduate in chemical engineering. After graduating in 2001, she received a grant from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to pursue a master’s degree in hydrogeology at the University of Calgary, where she focused on groundwater flow modeling. After graduating in 2004, she worked for 5 years as adjunct professor at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, Managua (UNAN-Managua), where she realized the need for an integrative and collaborative approach to tackle the impact of climate change in water resources. This led her to the UNESCO Institute for Water Education, now the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands, where she completed a PhD in Hydrology and Water Resources in 2014.In 2018, she was appointed the first female and youngest director of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at UNAN-Managua, where she has worked since 2016.Dr. Calderon has received an International Science Foundation grant (2012) and the prestigious Faculty for the Future Grant from the Schlumberger Foundation (2012–2014). She has been invited as guest lecturer in water resources and climate change at various Central American universities and the University of Denver. She has supervised several PhD, master’s and undergrad theses and has collaborated with the National Water Authority of Nicaragua.

Dr Myriam Mujawamariya is helping Rwanda prepare for climate change by studying how various types of indigenous trees respond to different climate scenarios. Erosion is a major environmental concern in Rwanda, and many efforts are being put into landscape restoration and ecosystem-based adaptation. However, greater knowledge is needed about how trees will respond to higher temperatures and other climatic changes, as well as which trees can best support ecosystem services such as soil stabilization, climate regulation, biodiversity and bioenergy.

To simulate different climate change scenarios, Dr Mujawamariya tested the physiological responses of 20 native species grown at three sites along an elevation gradient. Her research is part of the unique Rwanda Tropical Elevation Experiment, Rwanda TREE project. The project will contribute to understanding how climate change will influence tropical forest cover, carbon sequestration and biodiversity not only in Rwanda but in all of Africa’s Western Rift Valley region and beyond.

Dr Mujawamariya received her bachelor’s degree in biology at the former National University of Rwanda in 2007 and a master’s degree in plant sciences, specializing in natural resources management, from Wageningen University in the Netherlands in 2012. She received her PhD in natural sciences, specializing in environmental science, from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2021. She began working at the University of Rwanda in 2007 as as a Tutorial Assistant and then Assistant Lecturer since 2013. Last year, she was promoted to Lecturer.

Dr Mujawamariya is a member of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and is a Research Associate at the Center of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resources Management (CoEB). She has won numerous grants for her work, including the Belgian ARES grant, and grants from the Rwanda National Council of Science and Technology and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). She has participated in many community outreach activities through the University of Rwanda and CoEB to raise awareness for biodiversity conservation, including educating school children about environmental protection.

Dr Ghada Dushaq is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Photonics Research lab of NYU Abu Dhabi. As a researcher in applied physics, she investigates new and innovative materials, structures and process technologies to improve the performance of high-speed optoelectronics, nanoelectronics and photonics devices. Her research on the use of silicon, germanium, III-V compound semiconductors, and other 2D materials is intended to improve the efficiency of current technologies and address their limitations.

Ghada received her bachelor’s degree in Physics and Mathematics from Birzeit University, Palestine, with distinction in 2009. She went on to graduate with an MSc in Physics from the University of Jordan in 2012, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She then pursued a PhD in Microsystems Engineering at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Khalifa University, in Abu Dhabi under a cooperative program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 2017.

Ghada has received several awards for her research, including the International Association of Advanced Materials (IAAM) Scientist Medal for 2018, the Post-Doctoral Conference and Travel Award from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2018, and the Falling Walls Lab prize in 2020, for her work on “Breaking the Wall of High-Speed Optical Communication,” awarded at the World Science Summit in Berlin, 2020.

She has published over 35 papers in international peer-reviewed scientific journals and conference proceedings. She is also a reviewer for several scientific journals including Optics Express, Advanced Optical Materials, Scientific Reports, Applied Optics, Optical Materials Express, Journal of Applied Physics, Photovoltaic Specialist Conferences (IEEE PVSC) and the Journal of Materials Science.

Dr Imalka Munaweera is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Sri Lanka. Her research focuses on using synthetic chemistry techniques to produce nanoparticles and nanofibre composites that can be applied in a range of functions, from drug delivery to water filtration to minimizing post-harvest losses of fruits and vegetables. She has made particular advances in using nanotechnology to produce environmentally-friendly and cost-effective crop fertilizers, and in developing chemoradiotherapeutic formulations and radiotherapeutic bandages for use in lung and skin cancer treatment.

