Dealing with the rough and tumble of communicating in practice

Tracey Brown OBE is the director of Sense about Science. Under her leadership, the charity has launched important initiatives to promote open discussions of evidence, including Risk know-how and AllTrials - a global campaign for the reporting of all clinical trial outcomes. She initiated Evidence Week in the UK Parliament and co-founded the international Maddox prize. Tracey writes about the public and evidence, and leads Sense about Science’s work on transparency of evidence and AI in policy. She is honorary Professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Engineering in Public Policy at UCL. 

Lyndal has over 25 years of experience communicating science, with a focus on science journalism in Australia and the UK. She has an Honours Degree in biotechnology from Flinders University and a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication from the Australian National University. Lyndal runs the AusSMC’s science news site Scimex.org and regularly talks about science on ABC Radio. She has written for publications including Crikey, Cosmos, and News Corp Australia and was a member of the Australian Government’s Science and the Media Expert Working Group. In 2023, she was awarded the Unsung Hero of Science Communication award from the Australian Science Communicators, reflecting her dedication to making science accessible to all Australians.

Christiane has been Publishing Director for Open Access at Cell Press since 2022, leading a team of over 100 colleagues. She oversees the growth and expansion of Cell Press’s Open Access portfolio, which publishes more than 25,000 articles annually across a wide range of scientific disciplines.

Under her leadership, Cell Press has strengthened its international position in Open Science, fostering connections across communities and disciplines while upholding the publisher’s core values of exceptional author service and researcher centricity.

With a 20-year career in publishing, Christiane has driven innovation and Open Access across diverse fields, including Aquatic Ecology, Water Resources, Computer Science, and Materials Science.

She holds a scientific background in Oceanography and Aquatic Ecology, has authored over 30 international publications, and has conducted research in Uruguay, Spain, France, and the Netherlands.

Dr Billy Quilty is a postdoctoral researcher specialising in infectious disease epidemiology and mathematical modelling at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. He holds a PhD from LSHTM (2023) and MSc in Epidemiology from Imperial College London (2018), and retains an honorary position at LSHTM.

His research includes evaluating pneumococcal vaccine schedules, COVID-19 modelling as part of UK SAGE's SPI-M subgroup, and supporting WHO's 2018 Ebola response. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his work on travel quarantine duration and daily contact testing were cited in UK and US policy decisions, with his research and opinion writing featured in newspapers such as The Guardian.

Currently, he explores artificial intelligence applications in outbreak response and pandemic preparedness, collaborating with WHO Pandemic Hub Berlin, LSHTM, and MSF Epicentre. His research has been funded by WHO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institute for Health Research.