Dr Alex Wodak AM is a retired physician who was President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation for many years. He has worked full time on drug law reform and then tobacco harm reduction as a volunteer in his retirement. Together with colleagues, he started the first needle syringe programme (1986) and the first medically supervised injecting centre (1999) in Australia when both were pre-legal. Dr Wodak was President of the International Harm Reduction Association (1996-2004). He has been interested in tobacco harm reduction since 1992 but only active in THR in recent years. Dr Wodak helped to start the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (1987).

President of Asovape Costa Rica, Social Media Director and Audiovisual Producer for INNCO, recipient of the Enhanced Scholarship of KAC THRSP with a project on a documentary series called #Safer, and Project Leader for the Veritas studio of ECLAT (Spin off of the University of Catania, Italy). Jeffrey Zamora has been working in Social Media and Marketing with NGOs, Governmental Entities, and Commercial Brands.

Presidente de Asovape Costa Rica (organización de consumidores adultos Pro Reducción de Daños para personas que no quieren o pueden dejar de fumar), Director de Redes Sociales y Productor Audiovisual para INNCO, recipiente de la Enhanced Scholarship de KAC THRSP con un proyecto sobre una serie documental llamada #Safer, y Líder de Proyecto para el estudio Veritas de ECLAT (Spin off de la Universidad de Catania, Italia). Jeffrey Zamora ha estado trabajando en Medios Sociales y Marketing con ONGs, Entidades Gubernamentales y Marcas Comerciales.

Colin Mendelsohn has worked as a medical practitioner, academic and researcher in smoking cessation and tobacco harm reduction for 40 years. He is the Founding Chairman of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association and was a Conjoint Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales. He is a member of the expert advisory group that develops the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ national smoking cessation guidelines. He is actively involved in teaching, writing, researching and advocating for tobacco harm reduction.

Ian Fearon is an independent consultant with expertise in regulatory and scientific aspects of nicotine and tobacco products. His consulting work encompasses clinical and behavioural studies of tobacco and nicotine products for regulatory submissions in the US and Europe, and he has a wealth of experience of both consumer goods and medicinal licensing submissions.  His 15 years working in the Tobacco Harm Reduction arena has included roles as Senior Director of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs EMEA with JUUL Labs, Director of Tobacco Research with Celerion, and Principal Scientist and Head of Clinical Research at British American Tobacco. 

Scott J. Leischow, Ph.D. joined the Mayo Clinic in 2012, where he leads the Research on Health Equity and Community Health (REACH) Program at Mayo Clinic Arizona, and co-leads Cancer Prevention and Control within the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center. He was formerly University of Arizona and also served as Senior Advisor for Tobacco Policy in the US Department of Health and Human Services and Chief of the Tobacco Control Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute of NIH. Dr. Leischow completed his doctorate in Health Education from the University of Maryland, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Behavioral Pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Leischow has received several awards, including the NIH Director’s Award. Most of Dr. Leischow’s research and publications focus on pharmacologic and behavioral treatments for tobacco dependence, along with systems and network approaches to public health. Dr. Leischow is past President of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT).

Heneage Mitchell, commonly known as ‘H’, has been resident in Asia for over 40 years. He spent most of those decades working in regional media, including as managing editor and co-publisher of Tobacco Asia, a trade publication reporting on the regional tobacco industry,

In 2012, he established factasia, an independent, not-for-profit, consumer-oriented regional advocacy for rational debate about – and sensible regulation of – the rights of adult citizens throughout the Asia-Pacific region to choose to use tobacco or other nicotine-related products.

Heneage smoked for over 45 years before switching to vaping in 2016, since when he has never touched a cigarette.

PhD. in Cell Biology and Genetics from the Autonomous University of Madrid, she is the founder, coordinator, and/or scientific advisor of different organisations related to Smoking Harm Reduction, such as the Spanish Medical Platform for Smoking Harm Reduction, composed of about 30 doctors, professors, and health professionals, as well as the Spanish Association of Personal Vapourisers Users (ANESVAP). She is the organiser of THR SUMMIT SPAIN, the first scientific congress on Smoking Harm Reduction in Spain, now in its second edition. She has attended or participated as a speaker in several congresses related to THR. He also collaborates actively with users and scientific organisations in Latin America.