Imalka first became interested in functional and applied materials as an undergraduate at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, where she worked on applications of iron oxide nanoparticles. As a master’s student at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, she gravitated towards nanofertilizer research, for which she received the National Science and Technology Award in 2010 and holds two US patents. She went on to do a PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she developed an innovative approach that could ultimately enable clinicians to target and aggressively reduce tumor burden in cancer patients. She also holds two US patents as well as a Sri Lankan patent and an international patent for this technology.

Following three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Imalka worked as an Assistant Professor at Prairie View A&M University in Texas before returning to Sri Lanka, where she has worked since 2019.

Imalka received a Sri Lankan National Research Council Private-Public Partnership grant in 2019 and a research grant from TWAS, the World Academy of Sciences, in 2020. She has won several awards and has published many papers in prestigious journals including Nature Scientific Reports, Biomaterials and ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. In addition, she has more than 10 years of experience mentoring high school, undergraduate and graduate student

Dr Khongorzul Dorjgotov is a mathematician whose research focuses on fractional differential equations (FDEs), an emerging field in applied and theoretical mathematics with many applications in science and engineering. FDEs have been recognized as an excellent tool for describing complex systems and processes in many applied sciences, including physics, chemistry, biology and economics. The study of these types of equations is becoming increasingly popular as they can more accurately model a given physical system or process than conventional differential equations.

Khongorzul began studying applied mathematics as an undergraduate student at the National University of Mongolia (NUM), where she won an award for best research in a student competition. She went on to do her master’s degree in the same subject, before winning a MEXT scholarship from the Japanese government for doctoral study at Kyushu University in Japan. It was there that she first started her research on FDEs, focusing on Lie theory and the symmetry approach. During the final year of her PhD, she out-competed many international students  to win Best Poster at the Forum “Math-for-Industry” 2017. After completing her PhD, she returned to Mongolia, becoming one of the few women with a mathematics PhD in the country. She began working as a lecturer at NUM in 2018.

Now, Khongorzul is working to establish the study of fractional calculus in Mongolia. In addition to serving as senior lecturer and supervising graduate students, she is working to increase collaboration between the industrial and academic sectors. To this end, she recently organized, with fellow researchers, the first Mongolian “Study Group” workshops, an internationally recognized method of technology and knowledge transfer between academic mathematicians and industrial sectors. Khongorzul hopes that not only the industrial representatives but other decision-makers will be able to apply the results of mathematical research to do their jobs more effectively.

As a Junior Professor in the School of Physical Sciences and Mathematics at University of San Carlos of Guatemala (USAC), Dr María Eugenia Cabrera’s Catalán researches the phenomenology of physics. Her work builds on the discovery of the Higgs boson particle in 2012, expanding the knowledge of what we know about the Standard Model of particle physics and the fundamental forces of nature.

María studies dark matter, the most abundant component of matter in our universe, known only by its gravitational interactions and key to developing a more fundamental theory of nature. She focuses on the interaction between newly discovered particles such as the Higgs boson; understanding these dynamics can help scientists understand the interactions that could be expected between massive weakly coupled dark matter particles in particle collider experiments, or seen by underground detectors that attempt to measure how dark matter interacts with the Earth.

María first became interested in physics in secondary school, thanks to the inspiration of her physics teacher. She majored in physics at USAC, then received a scholarship to pursue a postgraduate diploma at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theo­retical Physics (ICTP) in Italy. There, she became fascinat­ed by high energy physics and made this the focus of her PhD research at the Institute for Theo­retical Physics in Madrid. She graduated Cum Laude in 2011 with the distinction of Doctor Europeus.

Following a postdoctoral position at the GRAPPA Institute at the University of Amsterdam, during a second postdoc at the Institute of Physics at the University of Sao Paolo in 2016, María learned that her alma mater USAC was opening permanent research positions in Physics and Mathematics for the first time, with 75 percent of the time available for research. Six months later she accepted one of these positions. Now, she is working to put her country and region on the world physics map, having helped to organize the first Central American Meeting of High Energy Physics, Cosmology and High Energy Astrophysics in 2020, and dedicating much of her time to supervising and tutoring undergraduate students in particle physics.

