Scientific Committee

Joachim Cohen, Belgium

Prof Joachim Cohen is a social health scientist and a professor of the End-of-Life Care Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. In the research group he is chairing a research program on public health and palliative care.

He graduated in 2001 as a Master in Sociology and in 2007 as a PhD in Social Health Sciences. His research has been awarded with the Kubler Ross Award for Young Researchers and the Young Investigator Award from the European Association of Palliative Care 2010. Both prizes were awarded to him, mainly because of his large-scale population-based and population-level cross-national research on end-of-life care.

Prof. Cohen has published over 220 articles in international peer reviewed journals and co-edited the Oxford University Press book: “A public health perspective on end of life care”. He has 5870 citations in Web of Science and a h-index of 41.

Steffen Eychmüller, Switzerland

Steffen Eychmüller is a palliative care physician since more than 20 years. Specialized in Internal medicine, psychosomatics and psychotherapy he learned from several stays in Australia how to run a regional palliative care as well as an academic center in this field. He led the Center for Palliative Care at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen from 1999 to 2011 and built up the University Center for Palliative Care at the University Hospital of Bern, Switzerland from 2012, taking over the first professorship for palliative medicine at the University of Bern in 2016. Inspired from a collaboration with Kerala, India, he started to co-create compassionate communities in 2008 in the Eastern part of Switzerland, followed by the compassionate city of Bern, the Swiss capital, in 2020.

Farzana Khan, Bangladesh

Dr. Farzana Khan, a physician and CEO of the Fasiuddin Khan Research Foundation (FKRF), is currently pursuing a PhD in Global Health at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on examining the impact and processes of delivering quality palliative care in humanitarian settings of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), which is a global commitment and an essential health service under Universal Health Coverage. She has collaborated closely with the UN-International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Cox's Bazar to establish palliative care in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Dr. Khan has also been instrumental in establishing the Palliative Medicine Department and MD course in Palliative Medicine at the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU). She has also played a key role in advocating for changes to the Bangladesh Narcotics Law, making it more accessible for patients experiencing severe chronic pain.

Phil Larkin, Switzerland

Philip Larkin is Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Chair of Palliative Care Nursing within the Palliative and Supportive Care Service of the University Hospital Centre (CHUV) affiliated to the Institute for Higher Education and Research in Healthcare (IUFRS), University of Lausanne.

He leads a palliative care nursing research team at the CHUV and continues to lecture nationally and internationally on palliative care, nursing practice and compassion in care. His current work, funded by the Stiftungpflegewissenschaft Schweiz is exploring interventions to support informal caregivers caring for people in the home at end-of-life.

Jason Mills, Australia

Associate Professor Jason Mills is an Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia. He leads a program of research centred around the public health transformation of palliative and end-of-life care through key domains of health services innovation, workforce capacity building, and community development. This research seeks to better understand and address needs across health systems and communities for, and in partnership with, health services, healthcare consumers and broader society. He holds Fellowships from the Australian College of Nursing and the Higher Education Academy, having completed postgraduate studies in Health Promoting Palliative Care, Medical Anthropology, Compassion Science, and Positive Education.

Saif Mohammed, India

Saif Mohammed, currently a faculty member at the Institute of Palliative Medicine (IPM WHO CC), brings extensive experience in leading and organizing community-based palliative care programs. He served as the program manager for the Government palliative care program in Kerala, India, which played a key role in the development of India's first comprehensive palliative care policy. Saif actively coordinates the 'Death Café' initiative and the Bereavement Companionship Program, offered by the IPM WHO CC and the Death Literacy Institute. He is also the founding member of the Students in Palliative Initiative, focused on providing psycho-social support and raising awareness. Saif's expertise extends to palliative care education in many countries in Asia.

Christian Ntizimira, Rwanda

Dr. Christian Ntizimira is the Founder/Executive Director of the African Center for Research on End-of-Life Care (ACREOL), a non-profit organization to bring socio-cultural equality through “Ubuntu in End-of-life Care” in Africa. He is a Fulbright Alumni and graduated from Harvard Medical School, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Dr. Ntizimira is also an alumnus of the Kofi Annan Global Health Leadership program, which aims to bring selected Africans to strategize, manage and lead public health programs that will transform public health in Africa. Dr. Ntizimira is the winner of the prestigious Tällberg-Stervos Niarcos Foundation-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize 2021, for his passionate advocacy for palliative care in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, based on his deeply held belief that dignified end-of-life care is a human right.

John Rosenberg, Australia

Dr John Rosenberg is a Registered Nurse with a clinical background in community based palliative care. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Health at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. John was awarded a PhD in 2007 for the first ever doctoral study in health promoting palliative care and since then has been a substantial contributor to the advancement of public health palliative care. John was the President of Public Health Palliative Care International from 2019-2023.

Libby Sallnow, United Kingdom

Dr Libby Sallnow is a palliative medicine physician at CNWL NHS Trust in London and an academic at St Christopher's Hospice, UCL Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She has led and developed the fields of new public health approaches to end of life care, compassionate communities and social approaches to death, dying and loss over the past two decades. She is an Honorary Consultant at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Palliative Care in Kerala, India, and the first author of the new Lancet Commission on the Value of death: bringing death back into life (2022).

Ekkapop Sittwantana, Thailand

Ekkapop Sittiwantana is a Co-founder of Peaceful Death Group, he is a Compassionate Communities Facilitator, a Lecturer and a Reportage Sketching Artist and Cartoonist. Ekkapop is a Candidate of the member of the House of Representative (On-going process), an Advocate for Public Health Palliative Care, Local Health Vanguard Movement for Long term Care, Palliative Care, and Mental Health Care in Communities.

Kelli Stajduhar, Canada

Dr. Kelli Stajduhar is a Professor in the School of Nursing and Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health at the University of Victoria. She has worked in oncology, palliative care, and gerontology for 30 years as a practicing nurse, educator, and researcher.  Her clinical work and research has focused on health service needs for those at the end-of-life and their families, and on the needs of people who experience structural inequities at the end of life.

Vilma Tripodoro, Argentina

Originally from Buenos Aires City, Argentina, I am a palliative care specialist with a PhD from the University of Vic, Barcelona, Spain. I have worked in Pallium Latinoamérica (NGO) and the University of Buenos Aires since 2002. I led international collaborative research projects and designed the RED-InPAL (research PC network). In 2016 we launched a Compassionate City project in Buenos Aires (Todos con vos). I am currently a senior researcher at ATLANTES, the Global Observatory of Palliative Care, CC WHO University of Navarra, Spain.  In recognition of my research work in Latin America, I was awarded the Eduardo Bruera Award in 2022 (ALCP).

Klaus Wegleitner, Austria

As an Associate Professor (Public Health & End-of-Life-Care) he is Vice Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC), head of the working area “Public Care” at the Institute of Pastoral Theology at the University of Graz (Austria) and chairperson of “Careweb - Association for the promotion of societal care culture. Life, old age, dementia and dying” in Vienna. His research interests are addressing the need for developing and transforming health care systems and societal care networks in elderly and end-of-life care, interlinking palliative care and public health perspectives, care ethics, questions about social justice and the democratization of care. A major aspect of his research and consulting is to promote and develop Caring/Compassionate Communities.