CO-FOUNDERS

Dr. Véronique Inès Thouvenot
Dr. Véronique Inès Thouvenot is an eHealth and Telemedicine senior expert for the United Nations since 2006, and Co-Founder of the Millennia2025 Women and Innovation Foundation.

Her current assignments cover gender based projects in developing countries to improve the access and use of eHealth and mHealth by women. She is a Co-founder of Zero Mothers Die.
Dr. Jordi Serrano Pons
Dr. Jordi Serrano Pons is a General Practitioner and the founder of the UniversalDoctor Project, whose main objective is to improve multilingual communication between health professionals and patients that don’t share the same language using new technologies. He is a widely recognized and active participant in the digital health field both in Europe and abroad who has combined his knowledge as a physician and entrepreneur to successfully introduce digital health tools in various healthcare settings.

Dr. Serrano Pons is a Co-founder of Zero Mothers Die and is also working as a Consultant with the WHO and TicSalut Foundation and frequently collaborates with the Geneva Health Forum as Advisor on Innovation and Health.
Jeannine Lemaire
Global Program Manager
Jeannine Lemaire, MSc, is a global health and development consultant specializing in mobile health, partnership development, project management, communications and new media solutions. She has worked as a consultant in the private, non-profit and public sectors in the US, Europe, Africa and South Asia with a focus on leveraging technology, partnerships and innovative solutions to advance digital health and development initiatives.

She currently works as the Program Director for the UniversalDoctor Project. She is also the recent author of two white papers on scaling up mobile health in developing countries and mobile health partnership development, commissioned by Advanced Development for Africa. She received her Master of Science in International Health Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Global Program Manager for the Zero Mothers Die Project, Consortium and Global Partnership.
Dr. Coumba Touré
2012 - 2020
Dr. Coumba Touré is a Medical Scientist and Founder/ President of Advanced Development for Africa (ADA), whose goal is to bring innovative solutions to contribute to the achievements of the MDGs. ADA aims to use technology to scale up the implementation of projects by bringing partners from specific sectors that provide electronic health (e-health) and Mobile Health (m-health) tools.

She is a Co-founder of Zero Mothers Die, and on the Board of Directors for Women4Empowerment and Fashion for Development.

SENIOR CAMPAIGN ASSOCIATE
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Lisa Darsch
Lisa Darsch, MSN RN, co-founder of the CEO Collaborative Forum (CEO-CF), helps guide philanthropic donations to Zero Mothers Die.  Her unique set of skills in life sciences and connectivity to its eco-system uniquely positions her to assist the organization in obtaining funding for the projects it pursues.  Her visionary approach to designing specific offers that meets the needs of the donor as well as ZMD makes her successful in her endeavors.  Darsch has gained international recognition for a portfolio of services that embody the mission: “Innovation that Makes an Impact.”  This visionary approach also takes into consideration a worldwide marketplace built on years of collaboration with public and private sectors in the US and Europe, as well as emerging nations in the sub-Saharan areas of Africa or the war-torn areas of the Middle East.  With decades of practical knowledge of the European business community, coupled with her US experience as a nurse, Darsch provides a unique capacity to organizations for identifying funding opportunities. Darsch is a graduate of Lynchburg College, Virginia, and holds a Master of Science in nursing administration as well as a master’s level certification in international health from George Mason University, Virginia. She is a faculty member at Shenandoah University in Virginia.  Darsch splits her time between Barcelona Spain and Washington DC in the US.

