Keynote Speakers

Opening keynote

Prof. Amara Okonkwo

Centre for Epidemic Communication, Lagos

“Rumour travels first: what outbreak responders learn in week one”

Okonkwo has led community feedback programmes across three national outbreak responses, building rumour-tracking systems that route what communities are actually saying back into the daily response meeting. Her work argues that the first week sets the terms of trust for the whole event, and that the rumour is usually a reasonable inference from incomplete information rather than a failure of understanding.

Day two keynote

Dr Henrik Sølvberg

Norwegian Institute of Risk Studies, Oslo

“Numbers people can act on”

Sølvberg has spent twenty years testing how numeric risk formats behave in national health advice — frequencies against percentages, intervals against point estimates, and the moment at which added precision stops helping a decision. The lecture draws on a decade of field experiments run with public health agencies in four countries.

Closing keynote

Prof. Mei-Ling Chua

Institute of Public Health Communication, Singapore

“After the emergency”

Chua studies what institutions owe publics once the acute phase ends: the corrections that were never issued, the promises made under pressure, and the slow reconstruction of credibility. Her longitudinal panel has followed the same eight thousand households since 2020.

Public evening lecture

Dr Rosa Iglesias

Barcelona School of Public Health

“The correction nobody read”

Iglesias works on retraction and rebuttal in local media ecosystems, where a correction reaches a fraction of the audience that saw the claim. The evening lecture is open to the public and to students of any institution without registration.