Prerna Banati
UNICEF
Senegal

Dr. Banati has over 20 years of international development experience with the United Nations and other international organizations. Since 2012 she has been working with UNICEF, including at their West and Central Africa Regional Office, and at the Office of Research. She brings extensive experience at the intersections of adolescence, gender and social inclusion, supporting evidence generation and technical support to rights-based country programmes of cooperation in collaboration with governments, civil society and the private sector. Over her career, she has led a number of action-research programs, most recently a DfID funded gender-responsive, adolescent-sensitive social protection, and prior to that on the social and structural determinants of adolescent wellbeing.  Before joining UNICEF, she was a Takemi Fellow at Harvard University. She has previously worked for the World Health Organization, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, and for different NGOs. She sits on a number of advisory boards and has authored many publications in the field of adolescent health and wellbeing, including in reproductive health, mental health, HIV prevention and migration. In 2018, she co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Adolescent Development Research and its Impact on Global Policy. In 2020, she will release her new edited volume on Sustainable Human Development Across the Life Course: Evidence from Longitudinal Research on Children, Adolescents and Youth by Policy Press. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

Cristina Bacalso
Independent Consultant, Berlin, Germany
Germany