Doctorada en Biología Celular y Genética por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, es fundadora, coordinadora y/o asesora científica de distintas organizaciones relacionadas con la Reducción de Daños por Tabaquismo, como la Plataforma Médica Española por la Reducción de Daños por Tabaquismo, compuesta por cerca de 30 médicos, catedráticos y profesionales sanitarios, así como de la Asociación Española de Usuarios de Vaporizadores Personales (ANESVAP). Esorganizadora del THR SUMMIT SPAIN, primer congreso científico sobre Reducción de Daños por Tabaquismo en España que ya va por su segunda edición. Ha asistido o participado como ponente en varios congresos relacionados con la THR. También colabora activamente con organizaciones de usuarios y científicos hermanas en Latinoamérica.

Will Godfrey is the founding editor-in-chief of Filter (https://filtermag.org), an online magazine that launched in 2018 to cover drug use, drug policy and human rights through a harm reduction lens. He's also the executive director of The Influence Foundation, the nonprofit behind Filter. He previously founded The Influence, an award-winning drug policy news site, and ran Substance.com and the addiction-focused site The Fix. Before that, he co-founded an award-winning print publication for incarcerated people in London. He has consulted for numerous organisations in the drug policy and harm reduction space. He lives in New York.

Clive Bates has had a diverse career in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Starting out with IBM, he then switched career to work in the environment movement. From 1997-2003 he was Director of Action on Smoking and Health (UK), campaigning to reduce the harms caused by tobacco. In 2003 he joined Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit as a civil servant and worked in senior roles in the public sector and for the United Nations in Sudan. He is now Director of The Counterfactual, a consulting and advocacy practice focussed on a pragmatic approach to sustainability and public health.  

Sudhanshu Patwardhan is a British-Indian, U.K.-licensed medical doctor, passionate about Healthtech innovation in cancer prevention. For the past two decades, he has lived and worked in three continents, doing senior roles in research, strategy and policy in the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries. 

In his early years in tobacco harm reduction, his team of clinical researchers and lab scientists set the foundations for the assessment of reduced-risk products, now accepted by regulators and the industry as the definitive approach for duty of care and regulatory compliance. At Nicoventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of BAT, he was instrumental in enabling the first e-cigarette company acquisition by a global tobacco business leading to a successful application for a medical license with the MHRA for an e-cigarette. In his policy role there, Patwardhan shaped the creation of a global key opinion leader network in consumer advocacy and public health champions. With the British Standards Institution (BSI), Patwardhan led the creation of the world’s first vaping product standards for safety and quality in 2015 and the BSI Online Age Checking specifications in collaboration with the Westminster-based Digital Policy Alliance in 2018. 

Patwardhan splits time between the U.K. and South Asia on projects that address the needs of the most disadvantaged tobacco users. In 2018, he co-founded the Centre for Health Research and Education that now has a team of over 100 medical and public health experts globally working in cancer prevention. Since 2021, Patwardhan is working with digital tech partners for innovating in oral cancer screening.

Dr Roberto A Sussman (PhD University of London) is a full time senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Nuclear Sciences of the National University of Mexico. His main research areas are General Relativity and Cosmology, but he has conducted research in other areas of Physics, including peer reviewed publications on e-cigarette aerosols. He is also the founder and Director of Pro-Vapeo Mexico, an association representing Mexican consumers of noncombustible nicotine products and is a member of INNCO. He is actively advocating for an appropriate regulation of Tobacco Harm Reduction products in Mexico. He directs and supervises the effort to spread scientific information on these products, as well as advising consumers on how to counter the gubernmental misinformation and prejudice about them that is rampant throughout Latin America.

