Speakers in Plenary

Gabriel Wikström, Minister for health care, public health and sport, Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. Mr. Wikström studied political science and economics at Uppsala University, and has pursued the French and Spanish languages in their respective countries. He also has a long and varied background within the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which, following the 2014 general election, now governs Sweden together with the Green Party.

Professor Corinna Hawkes is Director of the Centre for Food Policy, City University London.

Her specialty is identifying and analysing food policies and food systems solutions for better eating, nutrition and public health. Between 2012 and 2015 she was Head of Policy and Public Affairs at World Cancer Research Fund International, where she established the NOURISHING Policy Framework for healthy diets and obesity. She sits on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems and the Lancet Obesity Commission.

Between 2014 and 2016 she participated in one of the two working group supporting the WHO Ending Childhood Obesity Commission. Corinna is also Co-Chair of the Global Nutrition Report, an international report tracking progress in malnutrition in all its forms across the globe.

Dr. Douglas William Bettcher is the Director the Department for Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases, World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, Switzerland. He was previously the Director of WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative Department.

He has a multidisciplinary background and holds a PhD in International Relations and a Graduate Diploma in World Politics, both from the London School of Economics and Political Science; a Master’s of Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Alberta, Canada.

Dr Bettcher is responsible for coordinating WHO’s work for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases. Dr Bettcher’s current portfolio includes oversight for WHO’s work on NCD risk factor prevention (including tobacco use, diet and physical inactivity), prevention of childhood obesity, health promotion, and NCD risk factor surveillance.

Boyd Swinburn, MBChB, MD, FRACP, FNZCPHM, is the Professor of Population Nutrition and Global Health at the University of Auckland and Alfred Deakin Professor and Co-Director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Melbourne. He is also Co-Chair of World Obesity Policy & Prevention section (formerly International Obesity Task Force).

He trained as an endocrinologist and has conducted research in metabolic, clinical and public health aspects of obesity. His major research interests are centred on community and policy actions to prevent childhood and adolescent obesity, and reduce, what he has coined, ‘obesogenic’ environments. He is currently leading an initiative (www.informas.org) to monitor and benchmark food environments internationally.

Lisa M. Powell, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor and Director in the Division of Health Policy and Administration in the School of Public Health and Director of the Illinois Prevention Research Center in the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Powell has extensive experience as an applied micro-economist in the empirical analysis of the effects of public policy on a series of behavioral outcomes.

Much of her current research is on assessing the importance of economic and environmental factors (such as food prices, sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxes; access to food stores, fast-food restaurants, other eating places, and facilities for physical activity; and, television food advertising exposure) on food consumption and physical activity behaviors and as determinants of obesity, including related disparities. Her work has contributed to the policy debates on SSB taxes and child-directed marketing in the U.S.

Alejandro Cavillo Unna, General Director, El Poder del Consumidor. Alejandro was a founding member of Greenpeace Mexico where he collaborated for 12 years, including a 5 year period as Executive Director, before founding the consumer rights organization El Poder del Consumidor in 2006.

In his work at El Poder del Consumidor he has been designing and coordinated studies and public awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns on the impact of child targeted marketing, school food policy, a soda tax and effective front-of-package labeling on public nutrition and health, particularly children’s, and the study of the causes and effects of the obesity and overweight epidemic in Mexico.

Alejandro Calvillo, with El Poder del Consumidor, has been a central actor from the civil society to obtain a soda tax, to have a mandatory regulation in food and beverage inside schools and for the implementation of a regulation aimed to children implemented in Mexico.

Julie S. Downs, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Risk Perception and Communication, and Associate Professor in the department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Downs received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton University, and her B.A. from University of California, Berkeley. Her research has been published in psychological, public policy, economic, engineering, and medical journals.