Dr Marian Asantewah Nkansah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, where she teaches Practical Chemistry, Nuclear/Radiochemistry, Chemistry and Society, and Petroleum Chemistry. In her research, she focuses on identifying and characterizing the presence of both inorganic and organic contaminants in water, food, soil, the atmosphere and other environmental matrices, and on developing strategies for environmental remediation. By preparing and analyzing samples from different environments, she can determine the levels and effects of contaminants such as heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are generated by urbanization, industrial activities, artisanal activities and mining. She is striving to make the public aware of the risks of heavy metals, which she has found in unexpected places such as spices, lipstick, edible clay and classroom dust

Growing up as one of six children in Ghana during a period when the economy was in a state of collapse, Marian had a desire to help society from an early age. After completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Chemistry at KNUST, she went to Norway to pursue her PhD in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Bergen. After completing it in 2012, she returned to KNUST where she worked as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer before being promoted to Associate Professor in 2019, making her the youngest woman at the university to hold this position.

In addition to her research and teaching, Marian has undertaken training in science diplomacy. She is involved in advocacy and initiatives of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she mentors school children and younger peers. Her many achievements have brought her international recognition, including the TWAS FM Al-Kharafi Prize in 2016, a feature in the book Women in Science: An Inspiring Story from Africa and a slot on the commemorative Periodic Table of Younger Chemists by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).

Marian has 33 peer-reviewed articles and books chapters.

Dr. Champika Ellawala Kankanamge works on ecosystem conservation and pollution control. Her current research efforts are focused on controlling invasive macrophytes (aquatic plants) in river ecosystems, by restoring shade and encouraging the natural resistance of native plants to invasive species. By understanding the behavior of aquatic plants in response to changes in environmental conditions, her research will help to control ecosystem degradation. She additionally works on assessing pollution levels in aquatic ecosystems. Specifically, she is studying the levels of heavy metals in edible fish and shellfish in Sri Lanka’s Batticaloa lagoon, which serves as the main source of seafood for the local community. Dr. Ellawala Kankanamge was born in Matara, Sri Lanka.

She started her career as an engineer after graduating from the University of Moratuwa with a degree in civil engineering in 2005. Soon after beginning to work as an engineer, she decided to continue her education, and obtained a PhD from Saitama University, Japan in 2011. She joined the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka as a Senior Lecturer attached to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering just after the completion of her PhD. Since then, she has served as a teacher and supervisor for many undergraduate and postgraduate students. In 2013, she received the Sri Lankan President’s award for scientific publications. Dr. Ellawala Kankanamge collaborates with the Eastern University in Sri Lanka for her research on the Batticaloa lagoon, in addition to research collaborations with other government institutions. She has conducted research studies in Sri Lanka, Japan and New Zealand. Her research has been published in high-impact journals including the Journal of Environmental Sciences, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Flora, Aquatic Botany, Aquatic Ecology and Hydrobiologia. Results of her studies will contribute to local and global freshwater ecosystem conservation

Dr. Chao’s current research focuses on supporting students in resource-constrained environments to learn to program using mobile devices. Computer programming is a core course in most IT-related degrees. The ubiquity of mobile phones makes them valuable tools for students to practice programming on their phones. However, limitations of mobile phones, such as small screens and small keypads, impede their use as typical programming environments. Dr. Chao is designing supporting techniques to enable learning of computer programming on such limited devices.

Since obtaining her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town in 2015, Dr. Chao has received several recognitions for her academic achievements, demonstrated leadership skills, and community involvement. She was a winner of the 2014 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and a recipient of the 2015 Schlumberger Faculty for the Future award for women in STEM. She was also named as one of the 2017 Quartz Africa Innovators, was selected as a 2017 Techwomen Fellow, was awarded a Leadership ‘Zuri’ award for her positive contribution to the Kenyan community in 2018, and was named as one of the 2018 Faces of Science in Kenya. In 2019, Dr. Chao was recognized by Okay! Africa as one of the women of African descent who are making a positive and impactful contribution to the youth in their communities. In addition to publishing her work in several international peer-reviewed journals and conference papers, Dr. Chao is also actively involved in the local and international Information Technology scene and is an active advocate for quality education and research. She was one of the committee organizers for the 2019 Mozilla Festival and is Founder and Program Lead for KamiLimu, an impactful structured mentorship program for university students studying computer science.

