Caitilin McMillan is a passionate peacebuilding and human rights advocate with a professional background in international development and gender equality.

She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where her research examines the impact of humanitarian care work supporting the mental health and wellbeing of refugees in Cyprus as they navigate the EU’s asylum system and remake home. Her work furthers GWI’s mission as she collaborates with women survivors of war to improve mental health and psychosocial care practices in the aftermath of violence. Psychosocial approaches often still remain a relative ‘black box’ within the humanitarian sector, but broadly offer a way of thinking about care that captures the inseparable relationship between an individual’s psychological wellbeing and their embeddedness in the wider social environment. Her work looks at how these spaces of care are produced by civil society organizations and sheds light on the intimate geopolitics of how refugees alongside local humanitarian workers heal trauma while advocating to prevent future violence.

Before pursuing her PhD, Caitilin worked with grassroots groups, local governments and NGOs across North America, West Africa, Europe and Asia. Many of her roles were dedicated to the empowerment of women and girls. Most recently, she worked for Plan International, a girls’ rights NGO, where she led innovative research and evaluation on inclusive education projects in Sierra Leone promoting gender equality, access to school, learning for girls and sustainability She has also worked with displaced communities around the world, including helping shape a grassroots response in the UK and travelling to Greece in response to the refugee crisis.

Caitilin holds a BA (honours) in Global Development Studies from Queen’s University in Canada as well as an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford.

Samantha Newby gained her undergraduate degree from Hofstra University in NY, USA with a focus in costume design and construction. She then worked in industry, on Broadway, for several years before deciding to change her focus.

While on Broadway she became passionate about environmental protection and sustainability and wanted to focus on creating a better future for textiles that does not destroy the environment. She went to North Carolina State University and earned a Master’s in Science with a focus on sustainability and management. Following that, she set out to have a more technical impact on the industry and, specifically, the future of smart textiles. She is currently seeking her PhD from The University of Manchester’s Department of Materials with a focus on sustainable energy that utilises textiles.

Her project focuses on harvesting energy though various temperature variations near the textile that can be then used to power sensors or other technology. The purpose of this technology is to give autonomy to those who do not have access to reliable energy. This research will pave the way for sustainable energy at an individual level that has numerous applications across many fields. This research will allow more at-home care and analysis which will help communities that do not have full access to medical personnel produce long-term treatments without having to travel to medical centres.

This research will also offer opportunities to women in education as this will allow women in developing nations to have better access to computers and online education that is currently difficult to acquire.

Eli is a PhD student in the “Global research on Autism and other Developmental disorders” (GLAD) Lab, in the Department of Psychology at King’s College London (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, IoPPN), supervised by Dr Rosa Hoekstra and Dr Charlotte Hanlon. Her main research interests are in developmental disabilities, inclusive education, and intervention development for low and middle income countries.

Graduating from King’s College London with a First Class Honours degree in Psychology, Eli was awarded a Dean's Prize for Outstanding Achievement and the 2019 Jelf Medal for the IoPPN for her academic excellence combined with service to her programme and peers at King's as well as the community beyond King's. She then completed with Distinction the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and King’s College London joint MSc in Global Mental Health. For her MSc final project, Eli conducted a systematic review of qualitative studies on stakeholders’ experiences, attitudes and perspectives on inclusive education for children with developmental disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Eli's PhD is funded by the Economic & Social Research Council London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership. Her PhD research employs predominantly qualitative methods, and aims at collaborating with Ethiopian stakeholders to develop and evaluate a context-appropriate programme to help teachers support children with developmental disabilities in mainstream school settings. The intervention will be co-developed through stakeholder workshops and working group sessions and piloted at a few mainstream schools. As girls with disabilities in Africa face greater challenges to have their right to education acknowledged compared to boys, the intervention will include any additional supports needed to ensure that girls with disabilities equally benefit from the intervention.

Eli is a qualified Mental Health First Aider and experienced in working with children with developmental disabilities in clinical and educational settings. As well as conducting her PhD project, Eli works as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Psychology BSc at King’s College London. Additionally, she is co-supervisor of a placement student and a third-year research project student, mentor to two first-year PhD students, and social media manager for the GLAD Lab.

Isabela Dos Santos is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She studies peace and conflict with a focus on the Middle East. Her doctoral research explores the village of Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom (WAS-NS), which in English translates to “Oasis of Peace.” WAS-NS is a binational and bilingual village of Palestinian Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel “dedicated to building justice, peace and equality in the country and the region” (WASNS, n.d.). Isabela is interested in understanding how peace has been possible in WAS-NS.

She wants to use her research to inform peacebuilding practices elsewhere in the Middle East and in the world. Isabela is fluent in English, French, and Portuguese and is currently learning Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish. Upon completing her doctoral degree, she would like to work in the peacebuilding sector either for the Government of Canada or for an international, non-governmental organization.

Outside of her studies, Isabela loves running, reading, and cooking and baking for her family and friends.

Klara Mundilova is a PhD student in computer science at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria.

Klara’s research interests are in computational origami, in particular the geometry of curved-crease origami, that is, the geometry of shapes that can be obtained by folding a flat sheet of material such as paper along curves. Due to their aesthetics, ease in fabrication, structural stiffness, and space-saving transport, these shapes have applications in fields such as architecture, design, engineering, and aeronautics. Although manual fabrication is relatively straightforward, the mathematical description and the computational design of curved-crease origami shapes are still difficult tasks.

Klara enjoys investigating novel construction methods for curved-crease design. For example, she implemented the novel construction approach for creases between arbitrary developable surfaces and a cylinder or a cone as a plug-in named Lotus for the commercial CAD software Grasshopper / Rhino. The components of Lotus allow users with limited knowledge about the mathematics of curved creases to interactively design curved-crease origami shapes. In the proposed project, Klara plans to extend the functionality of Lotus to offer more parametric design possibilities.

Klara’s plug-in has sparked the interest of architects and designers and has already been used in a seminar for graduate architecture students. Klara collaborates with architects and designers and provides technical knowledge and software solutions for design problems. Ultimately, the goal of Klara’s fundamental research is to make curved crease origami design more attainable for interdisciplinary research. She believes that curved creases have the potential to address the need of functional material-efficient lightweight constructions.