Grzegorz Król, Ph.D. is a Director at Knowledge•Action•Change, the sister company to KAC Communications which runs GFN. Social psychologist & IT specialist, author of publications on psychology, data analysis and harm reduction. Since 2003 Grzegorz manages international projects in the area of public health, drugs and tobacco harm reduction. Between 2012 and 2018, he was lecturer at the Faculty of Management and MBA School, University of Warsaw. Since 2016, member of the European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (ENRESSH), part of the COST Action: European Cooperation in Science and Technology. Co-founder of a harm reduction knowledge hub at harmreduction.eu

Anne Molloy is the wife and life long partner of the late Kevin Molloy, who worked with Knowledge Action Change as Head of the Tobacco Harm Reduction Scholarship Programme, until he sadly passed away in 2021. Anne met Kevin in London through their work as actors. They eventually moved to Canterbury, where they raised their two children, Lottie & Jake. As well as Anne’s career in acting, she has worked as a lecturer in Performing Arts, is an advanced practitioner and mentor in the field of teaching and learning and is currently training to be a Humanist wedding celebrant.

Sarah Cooney is a science engagement specialist focusing on harm reduction and science communication, now running her own consultancy. Prior to this, she spent nearly 12 years at British American Tobacco, establishing the science engagement and communication capability at BAT R&D, to better communicate the science behind less-risky nicotine products to regulatory and general audiences. She drove a real change in BAT’s publishing strategy and created the visitor engagement programme, science exhibition and a series of award-winning science reports – which showcased the company’s reduced risk product research in an accessible way. Prior to BAT, she held various editorial and publishing roles at Nature, Elsevier and BioMedCentral. She holds a BSc in genetics and an MSc in plant genetics both from the University of Toronto, and her research has been published in Science. She is also dedicated to choral singing!

Harry Shapiro is Director of DrugWise – an online drug information service - and Managing Editor of DS Daily - the daily online drug, alcohol and tobacco news service. He has worked in the drugs field for over 40 years, first with the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence and then from 2000 with DrugScope where he was Director of Communications until the charity folded in 2015.

Since 2015, he has been working with Knowledge-Action-Change promoting public health through harm reduction. He is the author and Executive Editor of the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction report, contributes a blog to Nicotine Science and Policy and is one of KAC’s media spokespeople.

Marina Murphy PhD is a scientific communications and engagement professional with more than 25 years of experience including 14 years in the tobacco and nicotine sector. With a background in chemistry, she also has broad outreach, engagement and advocacy experience. She has previously worked for JUUL Labs as Head of Public Health Advocacy and spent nearly ten years working for British American Tobacco where she was a driving force behind a communications strategy designed to reflect BAT’s transparent approach to scientific communication. The strategy was designed to provide clear communication and engender debate on the company’s ambitious tobacco harm-reduction research program. Over these ten years, Marina held various roles, including Head of Scientific Media Relations, International Scientific Engagement Manager and Scientific Communications Manager. Marina has also worked as a journalist, editor and in PR and has published in several high-profile publications including New Scientist, The Irish Times and science|business.

David MacKintosh has over 25 years’ experience of working on alcohol and drug policy, which has included working within the UK Cabinet Office (UKADCU), heading up the London Drug and Alcohol Policy Forum (LDAPF) and providing specialist advice to the Greater London Authority. He also spent six years as Head of Community Safety for the City of London and has served as a trustee of a number of charities addressing substance use problems. He has helped deliver a range of innovative campaigns and national best practice guidance, which have all had one common purpose, to reduce harm to individuals and communities. In 2020 he began working as an independent consultant and is now helping Knowledge•Action•Change support and develop evidence based harm reduction programmes.

Michelle Minton is a senior policy analyst at the Reason Foundation. Minton specializes in consumer policy, covering regulatory issues that include gambling, tobacco harm reduction, cannabis legalization, alcohol, and nutrition.

Minton has authored numerous studies, including topics like the effectiveness and unintended consequences of sin taxes and history of gambling regulation. Her analyses have been published and cited by nationally respected news outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today as well as peer-reviewed journals. She regularly appears in news media to discuss the unintended effects of laws and rules designed to save adults from their own choices which, not only conflicts with the principle of individual liberty, but often the goals of public health.

Ms. Minton holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Science from the University of new England.

When not working, Minton engages in hands-on “research” in her areas of expertise by spending many hours playing poker, enjoying salty foods, and drinking delicious craft beers.

