Jessica Goh graduated from Graduate Dip in Social Work (NUS, Singapore). She has a Master’s in Education & Training, and a Bachelor’s in Electrical & Electronic Engineering. She is a registered social worker with practice experiences in hospice and hospital settings to provide psychosocial support for terminally patients and their significant others. She has years of experience in education development and design thinking related projects, including healthcare related services. She is currently working as an Educational Executive at the Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network (APHN). Her interests are psychosocial education and use of technologies for education.

Dr Andy H. Y. Ho is a psychologist, social scientist, educator who specializes in thanatology, public health palliative care, psychosocial gerontology, integrative therapies, and community empowerment. He is the President for the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) and serves as Board Director of the prestigious International Work Group on Death Dying and Bereavement (IWGDDB). He is also the Head of Psychology and Associate Professor of Psychology and Medicine at Nanyang Technological University, as well as Director of Research of the Palliative Care Centre for Excellence in Research and Education (PalC) Singapore. A clinical innovator, Andy has founded a number of acclaimed and innovative psycho-socio-spiritual interventions for health promotion, some of which include: Mindful-Compassion Art-based Therapy (MCAT) for burnout prevention; Family Dignity Intervention (FDI) for advancing holistic palliative care services; and Narrative e-Writing Intervention (NeW-I) for augmenting pediatrics palliative care and parental bereavement services. Andy is the recipient 2018 ADEC Academic Educator Award, 2019 Nanyang Educator Award, and the 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award of the University of Hong Kong. He has authored over 120 top-tier publications and presented more than 200 keynote and plenary sessions across the globe.

Nancy Preston is a Professor of Supportive and Palliative Care. She is the Co-Director of the International Observatory on End-of-Life Care at Lancaster University and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Health and Medicine. She is also Associate Professor of Palliative Care at KMC Mannipal, India.

She completed her degree in Nursing at King’s College London and worked as a cancer nurse including time at the Royal Marsden Hospital as a Research Nurse. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research where she investigated and developed a novel intervention for the management of malignant ascites. She was then employed by the Cochrane Foundation and the Royal College of Nursing to be trained in and conduct Cochrane Systematic Reviews. She has authored five Cochrane reviews to date and published a further 50 reviews. She co-edited ‘A Post-Graduates Guide to Doing a Literature Review in Health and Social Science - 2nd Edition’. She teaches a module on evidence reviews for post graduate students in the Division of Health Research at Lancaster University.

She was appointed as a researcher in the International Observatory on End-of-Life care in 2009 and was promoted to Professor in 2018. Here she teaches on their part-time, online PhD programmes including the PhD in Palliative Care. She has supervised 15 PhD students to completion resulting in multiple publications.

Her research focusses on palliative care and how best to integrate it into general healthcare systems. She was part of an EU funded study evaluating integrated palliative care in six countries and is currently part of another EU study evaluating an integrated palliative care intervention in a trial in seven countries. She is part of the same consortium of researchers who are now evaluating the use of palliative sedation across Europe.

She has a strong interest in how people make decisions about their future care. She was part of an EU study evaluating the use of advance planning in six countries which is probably the largest palliative care trail conducted with over 1100 participants. She was part of another EU study evaluating the use of advance are planning for people with advanced dementia. In some countries assisted dying is legal and one of the decisions people face. She has been involved in a number of studies evaluating the experiences of health care professionals and bereaved families following an assisted death.

She has over 140 peer reviewed publications, has published three books with a fourth due out next year. The latest is on “How to read and critique Research”. She tries to deliver her research in accessible ways including the use of Massive Online Courses (MOOC) where ‘Palliative Care: Making it work’ attracted over 9,000 participants from more than 140 countries. She has been the Section Editor for BMC Palliative Care since 2015.

Catherine Walshe is currently Professor of Palliative Care in the International Observatory on End of Life Care at Lancaster University. Catherine has an extensive background in palliative care clinical practice, education and research.