COUNTRY REPRESENTATIVES
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Dr. Pietro Aparicio
​NY, USA
Dr. Jose Pietro Aparicio (MD MPH) is both a Medical Doctor and an expert in International Public Health who comes originally from Honduras and now lives in New York City.  He is the current President of the Latino Caucus for Public Health of the American Public Health Association.  He is also a Director of Quality Assurance, Performance Improvement and Regulatory Affairs working inside the New York University Hospital Network.  Beginning his work as chief doctor for a region of 20,000 people in the countryside of Honduras, in addition to providing primary medical care Dr. Aparicio implemented numerous public health projects to reduce disease incidence and improve the quality of health care delivery for the population over which he was in charge.  He obtained his MPH from the Hebrew University (Hadassah) in Jerusalem.
Dr. Aparicio has created and implemented programs as diverse as access to HIV medications for developing world populations and antibiotic resistance control programs that have been implemented by the New York State Public Health Department across all hospitals in the state. Dr. Aparicio has over the last 15 years contributed with numerous projects connected to the UN in New York and the World Health Organization in Geneva.
Dr. Kristie Holmes
​CA, USA
​Dr. Kristie Holmes, Ph.D., LCSW specializes in gender, media and global health. She teaches at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and has spent a significant amount of time in the past three years working on projects related to UN Millennium Development Goals and Human Rights.  She has acted as moderator for an NGO at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women as well as participated as a Panelist at the Women Leaders Forum as part of the United Nations General Assembly and is now a member of the Board of Directors, UN Women United States National Committee.  She has a passion for helping other women find their voice.
Ms. Chinomnso Ibe
​Abuja, Nigeria
Ms. Chinomnso Traffina Ibe is a Nurse / midwife, and a Public Health professional with eight years of experience in both clinical and public health activities. Chinomnso is a Maternal Heath Young Champion fellow, a program initiative of the Maternal Health Task Force at Harvard School of Public Health and Institute of International Education. During her fellowship, she initiated projects that provided free door to door Ante-natal care services for women who could not afford medical care. She is the founder and Executive Director of Traffina Foundation for community health, a non-profit organization providing strong support to improve Maternal and Newborn Health in Nigeria. Chinomnso self-funded a pilot project in two facilities in Northern Nigeria on m-health for pregnant mothers were she supported 2000 women with weekly information that improved their lives during pregnancy and delivery. In 2014 she championed / launched  the “1 KIT SAVES 2”  project which is aimed at providing 50,000 free clean birth kits to pregnant women in rural communities in Nigeria in a bid to reduce infection at birth. So far the project has provided 6000 clean births kits to pregnant women across Nigeria including those in areas affected by crisis and insurgency, thus saving more than 12,000 lives at birth. Chinomnso also initiated the first program involving men in maternal health programs where she organized the first community mobilization and conference on male involvement in maternal health in Bwari Area council FCT Abuja. 

ADVISORS

Dr. Lilia Pérez Chavolla
Dr. Lilia Pérez Chavolla has fourteen years of experience in the area of communications, in particular in the analysis of policies, institutional reform, and the performance of the telecommunications sector. In 2009, she started working as a consultant for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in the area of communications for development. Her most recent work for the ITU and WHO examines the role ICTs play in improving maternal and children’s health and in enabling developing countries achieve the MDGs 4 and 5. Since 2012 she collaborates with the Millennia 2015 "Women and eHealth" (Wehealth) International Working Group and the Millennia 2025 Foundation on activities that promote the empowerment of women through innovation in health services; through the Foundation, she acts as Senior Advisor in ICT Applications for the collaborative project "Zero Mothers Die" (ZMD).
Pr. S. Yunkap Kwankam
Prof. S. Yunkap Kwankam holds the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He is currently CEO of Global eHealth Consultants, based in Geneva Switzerland. He is also Executive Director, International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth (ISfTeH). From 2004 until August 2008 he was Coordinator eHealth, at the World Health Organization, Geneva Switzerland, where he was responsible for overall coordination of eHealth work across the Organization. In this role, he oversaw a number of WHO programs on the use of ICT in health. His work covered issues such as development of appropriate frameworks and tools to support policy and practice improvements in ICT-based knowledge management and sharing in countries; creation of, and support to, networks to assist countries in building national capacity for effective and efficient use of ICT in their health systems; and development of the evidence base and best practices in the area. He also directed the development of new policies and their implementation and provides authoritative advice in relation to policy and procedures as they relate to eHealth.
Dr. Anne Petitgirard
Dr. Anne Petitgirard, M.D., MSc., French, has been involved, since 1975, in women, child and adolescents health, then in HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, Health Promotion, health systems strengthening and community systems strengthening, and in Health and Human Rights. She worked in France until 1988 then internationally within international (IFRC) and multilateral (WHO, UNFPA) organizations before she accepts, in 2002, the offer of the French Ministries of Health and of Foreign Affairs to lead a newly launched French international initiative so-called ESTHER to increase access to quality care and treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS in developing countries. Her last position (2008 – 2012) brought her back in the WHO HIV/AIDS Department, after a thirty years long career in public health and in global health and development, to focus on projects monitoring and evaluation, on operational partnerships and regional capacity development, before leading the Health Department of DMI Associates, in France.
Mr. Hilmi Quraishi
Mr. Hilmi Quraishi is the Co-Founder and Director of Social Initiatives at ZMQ - a Technology for Development social enterprise based in India. He is a pioneer in using mobile phones to reach out to grass-roots communities. As an educational technologist and social entrepreneur, Hilmi specializes in developing innovative technological learning solutions in low-resource settings which effectively reach out to unreached communities and out-of-school children. He is the prime architect of Freedom HIV/AIDS, the largest social initiative to combat HIV/AIDS using educational mobile games, having reached people in Asia and Africa using a variety of ICT solutions like mobile games and training programs. His games have reached over 65 million subscribers with 29 million games session downloaded. He has also established an independent center for excellence - Mobile for Development - a game lab to design scalable and replicable social game-based learning programs using mobile phone and emerging technologies. Hilmi is an Ashoka Fellow, recognized for his technology-based innovations for the world’s most urgent social problems. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering with specialization in educational technology and human performance solutions from Georgian Technical University.