Joy Phumaphi is a former Minister of Health of Botswana; former Assistant Director General at WHO; and Former Vice President & Head of Human Development Network at the World Bank. She chairs the Botswana National Gender Commission and is Board Chair of the Rollback Malaria Partnership to End Malaria. She is co-Chair of the Global Pandemic Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), and the Lancet pathfinder commission on climate change and health. She sits on the boards of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the Partnership on Maternal, Newborn Child and Adolescent Health (PMNCH). She co-chaired the United Nations (UN) Secretary General’s Independent Accountability Panel for Every Woman, Every Child, Every Adolescent.

Dr Katharina Lauer is a health and biosecurity specialist and data strategist working at the intersection of biological risk, surveillance, and decision-making in high-stakes environments. She is Vice President of Data and Partnerships at Airfinity, where she leads the development of data-driven and AI-enabled platforms supporting infectious disease intelligence and global health decision-making. 

Her work focuses on how organisations turn complex, fragmented, and often uncertain data into actionable intelligence. This includes emerging approaches to surveillance, such as genomic data, digital, behavioural and environmental signals, and integrated data systems. 

She is particularly experienced in evaluating the reliability, limitations, and strategic use of data and modelling outputs in operational and commercially sensitive contexts, including the pharmaceutical and defence sectors, as well as the challenges of data sharing, trust, and coordination across systems. 

With a background in epidemic response in low- and middle-income countries, high-containment laboratory research, medical countermeasure development, large-scale data infrastructures, and commercial strategy, she brings a systems-level perspective that bridges science, technology, policy, and execution. She has conducted academic work at leading institutions including Harvard, Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh.