A Health and Human Rights Dialogue on the Refugee and Migration Crisis

Martina Adamoli 
Opera San Francisco, Milano 
Martina Adamoli graduated from the University of Milan in 2012 with a bachelor´s degree in Physician Assistant. She has been working for Opera San Francesco for the Poor (OSF) in Milan for 5 years. The OSF clinic provides free medical assistance to all those who do not have the right or the money to use the medical services offered by the Italian National Health System. At the OSF Clinic, Adamoli manages all the activities of prevention and health promotion: vaccinations, prevention of infectious diseases, promotion of cancer screening campaigns, promotion of correct lifestyles in patients with chronic diseases.

Richard Adanu 
Dean, University of Ghana School of Public Health
Richard Adanu is a specialist Obstetrician-Gynaecologist who graduated from the University of Ghana Medical School and completed his postgraduate training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana. He later obtained a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as a Gates scholar and was admitted into the Delta Omega Public Health Honor Society. He has extensive experience in the fields of maternal mortality and morbidity reduction, contraceptive use by women and cervical cancer screening. He is currently the Dean of the University of Ghana School of Public Health, a Professor of Women’s Reproductive Health and Consultant Obstetrician Gynaecologist with the University of Ghana Hospital.

 
Sarah Albala 
Research Associate, London School of Economics and Political Science
Sarah Albala is currently working at the London School of Economics and Political Science as a research associate in the Department of Health Policy, where she has worked on an OECD report on Antimicrobial Resistance as well as the upcoming Lancet Commission on the Chinese health care system. She has worked on an array of global health research projects, which has brought her to conduct work in such places as Tanzania, Grenada, and Moldova. Previous work has considered social network theory and community health perceptions in relation to NCDs. Her main research focus is situated between the fields of health policy and medical anthropology and is particularly interested in using discourse analysis to study the culture of health entities, and health systems. She received her MSc at both the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the London School of Economics and Political Science with her Master’s thesis written on IGO Migration Health Policy within the EU.

Sara Albiani 
Oxfam
Sara Albiani is Oxfam Italia Global Health Policy Advisor. After having worked in Oxfam development cooperation programs on health and community empowerment with many African countries, she is now responsible for Oxfam Italia advocacy activities on global health. Moreover she is responsible for the activities Oxfam Italia runs on migrants’ health in Italy, both in term of programs´ implementation and advocacy. She collaborates with the Global Health Center of the Tuscany Region in the coordination of regional activities on migrants´ health.

 
Joyce Apsel 
Professor, Liberal Studies, New York University
Joyce Apsel is Clinical Professor in the Liberal Studies Program at NYU and is teaching at NYU Florence during the academic year 2017-2018. Dr. Apsel is a recipient of the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. Her volume, Introducing Peace Museums, was nominated for the 2017 Dayton International Literary Peace Prize in non-fiction. She is co-editor of two other volumes on peace and human rights museums, and lectures and writes about human rights, comparative genocide, and education. Dr. Apsel is President of the Institute for the Study of Genocide and past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. She serves as NGO-DPI representative for the International Network of Museums for Peace at the U.N.

Nathan Bertelsen 
School of Global Public Health, New York University Koç University School of Medicine Bellevue Hospital/New York University School of Medicine (NYUSOM)
Nathan Bertelsen, M.D., is a physician in internal medicine and public health, with a joint academic appointment at Koç University School of Medicine (KUSOM) in Istanbul, Turkey, and New York University School of Medicine in New York City, and is currently teaching for the College of Global Public Health at NYU Florence. Dr. Bertelsen completed residency training in internal medicine and primary care at Cornell University/New York Presbyterian Hospital, his M.D. from University of Minnesota Medical School, a B.A. in government/international relations from Georgetown University, and a graduate certificate in global mental health from Harvard University. His teaching focuses on migrant health, communication skills, and health and culture. His research is focused on resilience factors of Syrian refugee families in Istanbul. At KUSOM, he runs a longitudinal bedside teaching and simulation program for all medical students and faculty, and also co-coordinates the mandatory Public Health internship which works with refugee health NGOs in Istanbul. He serves as Adviser for Training and Research for the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Eastern Mediterranean mission. At NYU, he continues to direct the Global Health Selective, a UME clinical clerkship built around case discussions, cross-cultural communication skills and simulations, and the Global Health Elective for Internal Medicine residents at NYU, with main sites in Turkey, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Ghana. At the NYU Florence campus in Italy, he teaches MPH courses on Thesis II, Capstone II, and Migrant Health in the Mediterranean. Before moving to Istanbul, he served for four years as Director of Primary Care for the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture (PSOT), delivering medical, psychiatric, social and legal services for migrants and asylum seekers in New York City from over fifty countries. Finally, he represents NYU on the Board of Directors for the Central American Healthcare Initiative (CAHI) at INCAE Business School in Costa Rica.

