Janette Merrill, MS CHES, is the Senior Director, Policy Programs, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) where she provides programmatic and strategic oversight to the Society’s initiatives related to cancer care delivery and research, with a predominant focus on those related to cancer prevention, health equity and survivorship. Additionally, Ms. Merrill provides content expertise for legislative and regulatory analysis, education initiatives, and awareness efforts related to ASCO’s prevention, survivorship and health equity efforts. She also serves as Project Director for ASCO’s Rural Montana Access pilot, a program supported by the Alliance for Equity in Cancer Care, a Merk Foundation Initiative. Ms. Merrill is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Health Administration at Central Michigan University.

Katherine Pettus is the Senior Advocacy and Partnerships Director for the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC). She holds a PhD in Political Theory from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in health law and policy from the University of California San Diego. Dr Pettus Katherine attends UN organization meetings to advocate for improved availability, and rational use of essential palliative care medicines as a component of the right to health. She addresses issues of global palliative care development and policy as an essential element of universal health coverage throughout the life course. Her focus is equitable inclusion of the those at the peripheries such as fail older persons, prisoners, persons living with disabilities, indigenous persons, and those affected by humanitarian emergencies.

Pilar Gangas (female) is Scientific Advice Officer for the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). She has participated in more than 70 projects for over more than 25 years, as social sciences researcher and/or project manager, including the co-coordination of ICT4Life project. She has participated in several previous EU funded projects connected to EUNAVIGATE objectives, involving senior people, cancer and/or integratation of care, to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of people, their carers and health and care professionals. She has also led and contributed to the impact analysis in several previous projects.

Dr Vânia de la Fuente-Núñez works as an independent senior consultant in healthy ageing, offering technical and strategic advice to different entities to help improve the lives of older people, their families, and communities. In this role, she has worked with governments, CSOs, research institutes and the private sector to ensure countries leverage the opportunities of increased longevity and provide better responses to population ageing.

As an Associate Professor and palliative care researcher at the School of Nursing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Nicholas is a clinical trialist and advocate who is focused on testing interventions that improve the lives of families caring for loved ones with advanced cancer and heart failure. As well as EU Navigate, he is involved in several ongoing projects focused on patient navigation.

Professor Christobel Saunders AO, MB BS, FRCS, FRACS, FAAHMS is the James Stewart Chair of Surgery, the Head of the Department of Surgery at the University of Melbourne (The Royal Melbourne Hospital precinct), Director Medical Research, Melbourne Medical School, and consultant surgeon in the Department of General Surgery at Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute. She is internationally recognised as one of Australia’s most prominent research-orientated cancer surgeons. She has substantially contributed to breast cancer research including clinical trials of new treatments, psychosocial, translational and health services research

Dr Libby Sallnow is a palliative medicine consultant with CNWL NHS Trust in London, UK, an honorary senior clinical lecturer at St Christopher’s Hospice and the UCL Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, UK and a guest professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She has helped lead and develop 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 in the UK and internationally. 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).