Dr. Fathiah Zakham applies biotechnology and bioengineering to the diagnosis and management of tuberculosis and other emerging infectious diseases. Her main goal is to develop rapid, accurate and cheap tools for the detection of the causal agent of tuberculosis and the control of drug-resistance TB strains, which are dramatically increasing, especially in low and middle income countries. Conventional culture methods for laboratory diagnosis and drug resistance testing require several weeks; the molecular approach is a good alternative in poor infrastructure settings. In addition to her work on TB, she is also using metagenomics technology to identify new zoonotic viral pathogens emerging on the Arabian peninsula, including hemorrhagic fevers. Dr. Zakham is working to implement the appropriate molecular tests for the diagnosis and surveillance of these infectious diseases. Dr. Zakham obtained her PhD in microbiology and molecular biology from Mohammed V University, Morocco, in 2012 and a MSc degree in microbiology and bio-engineering from the University Hassan II. In 2018, she completed a year-long postdoctoral fellowship in the Microbiology institute of University Hospital in Lausanne.

She has received the Young Investigator Award at the international Congress of Internal Medicine 2014 and the 2017 Gro Brundtland Award for professional performance in sustainable development and public health among young female scientsts. She also received the 2017 Fayza Al-Kharafi Award in biological sciences from The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). Dr. Zakham is a TWAS Young Affiliate, a member of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD), and international societies including the International Society for Infectious Disease, European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Yemeni Society of Biosafety and Biosecurity, and others. Currently, Dr. Zakham is an Institute of International Education Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) scholar at the University of Helsinki.

Dr. Subrina’s research focuses on the modeling of thermal and electronic transport in nanoscale materials and the applications of these materials in nanoscale devices. She is particularly interested in nanomaterials with high thermal conductivity, such as graphene (a form of carbon), that make it useful in heat mitigation. Fast, high-performance electronic devices tend to suffer from overheating, which causes performance degradation and shortens the life of the devices. Use of high heat-carrying materials in electronic device design can provide a solution to this issue. Dr. Subrina is also focused on how physical properties of materials change as devices are increasingly scaled down to the nano level; identifying nanomaterials with the right thermal and electronic properties for this scale can lead to new technologies such as low-power nanoelectronics, high-efficiency solar cells, and thermoelectric power generators. Dr. Subrina received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Riverside in 2011.

Her research has been published in many prestigious journals including Nature Materials, Nature Scientific Report, and the Journal of Applied Physics. She has been honoured with a number of awards throughout her career, including the Best Paper Award at the 2018 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) WIECON-ECE conference and the Young Scientist Award from the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences and TWAS, the World Academy of Sciences, in 2016. She is also the recipient of the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship from the University of California, Riverside, and is a TWAS Young Affiliate. She has been involved in organizing many conferences, workshops and tutorials, and is actively engaged in several national and international professional organizations, including as executive committee member and Chair (in 2017) of the IEEE EDS/SSCS Bangladesh Chapter and editorial board member of Nature Scientific Report. Dr. Subrina is dedicated to building the technological capacity of women in engineering in Bangladesh, and has served as Affinity Group Treasurer (in 2015) of the Women in Engineering group of IEEE Bangladesh. She is also involved in various kinds of consultancy services in the public and private sectors of Bangladesh.

Dr. Susana Arrechea’s research is focused on the potential industrial and environmental applications of materials such as nanoparticles, nanotubes, and graphene, which can be employed in creating more sustainable building materials, in water treatment, and in solar devices and other renewable energy solutions. In addition to contributing to the development of nanotechnology in Guatemala, she is also involved in improving solar electrification, connectivity, and digital and STEM literacy in schools in rural Guatemala, in partnership with New Sun Road and Microsoft. Dr. Arrechea received her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of San Carlos of Guatemala (USAC), and worked there as a professor of physical chemistry before pursuing her master’s degree and doctorate in nanoscience and nanotechnology at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. After graduating Cum Laude, she worked as a visiting researcher at the University of California-Berkeley as part of a Fulbright Nexus project on renewable energy, and later at the Center for Biotechnology Studies of the University of Valle de Guatemala. Her projects have won grants from the National Secretariat of Science and Technology in Guatemala (Senacyt) and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), among others, and she has received awards including the 2017 “Guatemaltecos Ilustres” Award and a prize for young scientists granted by TWAS, Senacyt and the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Guatemala. She has been profiled in national magazines, and in 2018 was named one of 50 Defiant Woman in Central America by the magazine Estrategia y Negocios. She is a member of the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Guatemala, the International Network of Scientists of Guatemala, the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD), and of other scientific networks in nanotechnology and energy.

Dr. Shaheen is working on improving the health care system response to gender based violence (GBV) in Palestine. She investigates the readiness of the health care system to identify and refer women victims of violence. Her primary goal is to improve identification and referral of victims by health care providers, in order to improve women’s health overall.

