Jennifer Johannesen’s son, Owen, had multiple severe disabilities all his life. He died in 2010 at the age of 12.  Jennifer’s experiences as Owen’s caregiver and advocate led her to ask broader questions about disability and society, special education and clinical healthcare practice. Specifically: why do we do what we do, and whom does it serve? Jennifer now writes, lectures and consults on healthcare practice and policy related to patient-centred care, patient engagement, and critical thinking in clinical practice. Jennifer recently earned a Master of Science in Bioethics from Clarkson University (Schenectady NY), and is based in Toronto, Canada.

Mark currently works part time as Head of Impact for the Central Commissioning Facility of the National Institute for Health Research. Before that he has worked, amongst other places, for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and Oxford University Innovation (the University's knowledge transfer arm). His work at the moment includes looking at ways to incorporate the patient experience into the evaluation of clinical and health research impact.

Mark is also part of the British Medical Journal's Patient Panel. He has been a trustee for the MS Society and briefly for Asthma UK and was diagnosed with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis in 2004.  He has just been made Parkrun's Ambassador to the MS community and is an Academic Visitor at the Radcliffe Department of Medicine in Oxford.

Dr. Ruth Elwood Martin, Clinical Professor, University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, worked as a family physician in correctional centres for 16 years.  In 2000 she initiated a cervical cancer screening pilot inside prison, and later assisted with the HPV primary screening RCT in BC, ‘HPV-FOCAL’.  In 2005, she introduced the unique concept of engaging women in prison, prison staff and academics in participatory health research (PHR), to address concerns raised by women themselves, and this work is published in peer-reviewed journals and the book, ‘Arresting Hope’.  

Mo Korchinski 

Mo Korchinski started working as a University of British Columbia project assistant with Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education in 2006.  She is currently the Project Manager for the project, “Unlocking the Gates Peer Health Mentoring Program.”  Previously, Mo worked on the research project “Doing Time" and interviewed women about their health goals as they were being released from prison. Mo graduated from Nicola Valley Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Social Work in 2014. Mo’s passion is working with women who are involved in the justice system as Mo has many years herself been incarcerated due to a long history with drug addiction.