Professor Emily Ying Yang Chan is a Professor, Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and Associate Director, of the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK); Director of the Collaborating Centre for Oxford University and CUHK for Disaster and Medical Humanitarian Response (CCOUC), Centre for Global Health (CGH) and Centre of Excellence (ICoE-CCOUC), Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR); Co-chair of the WHO Thematic Platform for Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management Research Group; and a member of the Asia Science Technology and Academia Advisory Group (ASTAAG). She is also a visiting professor at the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Medicine; senior fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and visiting scholar, FXB Center, Harvard University. Her research interests include disaster and humanitarian medicine, climate change and health, global and planetary health, human health security and health emergency and disaster risk management (H-EDRM), remote rural health, implementation and translational science, ethnic minority health, injury and violence epidemiology, and primary care. Awarded the American Public Health Association's 2007 Nobuo Maeda International Research Award, Professor Chan has published more than 200 international peer-reviewed academic, technical, and conference articles and eight academic books. She also has extensive experience as an international frontline emergency relief practitioner in the mid-1990s.

Rajib Shaw is a Professor at the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC). Before that, he was the Executive Director of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR), a decade-long research program co-sponsored by the International Council for Science (ICSU), the International Social Science Council (ISSC), and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). He is also a senior fellow of the Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) Japan, and the chair of SEEDS Asia, CWS Japan, two Japanese NGOs. He was  a Professor at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies. His expertise includes community-based disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, urban risk management, and disaster and environmental education. He is the Chair of the United Nations Global Science Technology Advisory Group (STAG); and is the co-chair of the Asia Science Technology Academic Advisory Group (ASTAAG). He serves as the Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of Asia chapter of IPCC 6th Assessment Report on Climate change impact, adaptation and vulnerability. He is the editor of a book series on disaster risk reduction, published by Springer. Prof. Shaw has published more than 45 books and over 300 academic papers and book chapters.