Lindsey Stroud is Director of TPA’s Consumer Center, which provides data and analysis to inform and assist policymakers when addressing consumer products. Stroud’s main focus is on providing up-to-date information on adult access to goods including alcohol, tobacco and vapor products, as well as regulatory policies that affect adult access to other consumer products, including harm reduction, technology, innovation, antitrust and privacy. Prior, Stroud was a state government relations manager at The Heartland Institute, and authored Tobacco Harm Reduction 101: A Guidebook for Policymakers in 2019, as well as Vaping, E-Cigarettes and Public Policy Towards Alternatives to Smoking in 2017, as well as hosting the podcast series Voices of Vapers. Prior to Heartland, Stroud worked as a staffer for state lawmakers in Minnesota and Virginia. In addition to her role at TPA, Stroud is the creator and manager of Tobacco Harm Reduction 101 (thr101.org) and a board director for the American Vapor Manufacturers Association and a Visiting Fellow at the Independent Womens Forum. Stroud received her Bachelor’s of Arts in Government from the College of William and Mary.

Paul Newhouse, M.D. holds the Jim Turner Chair in Cognitive Disorders at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and is Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology, and Medicine. He is Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Cognitive Medicine (VCCM) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He directs the Clinical Core for the Vanderbilt Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and is also a physician-scientist at the Veterans Affairs Tennessee Valley Health Systems Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center (GRECC). He is an Army veteran and served in Operation Desert Storm.

Dr. Newhouse received his undergraduate education at Kansas State University, attended medical school at Loyola University, Stritch School of Medicine, and completed his residency training in psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center followed by a fellowship in Geriatric Psychopharmacology Research at the National Institute of Mental Health. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in both General Psychiatry and Geriatric Psychiatry and was awarded the American Psychiatric Association Profiles in Courage award in 2002 and the Loyola University Alumnus of the Year Award for Research in 2017.

Dr. Newhouse's research has focused on brain cholinergic mechanisms in cognitive aging and the role of nicotinic cholinergic receptor systems in normal and impaired cognitive functioning in humans. His work established the importance of brain nicotinic cholinergic receptor systems in normal cognitive processes and established these receptors as a therapeutic target in Alzheimer’s disease and related conditions. He has pioneered the development of human models for new cognitive drug development including early first-in-human studies to the design and implementation of national multicenter trials. He has emphasized the development of novel cholinergic agents for clinical use in cognitive disorders and has established novel brain imaging and biomarker-based measures of brain drug effects through the use of novel pharmacologic‐imaging methodologies. His research has been continuously funded by NIH since 1989 and he is funded currently by the National Institute on Aging, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, and other private companies and foundations.

Sudhanshu Patwardhan is a British-Indian, U.K.-licensed medical doctor, passionate about Healthtech innovation in cancer prevention. For the past two decades, he has lived and worked in three continents, doing senior roles in research, strategy and policy in the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries. 

In his early years in tobacco harm reduction, his team of clinical researchers and lab scientists set the foundations for the assessment of reduced-risk products, now accepted by regulators and the industry as the definitive approach for duty of care and regulatory compliance. At Nicoventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of BAT, he was instrumental in enabling the first e-cigarette company acquisition by a global tobacco business leading to a successful application for a medical license with the MHRA for an e-cigarette. In his policy role there, Patwardhan shaped the creation of a global key opinion leader network in consumer advocacy and public health champions. With the British Standards Institution (BSI), Patwardhan led the creation of the world’s first vaping product standards for safety and quality in 2015 and the BSI Online Age Checking specifications in collaboration with the Westminster-based Digital Policy Alliance in 2018. 

Patwardhan splits time between the U.K. and South Asia on projects that address the needs of the most disadvantaged tobacco users. In 2018, he co-founded the Centre for Health Research and Education that now has a team of over 100 medical and public health experts globally working in cancer prevention. Since 2021, Patwardhan is working with digital tech partners for innovating in oral cancer screening.

Martin Cullip is a former company director and International Fellow of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, who has written and blogged on free market and lifestyle consumer issues for over a decade. As a user of e-cigarettes and other safer nicotine products, he is a particularly passionate consumer advocate for all forms of tobacco harm reduction and has a keen interest in the rapidly-evolving nicotine market and the politics surrounding it. Martin is a former Chair of UK educational charity, The New Nicotine Alliance, and has taken part in parliamentary evidence sessions and consumer, industry, and political events on the subject domestically and internationally.