Dr. Shaheen’s research interests are related to population health, and particularly to women’s health, child health, injuries, violence, environmental health, and mental health. Her research has appeared in many leading international journals including the Lancet, the International Journal of Public Health, European Journal of Pubic Health, JAMA Paediatric, PLoS One, and Archives of Suicide Research. She has successfully supervised several master students, including many women. She also helps to facilitate the development and advancement of young women in public health research careers as a mentor of young research assistants. She is a member of her university’s research ethics committee, and is also an active member of several scientific communities including Child Healthcare Information For All and the International Epidemiological Association.

Most recently, Dr. Shaheen together with collaborators from Brazil, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom, was awarded a grant from the British National Institutes of Health Research to enhance identification and referral of GBV cases in reproductive health settings within marginalized Palestinian populations.

Dr. Shaheen was born in East Jerusalem, Palestine. She received her PhD in Epidemiology and Population Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2009. Since returning to Palestine in 2011, Dr. Shaheen has carried out her research as an Assistant Professor at An-Najah National University, where she also teaches graduate students in the Masters of Public Health degree, as well as undergraduate students in health sciences.

Dr. Paniagua-Zambrana’s research focuses on documenting and protecting traditional knowledge of plant use by indigenous populations and local communities, especially in Bolivia. She works to provide local populations with tools that allow them to make decisions about the conservation of their natural resources and associated traditional knowledge. Dr. Paniagua-Zambrana’s research has mostly focused on native palms of the Andes and the Amazon.

She has worked consistently to disseminate the results of her research among the local communities with which she works. Her research has been incorporated into educational materials in local schools and has also served as important documentation protecting the traditional knowledge of local communities. The communities are enabled to elaborate strategies to conserve their natural resources, and encouraged to share and expand their knowledge regarding their use and maintenance.

Dr. Paniagua-Zambrana was born in La Paz, Bolivia. She received her PhD in Biological Sciences from the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain in 2016. Dr. Paniagua-Zambrana is one of the most published researchers in Bolivia, according to a regional report by Elsevier. Her research has resulted in numerous scientific articles published in journals including Nature Plants, PlosOne, and the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, among others, and she also acts as a reviewer of numerous scientific journals. She has published more than 100 book chapters and 15 books.

In addition, she works with undergraduate, masters and doctoral students around the globe who are interested in ethnobotanical studies, many of them young women scientists. She is a member of the Society for Economic Botany, where she currently serves on the council, the Latin American Association of Botany, the Latin American Group of Ethnobotany – Bolivia Chapter, the Bolivian Organization for Women in Science, and the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD).

Dr. Tabassum Mumtaz is an environmental microbiologist from Bangladesh and works on the conversion of biomass and other waste materials into useful compounds using bacteria. Her work contributes to directly removing harmful materials from the environment as well as generating renewable energy in the process. She specializes in producing polyhydroxyalkanotes (PHAs), bioplastics produced by special bacteria that are cultivated from compost, food waste and wastewater, such as the effluents from palm oil production. She received her PhD in Environmental Biotechnology from Universiti Putra Malaysia, under an OWSD PhD fellowship. After a post-doctoral position at the University Kebangsaan Malaysia, she returned to the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission, where in addition to her research as a Principal Scientific Officer, she trains students in laboratory techniques for microbiology. She has acted as a reviewer and has publications in several high-impact journals. She is the author of “Changes in the properties of LD-PE during biodegradation in soil.”

Dr. Mumtaz’s current research focuses on the remediation of wastewater by gamma radiation and the capability of radio-resistant bacteria for PHA production. In the future, she hopes to implement projects related to biohydrogen and bioethanol production from biomass. She believes that focusing on pollution abatement and renewable energy and valuable green bioproducts can be achieved through collaborations with industries such as textile dyeing. These developments will have a big impact on the energy consumption of Bangladesh in the near future.

Dr. Prasai Joshi’s work is dedicated to creating more environmentally friendly and economic techniques for water treatment, through the development of novel metal oxide adsorbents that can remove harmful organic and inorganic arsenic compounds efficiently from water. Her work has had a significant impact on public awareness and accountability of drinking
water suppliers in Kathmandu. Organic arsenic-based compounds are extensively used as feed additives in poultry farming, and upon entering the environment, these compounds tend to
transform into more toxic inorganic arsenic through microbial activity, which can spread to surface and ground water sources and cause serious harm to human health. Dr. Prasai Joshi has made significant contributions to understanding the interactions of the organic arsenic compounds with iron- and manganese-based adsorbents in order to optimize the adsorbents’ efficiency and prevent the arsenic compounds from reaching the environment. She has a registered patent in China for her novel method of treating organic arsenic-containing wastewater.

