2016 Pre-OHEH Dogs & People Workshop Speaker Biographies

SESSION SPEAKER BIO Ground-level Thinlay engagement Bhutia Dr Thinlay Bhutia is the program leader for the Sikkim Anti-Rabies and Animal Health Program (SARAH), India’s first government sanctioned program for state-wide rabies and stray-dog control. The success of this program to eliminate dog-mediated rabies and to create a stable dog population has relied on continual stakeholder engagement. Dr Thinlay worked with Vets Beyond Borders to bring an end to the mass shooting of dogs in Sikkim and simultaneously has reduced the street dog population. Sikkim had been rabies free from 2006 to 2016 but has had two suspect human rabies cases this year. In response to these cases, Dr Bhutia has been swift in implementing a One Health approach and engaging necessary stakeholders. Dr Bhutia has been invited to speak on the SARAH program in Delhi, , and China. He has been actively involved in training veterinarians from other States on small animal surgery and rabies program management. WHO acknowledged his “champion efforts “at the 2015 global elimination of dog-mediated rabies conference where he was an invited panel member for the “proof of elimination” session. Recently he was awarded the World Rabies Day MSD award for the Asia and Oceania region.

Dr Bhutia continues to be an active campaigner for improving animal welfare in Sikkim and is the State representative of the Animal Welfare Board of India. With his involvement, in addition to legislation to ban the mass shooting of dogs, legislation has also been passed and enacted in Sikkim to ban the sale and importation of birds other than poultry, to ban the castration of farm animals without adequate anaesthesia and proper restraint, and to prohibit the sale of glue strips for control of birds and vermin. Diki Palmu Dr Palmu is the senior veterinarian and animal surgeon for the Sikkim Anti-Rabies and Animal Health (SARAH) program in Sikkim, India, since its inception in 2005. She is responsible for the day-to-day running of the SARAH clinic in Gangtok and mobile clinics throughout Sikkim, training of Departmental veterinarians and field staff and is involved with community engagement including village and school based education campaigns on dog bite prevention, rabies and animal welfare. These programs incorporate the importance of treating all beings with respect and compassion. She can speak four languages – Nepali, English, Hindi and Bhutia which is important as thirty percent of the Sikkim population are indigenous (Lepcha and Bhutia) and about twenty different languages are spoken throughout this small Himalayan state. Her role has been pivotal to the success of the programs animal birth control (ABC) with a stable dog population now evident after ten years. In 2013 she presented on “The importance of animal welfare” at the 13th Sakyadhita International Conference on Buddhist Women, Bihar and her OHEH 2016 conference poster will present “Gender equality in a One Health zoonosis program in Sikkim, India”. She has been invited to present on Buddhist Social Action for Animals in Sikkim in July 2017 at the 15th Sakyadhita International Conference on Buddhist Women in Hong Kong.

Jan Allen Jan has been AMRRIC’s Program Manager since September 2008. Her passion for the bigger picture of dog management has progressed from many years vetting in small animal practices in throughout Australia though initially developed in Samoa. As an AVI volunteer working with the Animal Protection Society Samoa , she gained experience in community development, media, capacity building, liaising with governments and local communities and community and school education. AMRRIC’s Dog People Conference, 2006, was an inspiring introduction to work in Indigenous communities at home in Australia. So Jan left the beautiful north coast of NSW again and returned to the tropics – this time to Darwin - where she worked at the ARK Animal Hospital gaining experience in the Indigenous communities of Australia’s Top End and central desert areas. Jan’s position as AMRRIC’s Program Manager continues to generate an ever-changing variety of challenges. Robyn Alders Associate Professor Robyn Alders was born and raised on a grazing property on the Southern Tablelands of NSW, Australia. For over 20 years, she has worked closely with smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia as a veterinarian, researcher and colleague. For much of this time, she has been working on the development of sustainable Newcastle disease (ND) control in poultry in rural areas as this disease is a key constraint to small livestock producers, many of whom own only poultry. The ND control activities have included project management; epidemiology; production and quality control of thermotolerant ND vaccine; development and testing of innovative extension materials; community development; incorporating ethnoveterinary knowledge; training of extension personnel, animal health workers, livestock officers and laboratory personnel; and the development of user-pays schemes. Since 2004, Robyn has been involved with highly pathogenic avian influenza control and preparedness in , , , Lao PDR, , Mozambique, , Thailand, Timor-Leste and . In Indonesia, she oversaw the training and communication components of the FAO HPAI Participatory Disease Surveillance and Response Program from May 2007 to September 2009.From May 2008 to June 2011, Robyn directed the International Veterinary Medicine Program at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in the USA and remains an Adjunct Associate Professor with this program. From July 2011 to May 2012, Robyn was the Team Leader of a Newcastle disease control project in implemented by the KYEEMA Foundation and funded by the . In August 2012, she rejoined the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the as a Principal Research Fellow to pursue domestic and international food and nutrition security research and development activities.