 
Bernadette Boden-Albala 
Former Senior Associate Dean of Research and Program Development; Interim Chair for the Department of Epidemiology; Former Professor of Public Health, Neurology and Dentistry, of the School of Global Public Health
Dr. Bernadette Boden-Albala is an internationally recognized expert in the social epidemiology of stroke and cardiovascular disease. Over the past 15 years, her robust research portfolio has focused on defining and intervening on social determinants of disease, including the role of sex, race-ethnicity, socio-economic status, social support, stress, and social networks on stroke disparities and patterns across the U.S. and globally. As PI, she has led numerous large stroke prevention studies in urban and rural communities and has a wealth of knowledge and experience leading community level health assessments and interventions. Selected interventions include: SWIFT, a hospital-based stroke preparedness intervention; ASPIRE, a stroke preparedness study in Washington D.C.; and DESERVE, a discharge secondary stroke prevention intervention. In addition to her clinical interventions, Dr. Boden-Albala is Principal Investigator of the National Initiative for Minority Involvement in Neurological Clinical Trials (NIMICT), supported by NINDS/NIMHD, which has built a toolkit of materials to improve racial-ethnic minorities’ and women’s participation rates in neurological clinical trials. She was also a PI for the Alaska Native Stroke Registry (ANSR), which was designed to screen and capture all stroke cases between 2005-2009 through its integration into the existing Tribal Health System infrastructure. Her work has extended internationally to a collaborative effort between the American Heart Association and the Grenada Ministry of Health to develop and evaluate novel community and policy-based interventions for cardiovascular disease prevention in Grenada. She was MPI of an exploratory project in Ghana to assess gaps in lay knowledge of primary and secondary stroke prevention, stroke treatment and recovery. Finally, her work in global chronic disease prevention has included a World Health Organization project that sought to identify the optimum social networks for promoting health policy dialogue in Moldova. In addition to her broad research experience, Dr. Boden-Albala served as Senior Associate Dean of Research and Program Development at NYU School of Global Public Health. In this role, she co-created courses with UNICEF and the United Nations World Food Program focused on innovative solutions to Ebola and Polio response and exploring a systems approach to food access. She also developed the Cross-Continental MPH, a one-year program that combines classroom learning, collaborative research with faculty mentors, and public health practice experience across three continents. At NYU, she served as Interim Chair for the Department of Epidemiology and Professor of Public Health, Neurology and Dentistry. Dr. Boden-Albala earned her MPH and DrPH from Columbia University.

 
Gahlia Brogneri 
Director and Co-Founder, Adonis Musati Project
Gahlia Brogneri has worked in the education and NGO sectors for over 25 years, and specifically with refugees and asylum seekers for the last 10 years. She is passionate about developing sustainable and empowering programs for vulnerable people, and holds an Honours Degree in Psychology and a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education. The Adonis Musati Project (AMP) seeks to empower marginalized refugees and asylum seekers through a number of rights based, holistic and sustainable interventions with a strong focus on SGBV, mental health and community based, psycho-social, peer facilitated support group programs. These support group programs are unique to AMP and utilize and build on the existing resources of skilled individuals from within the refugee and asylum seeker community, by training and empowering them to deliver psycho-social services to their peers over an extended period of time. The overall purpose of this particular program is to fill critical gaps in service to trauma survivors that can be measured over time, have lasting impact and build resilient and integrated communities where individuals can self-advocate and support and empower one another. It also fulfills the need for a cost effective, community based, holistic and sustainable program that can be replicated in a variety of contexts and geographical locations.