Catherine graduated as a nurse with a first-class degree in nursing from the School of Nursing at Manchester University, UK in 1987. She then worked clinically for 15 years across a number of roles, with a focus throughout on generalist and specialist palliative care. Acute medicine experience included working in haematology in Cornwall, followed by working in one of the first HIV units to be opened in the UK, in Brighton. She then moved to primarily community-based roles working as a district nurse, and later community specialist palliative care nurse. Catherine also gained management experience managing district nursing services, and working in a strategic and policy focused role as the palliative care co-ordinator for Worcestershire.

Catherine always had an interest in research, and gained a distinction in her Masters in Nursing Research at King’s College, London in 1993. Catherine moved to a research focused career in 2002, completing her PhD in Nursing at the University of Manchester in 2006, funded by a prestigious NIHR doctoral fellowship. Catherine moved to Lancaster University in 2013, and has continued to develop her research and education career in palliative care.

Catherine has an international research reputation in palliative care. Her research programme primarily focuses on the organisation and provision of services at the end of life, including trials of new interventions and models of care, especially recently focusing on the role of volunteers and peer mentors. She has a broad methodological expertise, with studies including clinical trials, feasibility studies, qualitative research and mixed methods. Catherine also has extensive expertise in supervising PhD students, primarily on the Lancaster University innovative blended learning PhD in Palliative Care, and teaches widely on different aspects of research.

Catherine has been involved in editing the journal Palliative Medicine since 2008, becoming editor-in-chief in 2011, overseeing its development into the premier research journal in the field. Catherine was elected to the board of the European Association of Palliative Care in 2015, serving two terms on the board as secretary (2015-2019) and treasurer (2019-2023). Catherine was also a trustee of her local hospice from 2013-2022, and is now a vice-president of the organisation.

Dr. Seema Rajesh Rao is Associate Director, Education and Research at Bangalore Hospice Trust – Karunashraya Institute for Palliative Care Education and Research (KIPCER), Bengaluru. She is an Honorary Tutor at the School of Medicine, Cardiff (UK). She is a national faculty of Indian Association of Palliative Care, the national body overseeing palliative care activities in India, and is involved in training MD and DNB students in Palliative Medicine. She is the Course Coordinator for the Certificate Course in Essentials of Palliative Care (CCEPC) at BHT-K, and the Course Chair for the Certificate Course in Psychology in Palliative Care, both training programs run by IAPC. She was elected as a Central Council Member (South Zone), Indian Association of Palliative Care, in 2022 and is involved in advocacy activities in propagating palliative care. She is a member of the Quality and Clinical Advisory Board of PALCARE, an organization delivering home-based palliative care in Mumbai. She is also Honorary Faculty with Pallium India, WHO Collaborating Center for Training and Policy on Access to Pain Relief in India. She is also a faculty with the Cancer Treatment Centers Program, a capacity-building project of Asia Pacific Palliative Care Hospice Network, Lien Collaborative for Palliative Care and AIIMS, New Delhi.

Dr. Rao completed her postgraduate studies in Psychiatry from Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Bangalore. Her work in the field of mental health involved working with the vulnerable and abandoned – the destitute elderly, those with dementia, and chronic mental illnesses in Mumbai. She completed the ‘National Fellowship in Palliative Medicine’ and joined Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai. During her tenure of six years at Tata Memorial Hospital, as Senior Medical Officer, she was responsible for the clinical and administrative functioning of the 13-bedded inpatient respite palliative care facility. Dr. Rao completed her Masters in Palliative Medicine with distinction from Cardiff University, United Kingdom. She was awarded the Commonwealth Scholarship to pursue her MSc.

In 2019 she joined the Department of Palliative Medicine and Supportive Care at Kasturba Medical College and Hospital, Manipal, as Senior Consultant. She was the Lead for ICU-Palliative Care Services at KMC, Manipal. In her role as the ICU-Palliative Care Lead, she was involved in implementing the end-of-life care pathway at the hospital, training of critical and emergency care physicians, as well as collaborative research activities. She was involved in the development of the end-of-life-care pathway for critically-ill COVID patients in the ICU.

