Dr. Syed Imran Ali is an experienced humanitarian aid worker and environmental engineering researcher. Dr. Ali works to solve critical engineering challenges related to water and health in humanitarian emergencies. He has served in emergency responses and led research in South Sudan, Pakistan, Jordan, Rwanda, Uganda, and elsewhere with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF/Doctors Without Borders) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Dr. Ali holds a PhD in environmental engineering from the University of Guelph and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship. He is Global Health & Humanitarianism Research Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research and Adjunct Professor in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University.

Dr. James Orbinski is a professor and the inaugural Director of York University’s Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. Dr. Orbinski has worked providing medical humanitarian relief in situations of war, famine, epidemic disease and genocide with Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF). He was elected International President of MSF from 1998-2001, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to MSF in 1999, and co-chaired the founding of the  Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative  in 2004, which has since launched six new drug treatments for tropical diseases, and has 17 others in its research and development pipeline. He also co-founded Dignitas International, which researched health systems and clinical care, trained more than 12,000 Health Workers, and supported more than 370,000 people with full treatment for HIV and AIDS in Malawi. Dignitas also worked with First Nations communities in Northern Ontario on community based interventions for diabetes. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has received the  Meritorious Service Cross  for his leadership in providing direct medical relief in Kigali during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.