PLENARY SPEAKERS
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Presentation: Official opening address
Jonas Gahr Støre is Norway's Minister of Foreign Affairs. He has held this position since the present Government was formed in October 2005. He represents the Labour Party.
His first major international position was as Executive Director (Chief of Staff) in the World Health Organization under the leadership of Gro Harlem Brundtland. He was then appointed State Secretary and Chief of Staff for Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in the period 2000 to 2001. Before taking up the position as Foreign Minister, he was Executive Chairman of the think tank ECON Analyse from 2002 to 2003, and Secretary General of the Norwegian Red Cross from 2003 to 2005.
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Presentation: Better evidence for a better world (Opening session)
Richard Horton, FRCP FmedSci, is the present Editor-in-chief of The Lancet, a United Kingdom-based medical journal. Horton qualified as a medical doctor in 1986. In 1990, he joined The Lancet as an assistant editor and moved to New York as North American editor in 1993. Two years later he returned to the UK to become Editor-in-Chief. He was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors, and is presently a member of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. He has also been president of the US Council of Science Editors (2005-06). He is an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University College London. A book about controversies in modern medicine, Second Opinion, was published in 2003 (Health Wars in the US). He also wrote the Royal College of Physicians report on medical professionalism, "Doctors in Society" (2005).
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Presentation: Supporting policy and practice: Why systematic reviews matter
Professor Littell teaches at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Campbell Collaboration Steering Group, and Co-Chair and Coordinating Editor of Campbell's Social Welfare Group. Julia Littell is one of the leading international experts on systematic reviews, and has written and taught on the science of research synthesis, uses and misuses of empirical research in social policy, and evidence-informed interventions for children and families. Littell is the co-author of a new book, Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis, published in February 2008. Her published works also include analyses of data from randomized experiments and multi-method studies of in-home services for families of abused and neglected children.
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Presentation: Should impact evaluation of public programmes be mandatory?
Dr. Andy Oxman completed his medical training in the USA in 1979 and then moved to Norway where he worked as a general practitioner in northern Norway. From 1984 to 1994 he was at McMaster University in Canada. He moved back to Norway in 1994 and began work at the Health Services Research Unit at the National Institute of Public Health, which subsequent to several redisorganisations is now part of the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services. His research interest is in developing and evaluating methods of helping people to make informed choices about healthcare.
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Presentation: Towards an evidence-based world view
Rosling's career is an impressive combination of scientific achievement and social engagement. He began as a physician, spending years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava.
His research has also focused on links between economic development, agriculture, poverty and health in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He has been advisor to WHO, UNICEF and several aid agencies. In 1993 he co-founded Médecins sans frontières in Sweden; since 2005 he is a member of the Swedish Academy of Science.
Hans Rosling heads the Division of International Health at the Karolinska Institute, where he leads courses on global health that include training periods for students in India, Iran, Tanzania and Cuba. He is in charge of collaboration with universities in low and middle-income countries. He has co-authored a textbook on global health.
He co-founded the Gapminder Foundation with his son and daughter-in-law. Gapminder developed Trendalyzer software to convert statistical data into powerful graphics, with the aim of promoting a fact-based worldview and increased understanding of international statistics. His Gapminder lectures on development issues have won awards for being 'humorous yet deadly serious'.
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Presentation: Some Hypotheses about Characteristics of High Quality Nonrandomized Experiments
William Shadish's current research interests include experimental and quasi-experimental design, the empirical study of methodological issues, the methodology and practice of meta-analysis, and evaluation theory.
He received his bachelor's degree in sociology from Santa Clara University in 1972, and his M.S. (1975) and Ph.D. (1978) degrees from Purdue University in clinical psychology. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in methodology and program evaluation at Northwestern University from 1978-1981.
Shadish is the author (with T.D. Cook & D.T. Campbell, 2002) of "Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference", (with T.D. Cook & L.C. Leviton, 1991) of "Foundations of Program Evaluation", and (with L. Robinson & C. Lu, 1997) of "ES: A Computer Program and Manual for Effect Size Calculation", co-editor of five other volumes, and the author of over 100 articles and chapters.
He was 1997 President of the American Evaluation Association, winner of the 1994 Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Evaluation Theory from the American Evaluation Association, the 2000 Robert Ingle Award for service to the American Evaluation Association, the 1994 and 1996 Outstanding Research Publication Awards from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and the 2002 Donald T. Campbell Award for Innovations in Methodology from the Policy Studies Organization. He is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, and a past editor of New Directions for Evaluation.
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Presentation: Communicating Evidence About Development Policy
Howard White has over 20 years' experience in developing countries, focusing on aid effectiveness and anti-poverty policies. He is now Executive Director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), an organization which seeks to improve the lives of poor people in low- and middle-income countries by providing, and summarizing, evidence of what works.
Previous experience includes leading the impact evaluation program of the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group and, before that, several multi-country evaluations. White also has experience leading large projects, including the World Bank published report African Poverty at the Millennium, and overall direction of poverty training for 2,000 Department for International Development (DFID) staff at country offices around the world.
Howard White has published over 50 papers in internationally refereed journals, and is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Development Studies.
JERRY LEE LECTURE
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Presentation: Public Health Contributions to Violence Prevention
Read more about the Jerry Lee Lecture Series and the 2009 lecturer, Dr. Jonathan Shepherd.
SPEAKERS - PARALLEL SESSIONS
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Theme of session: Using Evidence to Change Complex Educational Systems
Dr. Ungerleider, one of Canada's best known and most highly respected researchers in the field of learning and education, is currently on leave-of-absence from the University of British Columbia where he is p professor of the sociology of education. He currently works with CCL to provide leadership in developing and applying research on learning.
As part of his responsibilities at CCL, he oversees and participates in the writing of technical reports, many of which can be found on the CCL website. See, for example, Lessons in Learning and systematic reviews. His involvement in recent program evaluations, including the system-wide educational change effort of the Ontario Ministry of Education, involved the preparation of analytic reports based on findings from student achievement data sets, surveys and field visits.
As an applied sociologist of education, Dr. Ungerleider has addressed a range of practical issues including the development of curricula for, and the use of appropriate pedagogy with, students from ethno-culturally diverse backgrounds and immigrant background. He has undertaken meta-analytic work on issues of inter-group relations in education as well as the analysis of student data to identify the factors that facilitate or impede the educational success of students from differing linguistic backgrounds.
From 1998 until 2001, Dr. Ungerleider served as Deputy Minister of Education for the Province of British Columbia.
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Theme of session: Helping chronically ill or disabled people into work: what can we learn from international comparative analyses?
Margaret Whitehead holds the WH Duncan Professor of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Liverpool, UK, and is Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on Social Determinants of Health.
Margaret's key research interests for over two decades have been on policies and strategies to reduce social inequalities in health and in health care and this has been the focus of her work with WHO and various EU research networks. As a co-investigator in two research collaborations - the ESRC Centre for Evidence Based Public Health Policy and the UK Public Health Research Consortium - she has been involved in numerous systematic reviews on non-healthcare policies and interventions and their impact on public health. These have included systematic reviews on employment policies such as the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programmes, the psychosocial and health effects of workplace reorganisation, and the health and welfare effects of changing the organisation of shiftwork. She is Associate Editor of the Cochrane Public Health Review Group.