Currently, she is the Associate Director (Education & Research) at BHT-Karunashraya, a 73-bedded hospice in Bangalore that provides free services for advanced cancer patients. BHT-Karunashraya is actively involved in training and research activities in palliative care. She was part of the team that successfully completed the Global Challenges Research Fund: UK Research and Innovation Grant titled “The development of a socio-culturally sensitive intervention to integrate palliative care services into Intensive Care in India to be tested in a future full trial” (Short title: ICU Palliative Care Project). She is the Course Director for the 6-month Certificate Course in Counselling Skills in Cancer and Palliative Care (CCPC) – a blended learning program jointly conducted by BHT-KIPCER and Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, as well as the International Neuropalliative Care Certificate Course being conducted by BHT-KIPCER, KMC Manipal and International Neuropalliative Care Society. She is the Organizing Secretary of the recently concluded 30th International Conference of the Indian Association of Palliative Care, IAPCON 2023, in which over 700 delegates from over 15 countries participated.

As a palliative care physician her role encompasses management of physical symptoms in advanced cancer patients, psychosocial care of patients and their caregivers, and end-of-life care. Her special focus of interest is psycho-spiritual care. She is trained in Dignity Therapy, Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy, Mindfulness Therapy and has completed the Interprofessional Spiritual Care Education Curriculum (ISPEC) program from George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish), Washington DC. She is a certified master facilitator for Education in Palliative and End of Life Care training from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago. She has several publications to her credit in national and international journals and has been invited as a speaker at many national and international conferences.

Her academic publications can be viewed in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1VgEyY0-yFI9-u/bibliography/public/

A physician by profession and a writer by choice, she pens her creative thoughts in her blog https://randommusings69.wordpress.com/ Her collections of poems have been published in the book “Random Musings of a Physician Poet.”

David W. Kissane, MD is an academic psychiatrist, palliative care physician and researcher in the fields of psycho-oncology and palliative care. He currently holds the Chair of Palliative Care Research with the University of Notre Dame Australia and the Cunningham Centre at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney (2019-present). He has previously been Head of the Department of Psychiatry for Monash University in Australia (2012-2019), Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York (2003-2012) and, before that, the Foundation Chair of Palliative Medicine at the University of Melbourne (1996-2003).

Professor Kissane’s academic interests include studies of existential distress, group, couples and family psychotherapy trials, communication skills training, and the ethics of end-of-life care. He is best known for his work on demoralization syndrome as a specifier for adjustment disorder and major depression in the medically ill, a form of low morale and poor coping that has preceded interventions to promote meaning-based coping. His model of family therapy delivered to ‘at risk’ families during palliative care has prevented complicated grief and prolonged grief disorder in bereavement. He has developed the Demoralization Scale (DS & DS-II), the Demoralization Interview (DI), the Psycho-existential Symptom Assessment Scale (PeSAS) and the Shame and Stigma Scale (SSS) in Head & Neck Cancer. He is the author of over 400 publications, including books exemplified by Oxford Textbook of Communication in Oncology and Palliative Care (2017), Psychotherapy in Cancer Care (2011), Bereavement Care for Families (2014), and Psycho-oncology in Palliative and End-of-Life Care (2023).

Prof Kissane has been recognised by the International Psycho-Oncology Society with its Sutherland Award for lifetime achievement, by Cornell University with its Klerman Award for psychotherapy research, by King’s College with its Dame Cecily Saunders lecture, and in 2018, he was made a Companion in the Order of Australia (AC) for his contribution to the development of the disciplines of Psycho-oncology and Palliative Care.

A/Prof Natasha Michael is the Director of Palliative Medicine at Cabrini Health Australia and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame and Monash University. Natasha has worked and trained in palliative care in Europe, Singapore and Australia. She is a clinician researcher with an interest in studying and promoting value alignment and the psycho-existential aspects of the end-of life care, bioethics and complex cancer pain management.

Prof Seon-Young Kim is the Professor in Department of Psychiatry, Chonnam National University Medical School, Gwangju, Republic of Korea. She completed her PhD at Chonnam National University Postgraduate School where she investigated plasma cytokines and risk of depression in patients with breast cancer. Her areas of research are psychosomatic medicine, psycho-oncology and psycho-neuro-immunology.