Agenda

Michiel Peters is a Director at the Global Coalition on Aging. He has more than a decade of experience in the public and private sectors. Michiel is passionate about bringing together governments, businesses, and other societal stakeholders to start a conversation and engage in finding solutions for the challenges we face. 
Michiel is an expert communications professional and strategist who worked on local, state, and national campaigns before serving as a Senior Press Officer in the Dutch Parliament – specializing in communications and political strategy on a broad range of policy areas, including healthcare and sustainability. 
After eight years of working in the public sector, he transferred to the private sector to build up the corporate and public affairs functions for a large family-owned multinational in the agricultural industry. In this role, he served as a trusted advisor to C-suite and was the company’s principal representative in national and international industry associations and public-private partnerships. While there, he led the development and implementation of the company’s worldwide sustainability strategy. 

Brian P. Kennedy has worked in leadership positions in five art museums - in Ireland, Australia and the United States of America.  Art historian, author, curator, and thought leader in visual literacy, he is President of Brian P Kennedy Arts Consulting LLC, based in Salem, Massachusetts. 
 

As Sr. Advisor, Policy Advocacy & Communications and Director of Adult Immunization at the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC), Lois focuses on immunization policy issues across the life course in a broad range of countries. Her research interests include understanding of the drivers of and barriers to country policies, characterizing country archetypes, stakeholder analysis, and factors impacting national vaccine decision-making and equitable uptake, with specific focus on pneumococcal, Hib, rotavirus, influenza and COVID-19 vaccines. 

More recently, she has focused on community engagement and vaccine acceptance in older minority populations in Baltimore City and preparation for COVID-19 vaccines in both the US and globally. She has worked in more than 70 countries to help accelerate equitable access to new and underutilized vaccines including Hib, pneumococcal, rotavirus, influenza and COVID-19 vaccines. Much of her focus has been in large countries, including India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia to support immunization decisions and work with local stakeholders to build an enabling environment for vaccines. Her advocacy work focuses on both the broader value of vaccines and their contributions to the sustainable development goals, including the Value of Immunization Compendium of Evidence (VoICE) and the annual Pneumonia and Diarrhea Progress Report to provide advocates with evidence to drive change. Her teaching focuses on vaccine policy and advocacy and she has trained hundreds of country-level professionals. 

Prior to coming to Hopkins, Lois spent more than 15 years in the pharmaceutical industry working in a variety of commercial, operational, forecasting, market research and analysis, and R&D strategy roles in both human and animal health. She managed multiple strategies and initiatives for the launch of the first pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) in the US, and worked with countries in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East to introduce PCV, Hib vaccine and MenC vaccines.

 Dr. Thiago Hérick de Sá holds a degree in Sports Science, and a Masters and PhD in Public Health from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He started his career as a physical educator, working with older people at hospitals, primary care settings and households in Brazil. Since 2010, Thiago has worked as a researcher in Brazil and in the UK, with a track record of scientific publications in high-impact journals. 
 
Thiago joined WHO in 2017 to support the work around urban, transport and health, including the development of WHO’s Urban Health Initiative (ongoing) and WHO’s Urban Health Research Agenda (2022). He also led the development of several technical resources such as the Sourcebook on Integrating Health in Urban and Territorial Planning (2020) and the adaptation for global use of the HEAT tool (2021). 
 
In 2022, Thiago joined the Department of Social Determinants of Health to lead the work on Age-friendly Environments, including the Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities.
 

Since 2008 Frans-Anton Vermast MBA (1969) has been Strategy Advisor and International Smart City Ambassador for Amsterdam Smart City and Chief Technology Office Innovation Team City of Amsterdam, metropole at a human scale and winners European Capital of Innovation: iCapital 2016.

He is a global expert in searching for opportunities for novel appliances and services that make cities and regions an accessible and inclusive society and a more habitable place for people to live, work and play in.

Next to a strategic and broad general knowledge and experience in this field for almost 20 years Mr Vermast specialises in citizens engagement and governance- and finance models to facilitate collaboration in a double triple helix.

His objectives are to facilitate social innovation and a sustainable-liveable environment to boost social and economic benefits based on open data, open AI and open algorithms in a human centric approach. Ethics, gaining (back) trust of citizens and ownership of data to citizens are important topics he focusses on. He is very interested to elaborate on these themes and to learn from others.

Furthermore, Mr Vermast has extensive Dutch, European and global knowledge and extensive experience in facilitating the participation of several local-, regional- and national governments in Europe, the Middle East, Peoples Republic of China, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and is frequent visitor to Australia.

In addition, the private sector regularly calls on Mr Vermast his opinion and advice; this includes big consultancy firms, communication incumbents and NGO’s, local SME’s and start-ups.

Mr Vermast holds several positions as jury member and had the privilege to be a jury member twice for the European Commission for Capital of Innovation 2018 and Rising Innovative City 2022. For the Global Organisation of Smart Cities GO SMART awards he is a jury member since 2018.

Mr Vermast is also a sought-after advisor, facilitator, moderator and day chair for conferences, strategy sessions and workshops.   

He is a guest lecturer at Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Tunis, Leiden University, Radboud University Nijmegen and Universities of Applied Sciences of The Hague and HAN. Mr Vermast is experienced in national and international training both professional and as a volunteer with political parties.

Joseph Musgrave has led Home and Community Care Ireland (HCCI) since 2018, bringing an essential mix of leadership and partnership to homecare in Ireland.

Over the last four years, as CEO of HCCI, Joseph has led an important public discussion about home care by highlighting the challenges the home care sector faces whilst putting a spotlight on the great work its member organisations do for their clients and the 10,000 carers who deliver care every day. At the height of the pandemic, home proved to be the safest place with infection rates rarely above 1% of the client base at any one time. In 2021, Joseph felt compelled to establish the annual HCCI Home Care Awards to recognise ‘unsung home care heroes’ – the carers who, on a daily basis, go above and beyond for our most vulnerable in society.

Each day, HCCI’s members provide vital home support services to more than 20,000 clients in their own home. Joseph is acutely aware of the significant and important role care in the home will continue to play in the lives of older and more vulnerable people for decades to come. HCCI has publicly said that Ireland is at a critical juncture when it comes to care of older people with many lessons learnt during the COVID pandemic.

Joseph’s earlier career was in Communications and Public Affairs having worked on the ‘Freedom to Marry’ campaign for the Conservative Party in the UK and as Chief of Staff for leading Communication Consultancy firm WPP Burson-Marsteller.