 
Ariadna Capasso
Doctoral Candidate, New York University School of Global Public Health
Ariadna Capasso, a Ph.D. Student at NYU’s School of Global Public Health, is currently investigating gender-based violence risk factors associated with internally displaced status among women in conflict-affected regions of Ukraine. Capasso has over 12 years of experience as a sexual and reproductive health and human rights advocate. Throughout her career she has collaborated with ministries of health and grassroots organizations worldwide to foster social inclusion policies for the most marginalized populations. Prior to joining NYU, Ariadna was Senior Technical Advisor at Management Sciences for Health, where she provided strategic leadership and managed a wide range of sexual and reproductive health programs. In 2017, Capasso oversaw an intervention to strengthen midwives’ advocacy capacity in Mexico, enabling midwives to better attend the needs of highly mobile women in Mexico’s Southern and Northern borders. She served as focal point to the United Nations’ Expert Consultative Group for Every Woman Every Child on Adolescent Health, promoting the adoption of best practices for young refugee and internally displaced girls. In 2016, she led the development of a global project to promote social inclusion of young persons with disabilities. While working at the United Nations Population Fund’s Latin America/Caribbean Regional Office, Capasso set the foundations for a research program on migration, health and human rights that was implemented in five critical border areas of the Latin American region. She previously worked with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, where she conducted research, wrote regional briefs, and supported country-level investigations of human rights violations worldwide.

Sarah Cook 
Director, UNICEF Office of Research at Innocenti
Sarah Cook is the Director of UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti in Florence. An economist and China specialist, her research has focused primarily on China´s social and economic transformations, including work on labor and migration, poverty, inequality, social policy and gender. From 2009-2015 she was the Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva, where she led the Institute in developing its 2016-2020 strategy on ‘Transformations to Equity and Sustainability’. Her engagement in China has spanned the period from the mid-1980s, including 5 years as the Ford Foundation’s Program Officer in Beijing (2000-2005) where she led the Foundation’s initiatives on economics, governance and gender. From 1996-2009 she was a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. Cook received her PhD from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and her BA from Oxford University.

 
Chris Dickey 
Director of Global Health at School of Global Public Health, New York University
Dr. Chris Dickey is an international development innovator and public health entrepreneur whose work seeks to develop sustainable public health models and to forge bonds between the academic community and practitioners in the field. He sees the challenges facing public health - vast health inequities, applied skills gaps among public health professionals, weak community health systems, and shrinking research budgets - and seeks to reimagine sustainable solutions through a multidisciplinary approach. This is reflected by the fact that he has worked in more than 20 countries with the United Nations (UN) and other agencies and co-founded a company that provides clean water and primary care in villages in India. Dr. Dickey is developing a public health entrepreneurship program to address the demand for a new generation of public health practitioners with the skill sets and opportunities to create innovative and sustainable business models as stand-alone entities or within a larger corporation. Through a learning model that combines lectures, group exercises, real-time simulations, and implementable course projects and in partnership with the UN and World Food Program, Dr. Dickey leads an Applied Food System and Nutrition course in which international public health professionals and public health students learn and work together on real world problems. Additionally, Dr. Dickey coordinates the Applied Global Health and Development Lab, which offers the opportunity to work on universal health coverage policy, a new data-driven decision support tool, supply chain and logistics analysis, social network and knowledge management analyses, and the development of a business model for online public health programs. 

 
Sara Fadelli 
Chief of Staff, Opera San Francisco, Milano
Sara Fadelli graduated from the University of Milan in 2012 with a bachelor´s degree in Physician Assistant and received her Master´s Degree in Healthcare Management from La Sapienza University of Rome in 2017. She has been working for Opera San Francesco for the Poor (OSF) in Milan for 6 years. The OSF clinic provides free medical assistance to all those who do not have the right or the money to use the medical services offered by the Italian National Health System. At the OSF Clinic, Fadelli plans, directs, and coordinates all the medical and health services ensuring that the clinic provides the most effective patient care.

Ugo Fedeli 
Medic and Epidemiologist, Epidemiological Regional System of Veneto
Ugo Fedeli works at the Epidemiological Department of the Veneto Region (North-Eastern Italy). As an epidemiologist for the regional government since 2004, he is involved mainly in descriptive epidemiology studies and health services research. His institutional activities include coding and analysis of mortality data, analysis of hospitalization data and of linked multiple electronic health archives, in order to evaluate the burden of common chronic diseases, and to investigate disparities between population groups in the occurrence of diseases and in the access to care. As regards the health of the immigrant population, his research involves mainly the analysis of disparities in the prevalence, incidence and mortality from cardiovascular and other chronic diseases among legal immigrants in the Veneto Region. Ugo Fedeli is co-author of more than 120 papers indexed in PubMed.

