Puja Myles is an Associate Professor of Health Protection and Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, UK. She also holds an honorary contract as a Consultant Epidemiologist with Public Health England. Her research interests include infectious disease epidemiology (particularly, pneumonia and influenza), using large routine databases for epidemiology, pharmacoepidemiology, evaluation of public health interventions and public health policy, educational research. She oversees the undergraduate public health teaching on the undergraduate medical degree course and also teaches health promotion, evaluation and health inequalities on the postgraduate public health degree course. In addition she supervises undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral research students. Her recent projects include a post-pandemic review of anti-influenza drug effectiveness (PRIDE study) that investigates the potential impact of neuraminidase inhibitor antivirals on public health outcomes like mortality during the 2009-10 influenza pandemic. Another study involves the setting up of a sysstem capable of real-time refinement and validation of referral criteria and tools for patients of all ages in the event of surge during and influenza pandemic. During a pandemic, this system will be capable of providing weekly basic descriptive reports and more detailed monthly epidemiological reports to inform pandemic influenza policy (FLUCATs study). She is also working with research in India and Kenya to design pragmatic evaluation studies and propose appropriate outcome measures for evaluating the impact of community-based interventions to reduce pneumonia-related mortality in children under the age of 5.

Melvin M. Mark is professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, where he also is Head of the Department of Psychology. He has served as President of the American Evaluation Association (AEA). He was Editor of the American Journal of Evaluation (and is now Editor Emeritus). A social psychologist, Dr. Mark has wide ranging interests related to the theory, methodology and practice of evaluation, as well as a general interest in the application of social psychology to evaluation and applied social research. Dr. Mark’s awards include the American Evaluation Association’s Lazarsfeld Award for Contributions to Evaluation Theory. He is author of more than 125 articles and chapters in books. Among his books are Evaluation: An integrated framework for understanding, guiding, and improving policies and programs and the co-edited volumes Social Science and Social Policy; SAGE Handbook of Evaluation; What Counts as Credible Evidence in Applied Research and Evaluation Practice; Evaluation in Action: Interviews with Expert Evaluators; and Social Psychology and Evaluation.

Gillian McLauchlan Gillian McLauchlan is a public health specialist who is currently working for Health Education England. Her role is to support the planning, education and development of the public health workforces across the North West region of England. She has worked across the 3 domains of public health, latterly focusing on screening and sexual health. Early in Gillian’s career, she evaluated the school sanitation programme in Laos after which she has become a passionate advocate for evaluation. Gillian has carried out local, regional and national evaluations on health interventions as well as teaching on the subject at a graduate and post graduate level. She particularly enjoys working with students on their evaluation plans through the People’s University Initiative.

Tim Warren, originally from London, went to University in Aberdeen, and Scotland has been his home ever since. He studied in Aberdeen, New York and Edinburgh, where he now lives. Originally a social worker, and moved into the Scottish Government as a social work inspector in 2000, before taking up a series of policy posts in the health directorates. He was the policy lead for Health Inequalities and Health Improvement, where he was responsible for the evaluation of a number of programmes which aimed to reduce health inequalities. Here he worked closely with leading evaluators and became interested making evaluations both rigorous and significant in shaping both policy and its implementation. This concern continued in his next post as the policy lead for Self Management and Health Literacy, where he was responsible for producing Making it Easy, the Scottish Government‘s Health Literacy Action Plan. This summer he was seconded to the Health and Social Care Alliance (an umbrella group for third sector organisations), as programme director, leading on the adoption of the ‘House of Care’, a re-working of the Chronic Care Model, which seeks to embed personalised care planning into general practice and specialist care, supported by local commissioning and service redesign. The task of ensuring that this endeavour is evaluated in ways which will assist both its improvement and its spread is both his current concern and responsibility.

James R. Dunn, is a Professor in the Department of Health, Aging and Society at McMaster University and a Scientist at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. He is the Director of the McMaster Institute for Environment and Health and holds adjunct appointments at the University of Toronto (Geography and Planning) and the University of Waterloo (Planning). He holds a Chair in Applied Public Health from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Public Health Agency of Canada and in 2011-12 was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies at Harvard University. He has published widely in geography, public health, urban planning and epidemiology journals over his career, and co-edited Rethinking Social Epidemiology: Towards a Science of Change with Patricia O’Campo in 2012. Since 2011 he has been the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, a specialty journal of the British Medical Journal.

His current research program focuses on the social determinants of health and the influence of economic and social policies and programs on inequalities in health and child development, concentrating on urban housing and neighbourhoods. Specifically, his work includes projects on the health and social impacts of public housing redevelopment, the impact of neighbourhood redevelopment initiatives on health and child development, and the development of cross-sectoral (between public health and urban planning) policy implementation solutions for urban health problems.