Dr. Prasai Joshi was born in Nepal. She received her PhD in Environmental Engineering in 2017 from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for which she was awarded a medal by the President of Nepal. Her work has been published in many leading international and national journals, and she also writes about science awareness in Nepal. Dr. Prasai Joshi actively mentors post-graduate students (the majority of them women) and lectures at universities. She has served as a member of several governmental committees in Nepal dedicated to public and environmental health, and is engaged in promoting drinking water quality in Nepal through public lectures and demonstrations. Dr. Prasai Joshi also organizes environmental awareness campaigns which are particularly focused on women and school teachers in remote mountainous areas of Nepal.

At the heart of Dr. Uduak Okomo’s work is the desire to decrease preventable deaths from infections in newborn babies. To this purpose, she has studied how neonatal infections are transmitted, and has found that hospital-acquired infections play a significant role. This finding has major implications for clinical and public health interventions and can inform policy at all levels of the healthcare system.

Dr. Okomo completed her undergraduate medical training in Nigeria, followed by paediatric specialist training in Nigeria and The Gambia. She received her PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom. With research funding from the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation, she established a paediatric HIV/AIDS cohort in The Gambia, improving capacity for clinical care and research through mentorship, in partnership with the National AIDS Secretariat. She also led the team that wrote the first national paediatric HIV/AIDS treatment guidelines in The Gambia. With the support of a recently awarded Pump Priming Grant from the Wellcome Trust and in collaboration with UNICEF, she is currently carrying out a facility-based evaluation of stillbirths and neonatal deaths in the country.

She is a Vice President and Chairwoman of the Gambia Chapter of the West African College of Physicians. Dr. Okomo is as passionate about supporting young scientists as she is about improving neonatal survival. She is a visiting Consultant Paediatrician to the National Teaching Hospital and teaches Paediatrics at the School of Medicine & Allied Health Sciences, University of The Gambia. She is a member of the Medical Research Council’s Gambia Women in Science Working Group and helps to facilitate the development and advancement of young girls in biomedical and clinical research careers, through public engagement activities and as a mentor to young African scientists across the region.

Dr. Dauqan is currently Head of the Medical Laboratory Sciences Department at Al-Saeed University in Taizz, Yemen, where her research focuses on the antioxidant properties of vegetable oils. Dr. Dauqan’s interests are in biochemistry and biotechnology and she has conducted specialist research in sensory evaluation and organic chemistry. She received her PhD from the National University of Malaysia (UKM). Dr Dauqan is a dedicated teacher and an active member of the OWSD chapter in Yemen.

Dr. Mamadalieva is currently Senior Scientific Researcher at the Institute of the Chemistry of Plant Substances in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Her work focuses on the phytochemical and biological investigation of active compounds derived from medicinal plants growing in Central Asia. The field of natural substances, a tradition at the Tashkent Institute, is gaining more interest in western countries for the development of efficient nutraceuticals and the discovery of new lead compounds for the pharmaceutical industry. Mamadalieva is the recipient of a number of international fellowships which have allowed her to travel extensively and develop a strong network of international collaborators.  She received her MSc from Fergana State University in Uzbekistan and her PhD from the Institute where she is currently researcher in Tashkent.  In 2011 she received the UNESCO-L’Oreal Award for Young Women in Life Sciences.

Dr. Simone Badal McCreath currently manages the Biochemistry lab at the Natural Products Institute at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica and is overseeing and designing a new cell culture lab at the same Institute. McCreath is an accomplished early career researcher who has been investigating the cancer-fighting properties of Jamaican natural compounds. She will be launching a new Masters degree in Natural Therapeutics at her institute in 2014. She has received numerous awards and has published extensively. McCreath received her BSc, MPhil and PhD from UWI and also undertook an MBA at the University of Wales in Cardiff, UK.

Dr. Elufioye is currently acting head of the Department of Pharmacognosy at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Her research focuses on the medicinal properties of native Nigerian plants. In particular she has looked at the effectiveness of different species in treating malaria, wounds, memory loss, leprosy and cancer.  Dr. Elufioye received both her MsC and PhD from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife in Nigeria. She is a Senate member of the University of Ibadan, a Coordinator of the consultancy group in her Department, and the Secretary of the Ibadan chapter of the National Association of Pharmacists in Academia.