 
Sally Guttmacher 
Senior Technical Advisor for Women and Children’s Health, HealthRight International
Dr. Sally Guttmacher is a Professor of Public Health at NYU and a Senior Technical Advisor for HealthRight International. Her research interests include policy and prevention of chronic and infectious diseases; poverty and public health; rights of migrants; reproductive health rights; women’s health and evaluation. Much of her research in the past several years has been in the Cape Town Metro area of South Africa. Dr. Guttmacher is currently involved in two research projects in South Africa. One is on the integration of TB and HIV clinics in the Cape Town Metro area which she is doing with her Doctoral Student Jenny Uyei. The second is examining the health and educational risk faced by the youth from Zimbabwe who are currently refugees in South Africa. Dr. Guttmacher is also involved in the evaluation of a training program for NPs in Title 10 clinics. She has just published a book Community Based Health Interventions with Pat Kelly and Yumary Ruiz, (Jossey Bass, 2010). Dr. Guttmacher is a member of the Board of Public Health Examiners, NAF, and the Immediate Past President of the Council on Public Health Programs.

 
Cheryl G. Healton 
Dean of the School of Global Public Health, New York University
Dr. Healton is the Dean of the School of Global Public Health (GPH) at New York University and Director of the Global Institute of Public Health. GPH is working to prepare the next generation of public health pioneers with the critical thinking skills, acumen and entrepreneurial approaches necessary to reinvent the public health paradigm. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Healton served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Legacy, the leading national foundation dedicated to tobacco control. During her tenure with the foundation, she guided the highly acclaimed, national youth tobacco prevention counter-marketing campaign, truth®, which has been credited in part with reducing youth smoking prevalence to near record lows. Prior to joining Legacy, Dr. Healton held numerous roles at Columbia University including Chairman of Sociomedical Sciences and Associate Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health. She has authored over 120 peer-reviewed articles and special reports and was awarded multiple grants in AIDS, tobacco control, and higher education. Dr. Healton holds a DrPH from Columbia University’s School of Public Health (with distinction) and a MPA in Public Administration from New York University in Health Policy and Planning.

 
Laurent Huber 
Executive Director, CEO Action on Smoking & Health
Laurent Huber is the Executive Director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH); a U.S. based NGO fully devoted to supporting global health and international tobacco control efforts. He was also a founder and the first Director and of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA), an international coalition of over 500 NGOs from more than 100 countries, which he led for over 15 years and which is now widely recognized by governments, NGOs and intergovernmental organizations for its vital role in shaping the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the world’s first global legally binding public health treaty. Huber played an influential role in building the base of the FCA, reaching out to advocates and policymakers around the world to ensure the FCA´s growth into a powerful and well-respected global health and tobacco control force. Under Huber´s decade-long direction, the FCA evolved from a loose coalition of advocates into a well-funded organization in official relationship with several United Nations bodies, influencing and strengthening numerous global governance mechanisms including the UN Sustainable Development Goals. While managing and directing both ASH and the FCA, Huber also helped facilitate the integration of tobacco control alongside non-communicable diseases and its risk factors in the UN and global development agendas. He now leads ASH’s campaign to strengthen the link between the tobacco control and human rights. Huber holds a postgraduate degree in Education with a focus on Exercise Physiology research, and before he began working full time in global health and tobacco control in 2000, he directed a number of programs and nonprofit organizations where he developed and implemented educational programs and non-communicable disease prevention programs for at risk and vulnerable populations. Fluent in 4 languages, Huber has written and contributed to numerous articles and regularly speaks at media, public health, and tobacco control policy events for advocates and legislators in more than 50 countries across 5 continents. He also consistently presents at intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the regional offices of the WHO, conferences around the world, governmental meetings, and at academic institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, University of Michigan, University of California – San Francisco, University of Southern California, University of Maryland, Harvard University, and Universidad Internacional Menendez Pelayo, among others. Huber served on a number of panels and Advisory Boards for academic institutions, corporations, and intergovernmental organizations that address health policy matters. A few notable memberships include the Steering Committee for the NCD Alliance, the Pan-American Forum on NCDs, the University of California – San Francisco’s Center for Tobacco Control Research, and the International Advisory Council of the WHO NCDnet.