Dr. Shawn T. Brown, PhD. is the Director of Public Health Applications at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at Carnegie Mellon University and is the Director of Computational Research for the Global Obesity Prevention Center (GOPC) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Brown is an expert in systems science approaches and simulation modeling and manages the software development of the Virtual Populations for Obesity Prevention (VPOP). His research interests also include developing models to mitigate disease spread through populations and healthcare ecosystems; supply chain modeling for to ensure delivery on needed vaccines, health food, and other public health commodities in low- and middle-income countries; and development of computational infrastructure for public health decision support.

Dr. Stefan Swartling Peterson is Chief of the health section for UNICEF globally, based in New York. He is a Professor at Uppsala University and, prior to that, at the Global Health Division of Karolinska Institute. He has also been visiting professor at Makerere University in Uganda. As a health systems researcher and medical doctor, he has done extensive field work in Tanzania and Uganda, and has worked with different ministries of health, organizations such as WHO, and implemented projects supported by Sida, the Gates Foundation, and the European Union. He was also a co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres Sweden and the CCM Task Force Operations Research Group.

Stefan is a Swedish national, a medical doctor with degrees in medicine, Public Health and a PHD in International Pediatrics.

Dr Claude Marcus is professor and head of the division of Pediatrics at CLINTEC department, Karolinska Institutet. Dr Marcus is specialized in pediatric endocrinology, founder and scientific leader of the Swedish National Childhood Obesity Centre. Dr Marcus is also Chairman of the Steering Committee for the Swedish BDD study, aimed to clarify the interactions between type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes and MODY. He is leader of the research groups working within the frames of STOPP, Stockholm Obesity Prevention Project.

Dr Marcus has published more than 200 articles in international journals primarily about adipocyte physiology, clinical endocrinology/diabetology, obesity genetics, physical activity and obesity treatment/prevention. He has run several large clinical trials within the fields of endocrinology and obesity.

Among other assignments, he is founder and registry holder of the Swedish Quality Registry for Childhood Obesity Treatment, BORIS, and chairman of Swedish Childhood Obesity Society.

Frank Bloomfield is Director of the Liggins Institute at the University of Auckland and Professor of Neonatology. He trained in Manchester, Auckland and Toronto in both clinical neonatology and experimental science investigating the role of maternal, fetal and neonatal nutrition on growth and development. Frank is the immediate past president of the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand and a council member of the Perinatal Research Society (USA). He serves on several Ministry of Health committees, including the National Maternity Monitoring Group.

Celina Gorre is the Executive Director of the GACD. Previously, Celina was the Managing Director of the Foundation for the UN Global Compact leading the the overall development and management of the New York-based 501(c)3 non-profit.

Celina was the Technical Manager for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (now GBCHealth), where she consulted to companies such as Nike, Volkswagen, Colgate, American Express, and Chevron, on programmes for employees, consumers, and communities. Celina also led global training for Gap Inc.'s Social Responsibility, on social and environmental audits in factories and develop stakeholder partnerships.

Celina holds a MPH from UCLA and an MPA from Harvard.

María Eugenia Bonilla-Chacín is a Senior Economist working on the Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice of the World Bank Group. Currently her work focuses mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean region. She is currently initiating a global study on obesity. She has worked in health and development issues in different countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Africa. She has led several operational activities and research on health financing, health service delivery and more recently on the promotion of healthy living. She has a PhD in Economics from the Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Garrath D. Williams, is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lancaster University. Dr. Williams research interests fall across ethics, political theory and applied ethics. One of his main interests, in all three of these areas, is responsibility – both conceptually and in terms of its practical and organisational aspects. In applied ethics, Dr. William is involved in collaborative research on children, health and public policy. He leads the ethics and policy strand of the EU-funded I.Family study (www.ifamilystudy.eu), which investigates diet and health-related behaviours in a large cohort of families across Europe. Garrath D. Williams is also co-author of Childhood Obesity: Ethical and Policy Issues (with Kristin Voigt and Stuart Nicholls; Oxford University Press, 2014).