Before her appointment at University of Bath, she was an Associate Professor at the University of York’s Department of Social Policy and Social Work, an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign and a Postdoctorate Research Associate at the Washington University in St. Louis Medical School-Siteman Cancer Center. She earned her Ph.D. and masters in social work (Boston College), and an M.P.A. as well as an M.A. from Columbia University and St. John’s University, respectively. A native of Kosovo, Venera Bekteshi acquired extensive experience in health and mental health research over 9 years by practicing in non-profit and government sectors, among others, as an associate researcher at the United Nations’ Human Development Reports Office and as Deputy Director of the Albanian American Women’s Organization. Most of her research focuses on the health and mental needs of immigrants, the homeless and of adolescents, and on breast cancer prevention research. Yet, she also examines sex trafficking in such Eastern European countries as Albania, Kosovo, Romania, and Macedonia. Grounded in theory, her research addresses this significant issue by employing various methodological techniques, depending on data availability. For her academic contributions and her involvement in community service and development, Professor Bekteshi received several prestigious awards and fellowships, among which the First Award for Community Building and Leadership by the International Leadership Class at the University of Oklahoma and the Mayor’s Recognition for Community Service, New York. Additionally, she won several competitive research grants from the National Institute of Health, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (co-authored) and a number of NGOs in New York such as the Van Ameringen Foundation and the New York Foundation. Currently, Professor Bektheshi has several ongoing projects on topics such as discrimination and Polish immigrants (with Dr. Monika Stodolska), the emotional barriers and access to mammography among Latina immigrants, and the integration challenges they face in the United States and United Kingdom

Maria Chiara Vinciguerra is a Doctoral Fellow at the Wiener-Anspach Foundation and PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge. She works on EU governance, migration and anti-corruption. Before Cambridge, Maria Chiara graduated from Bocconi University, Syracuse University and the Hertie School of Governance. She has already published articles in peer-reviewed journals and newspapers such as International Migration Review and Corriere della Sera, among others.

I am interested in understanding the effects of social/public policies aimed at addressing the gender/income disparities in the labor market, primarily focusing on workers with caregiving responsibilities in middle and old age. I do quantitative analysis in the hope that my work could contribute to developing policy initiatives that reduce the disadvantage in the labor force placed at persons with family care responsibilities over the life course and that work better with the aging population.

Shawn holds a MSc from The Management Centre, the School of Public Policy and Social Science, King’s College London, and is in the final stages of submitting his doctoral dissertation to the School of Public Policy and Administration, Ottawa, Carleton University. He is Managing Partner of Workforce Edge, a niche international consultancy working at the exclusive intersection of healthcare and workforce deployment. He has founded an international Practitioner’s Panel on Health Workforce Mobilization with the ICPA-Forum on whose board he serves. He is founder and co-Chair of a CCHL and HealthCareCAN collaborative, raising the visibility of staff scheduling, deployment and “in-system” workforce planning towards health services sustainability. He is a board member of the Canadian Chapter of the American College of Healthcare Executive as Canada has much to be proud of in the domain; serving as an example for our counterparts in the US and abroad.