 
Shannon Kay 
Co-Director, Small Projects Istanbul
Shannon Kay, originally from Australia, is the Co-Director at Small Projects Istanbul (SPI), a grass-roots NGO operating a Community Center for displaced people in Istanbul. Following an earlier career as a domestic electrician, Kay´s lifelong passion for travel and immersing herself in new places inspired her to undertake a degree in anthropology and political science. Through her studies and life experience, Kay has developed a core belief in the transformative power of grass-roots community development initiatives and sought the opportunity to convert this belief into action through her involvement with SPI. Over the past three years, Kay has been part of a small, dedicated team who have built the SPI infrastructure in order to provide community services in education, integration and livelihood programs. She feels deeply grateful for the experience of participating in and contributing to such a diverse, supportive and enriching community and is committed to working for a world in which meaningful community experience is a reality for all humans. 

Ioanna Kotsioni
Over the past 15 years, Ioanna Kotsioni has worked in the field of migrant/refugee health, combining research, policy and practice. She has worked with Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) over the past 9 years in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, managing refugee health activities in immigration detention, refugee camps and in the community, and conducting advocacy at national and European level. Her latest long-term assignment with MSF (2014-2017) was the set-up and management of the Athens MSF rehabilitation clinic for refugee torture survivors in partnership with two local NGOs. Between 2010 – 2011, she worked as a migration advisor to the Greek government during a period of structural reforms in asylum and migration and contributed to the set-up of the Asylum Service and the First Reception Service. Being interested in “bridging the gap” between practice, policy and research, she has published on the thematic of migrant and refugee health, focusing on immigration detention and the health risks linked with irregular migration. Kotsioni has also participated in two European transnational research networks under the European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (ADAPT Action: “Adapting European health systems to diversity” and COST Action: “Health and Social Care for Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Europe). She holds a PhD from Athens Medical School on “Access and use of healthcare services by Russian speaking immigrants in Athens” and I am a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

 
Iris Luthman 
Assistant Programme Manager, Expert Group for Aid Studies at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Iris Luthman is a MSC Political Science graduate from Uppsala University, Sweden. She presented her master thesis “The Gendered Implications of Securitized Migration” in January, 2017. She received her Bachelor of Philosophy in International Relations from Stockholm University in 2015 after presenting her thesis “Sex work on the CV? – a contextual idea analysis of policy recommendations from the European Parliament and the UNDP concerning prostitution and sex work”. She currently works as assistant programme manager at the Expert Group for Aid Studies (EBA) – a Government committee under the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a mandate to evaluate and analyze Sweden’s international development assistance. Before joining the EBA, Iris held the position of assistant delegation secretary at the Swedish Migration Studies Delegation (Delmi) at the Swedish Ministry of Justice. Her experience within the field of Public Health includes a previous summer-internship at the College of Global Public Health at New York University and studies in Global Outbreak Alert and Response at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po).

 
Gabriella Meltzer 
Doctoral Candidate, New York University College of Global Public Health
Gabriella Meltzer is a first year doctoral student at NYU CGPH studying social epidemiology with a focus on global environmental health. She is currently conducting research on the burden of noncommunicable diseases and access to care among irregular migrants and refugees in the European Union. Her other current research projects include an analysis of disproportionate environmental exposures in slums in South Asia, as well as an evaluation of Indonesia’s food voucher program on health outcomes. Meltzer graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 with a Bachelor’s in Health and Societies, concentrating in global health. Her undergraduate research focused on the public health implications of electronic waste with Accra, Ghana as a case study. Following graduation, Meltzer worked as a global health research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she contributed to policy projects on Zika in Latin America; global health governance and pandemic preparedness; environmental health in China, and planetary health.