In January 2011, Robyn was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to veterinary science as a researcher and educator, to the maintenance of in developing countries through livestock management and disease control programs. Brigitte Bagnol Brigitte has 30 years of experience in the region as an anthropologist-filmmaker specializing in development, anthropology of ecology, communication, sexuality, anthropology of health, One Health, nutrition and gender issues. Since 1994 she is an independent consultant working in Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, Eritrea, Laos, Indonesia and Vietnam. She has been contracted by different agencies (Danida, Care International, CIDA, The Netherlands Embassy, DFID, UNFPA, WHO, IFAD, FAO, etc.) to give training, design or evaluate project and conduct research. She carried out gender analysis and developed gender strategies both for grassroots projects as well as at Ministry level. She works on nutrition and One Health and studies the socio-economic factors affecting the role of poultry in the livelihoods of rural households in the context of Newcastle and Avian Influenza control. She has been associated with the International Rural Poultry Centre (IRPC), KYEEMA Foundation and she is a senior visiting lecturer in the Dept. of Anthropology at the Witwatersrand University, SA.

Collaboration Sarah Cleveland Prof. Sarah Cleaveland works at the University of Glasgow at the Institute for Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine. After training first as a zoologist at Southampton University and then as a vet at Cambridge University, she worked for a year in general practice before embarking on a research career based in East Africa, studying diseases at the human-animal interface. She obtained her Ph.D. from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, working on the epidemiology of rabies in the Serengeti, and subsequently joined the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh before moving on to the University of Glasgow in 2008. Sarah’s research addresses many different aspects of human and animal disease investigation, but the control and elimination of rabies in domestic dogs remains a principal focus of her work. She continues to work in East Africa, but her research programme also involves links with rabies projects in several other countries of Africa and Asia. She was a founding director of the Alliance for Rabies Control, a Scottishregistered charity, which spearheads the World Rabies Day campaigns (www.worldrabiesday.org). In 2014 she was awarded an OBE for services to veterinary epidemiology, primarily for her work on rabies. Bruce Harvey Bruce is the Principal of a boutique consultancy, resolution88, specialising in ‘Social Licence’ solutions, and an Adjunct Professor at the Sustainable Minerals Institute, University of Queensland, Australia. Bruce’s worldwide career has spanned 40 years of field experience in the mining industry. In his early career as a geologist Bruce developed an affinity for working with land connected peoples. For the last 20 years Bruce has been at the forefront of developing Social Performance as a professional discipline in the extractive sector. For eight years Bruce was Global Practice Leader – Communities and Social Performance at Rio Tinto.

Bruce maintains that earning a Social Licence is essentially a matter of cultural recognition and economics. Companies want to operate in peoples’ backyards with irreversible changes to natural and social landscapes, some induced by industrial development and some occurring anyway. In return, local people want economic opportunity whilst preserving their idiosyncratic cultural norms and local environmental integrity. Bruce believes strategy is important, but that lack of capability is the weak link in meeting the challenge of frontier development. He advocates an approach based on field work, seeking to identify and mobilise the convergent competitive advantage of business and community groups.

Ganga de Silva Dr Ganga de Silva graduated as a veterinary surgeon from University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka in 1997 and obtained Master of Business Administration (MBA) from University of Sri Jayewardenepura in 2004. After working in several organisations in different capacities Ganga joined Blue Paw Trust in 2006 to combine her passion for management with love for animals to improve animal welfare. She was the Project Coordinator of “Humane Dog Population and Rabies Management Project, Colombo” (2007 – 2012) and currently as the Director Operations coordinates field projects, disseminates knowledge gained during Colombo project to local and international organisations, writes project proposals, prepares budgets, negotiates with collaborators to start new projects, and works as part of the field team. Further, she works with the Sri Lankan government and other organisations to eradicate rabies from the country through a one health model which ultimately will lead to enhanced animal welfare in Sri Lanka High-level Bernadette engagement Abela-Ridder Dr Bernadette Abela-Ridder works in the Department for the Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) of the World Health Organization (WHO) as the team leader on neglected zoonotic diseases and responsible for veterinary public health aspects of NTDs. She dedicates her full energy and experience to improve health of people, animals and the environment, with an emphasis on improving livelihoods of people in under- served communities while engaging different sectors and disciplines to attain results. Bernadette is the WHO lead on rabies. Bernadette previously worked in the Department of Food Safety and Zoonoses of WHO leading an integrated capacity building network, the Global Foodborne Infections Network (GFN) and was the WHO focal point for the FAO, OIE, WHO Global Early Warning System for transboundary animal diseases, including zoonoses (GLEWS). She also managed the study to estimate the global burden of leptospirosis in humans. She is closely involved in advancing common areas of work of the FAO, OIE and WHO with regard to zoonotic, food safety and other risks emerging at the human-animal-ecosystem interface. Bernadette is a veterinary epidemiologist by training and previously worked for the US Food and Drug Administration on antimicrobial resistance, for l’Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Cameroon on emergence of simian immunodeficiency viruses from non-human primates including bushmeat, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. on veterinary public health, and in clinical veterinary practice.

Mark Schipp Mark Schipp was appointed Australian Chief Veterinary Officer in 2011. In 2012 he was elected to the OIE Council and in 2015 was elected Vice President of the OIE General Assembly. He is chair of Wildlife Health Australia management committee and chair of Animal Health Committee.

Together with the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Schipp chairs the Australian Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Antimicrobial Resistance. Previously Dr Schipp has held positions responsible for animal derived food product inspection, market access and export certification.

Dr Schipp served two terms overseas as Agriculture Counsellor in Seoul, South Korea and in Beijing, China.

Mark is a biology and veterinary graduate of Murdoch University. After graduation he worked with the Western Australian Department of Agriculture.