 
Salim Murad 
Faculty, New York University Prague and University of South Bohemia
Since 2007, Salim Murad has been teaching at New York University in Prague. His main research topics involve ethnic stereotypes in Czech advertising and media and migration.  Murad also teaches in the Political Science Department of the Faculty of Education of the University of South Bohemia, where he started working in 2000. He is a course coordinator and lecturer of the university´s teaching module in the European Union M.A. Program in Migration and Intercultural Relations. Murad has worked on projects for UNHCR Czech Republic and the Human Rights Education Centre of Charles University in Prague. In 2010, Murad earned a Ph.D. in Theory of Politics from the Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovak Republic). He graduated in 2000 from the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University in Brno with an M.A. degree in Political Science. From April to June 2003, Murad was a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. His research there dealt with the issue of asylum in the Czech Republic since the fall of communism and access to the EU. He also studied at the Institute of Political Science at Copenhagen University in 2004.

Peter Navario 
Executive Director, HealthRight International Director of Global Health Strategy, Research Scientist, and Associate Research Professor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health
Peter Navario is Executive Director at HealthRight International and Director of Global Health Strategy, Research Scientist, and Associate Research Professor at the School of Global Public Health at New York University. He was previously technical advisor at the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and a Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Navario has extensive field experience, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where he has worked on health system capacity building initiatives in more than 15 countries. He holds a Ph.D. in Health Economics from the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, and an MPH in Global Health from the School of Public Health at Yale University.

Joanna Pozen 
Former Director, Health and Human Rights Initiative/ Senior Technical Advisor, HealthRight International; Former Assistant Research Professor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health
Joanna Pozen is an international public health lawyer and human rights specialist and an Assistant Research Professor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health. She is also the co-founder of the Restore Cup, an innovative medical device to aid women suffering from obstetric fistula. Pozen brought over 15 years of experience at the intersection of international human rights law and public health to HealthRight. She conceived and led projects that informed the strategic development of health and human rights policy at the United Nations and in a range of international and post-conflict settings. She also served as Legal Advisor to the former UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, UN Women’s HIV and Health Policy Specialist, and Supervising Staff Attorney at NYU School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. She holds a Jurist Doctorate (JD) from NYU and a Masters of Public Health (MPH) from Harvard University.

Vanda Thorne 
Assistant Director for Academic Affairs, New York University Prague
Dr. Vanda Thorne, Assistant Director, Academic Affairs, NYU Prague, teaches and researches on the themes of mass mentality, social movements, and collective civil action in totalitarian and post-totalitarian regimes. Other interests include gender and politics in Central Europe, ideology and propaganda, and theories of cultural resistance. Thorne received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh. She also holds an M.A. in English and American Literature from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and an M.A. in Gender from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She has designed and taught courses at NYU Prague, the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (Prague), Charles University (Prague) and the University of Pittsburgh. Thorne is an advisor in several Czech educational foundations. She has also been collaborating with various Czech non-governmental organizations, such as the Political Prisoners research initiative, La Strada Czech Republic (anti-trafficking) and Gender Studies Center in Prague.

 
Ellyn Toscano 
Executive Director, New York University Florence; Director, Villa La Pietra
Ellyn Toscano is Executive Director of New York University Florence. ​She is the founder and director of La Pietra Dialogues and producer of The Season, a summer festival which assembles artists, writers, musicians and public intellectuals to produce new works or reinterpretations of classics. Toscano co-organized the renowned Black Portraitures II conference at NYU Florence, a ​gathering of scholars and public figures to offer comparative perspectives on the historical and contemporary role played by photography, art, film, literature, and music in referencing the image of the black body in the West. She also produced the corresponding exhibition ReS​ignifications, held at three locations in the city of Florence, showcasing contemporary works by artists from around the world. She is a member of the Honorary Board of the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Italy; the Advisory Board of the John Brademas Center, New York; the Italian Advisory Council of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Umbertide, Italy; and the Comitato Promotore of the Festival degli Scrittori and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, Santa Maddalena Foundation, Donnini, Italy. Before arriving at New York University Florence, Toscano served as Chief of Staff and Counsel to Congressman Josè Serrano of New York, was his chief policy advisor on legislative, political and media concerns and directed his work on the Appropriations Committee. Toscano also served as counsel to the New York State Assembly Committee on Education for nine ​years and served on the boards of several prominent arts and cultural institutions in New York City, including The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (representative of the Borough President)​, and on the board of trustees of the International School of Florence, Italy. A lawyer by training, Toscano earned an LLM in International Law from New York University School of Law.

Partners and Sponsors:

• Global Research Initiatives, Office of the Provost
• NYU Florence Villa La Pietra
• NYU School of Medicine - NYU Langone Medical Center