Dr. Valera is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and a Research Scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. As a pioneer in the field, Dr. Valera’s research is groundbreaking with her studies being among the first to look at the prevalence of brain injury, and its association with cognitive and psychiatric difficulties in women who had experienced intimate partner violence. She was also the first to use neuroimaging to investigate the effects of partner inflicted brain injury on neural connectivity and cognitive function in these women. She was awarded the prestigious Robert D. Voogt Founders Award from the North American Brain Injury Society as well as the inaugural Women Making History Award from Safe Living Spaces. In addition to her many publications and speaking engagements to the academic world nationally and internationally, Dr. Valera has translated her research on the effects of these often-overlooked brain injuries into education and training for police officers, judges, ER clinicians, domestic violence advocates, and others who work with women in the aftermath of violence. She is truly passionate about making change in this area, and raising awareness about this global public health crisis.

Hope Kent is an ESRC funded PhD student, studying on the Advanced Quantitative Methods pathway of SWDTP studentships at the University of Exeter. Prior to this, I worked as a Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner in the NHS. My research looks at risk factors and protective factors for contact with the Criminal Justice System in young people. I am using large administrative datasets to examine offending trajectories, and outcomes in custody, for neurodiverse young people. I am interested in cumulative risk theory as applied to vulnerable children and adolescents to predict outcomes such as school incompletion or exclusion, and contact with the criminal justice system.

Leigh Schrieff-Brown obtained her PhD from, and is currently an Associate Professor in, the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. She is also currently the Deputy Dean of Postgraduate Studies and Funding in the Humanities Faculty at UCT and a registered neuropsychologist in South Africa. She has built a research program around, and teaches primarily in, the area of pediatric traumatic brain injury (especially around a range of outcomes and predictors of those outcomes) and neuropsychological rehabilitation. She supervises and teaches on the pediatric component of the Masters in Clinical Neuropsychology in the department. She has supervised several postgraduatestudents (currently from honours to doctoral level), has published book chapters as well as a range of research papers in local and international journals, and presented at several local and international conferences in the above-mentioned fields. In terms of her international profile, she serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the International Paediatric Brain Injury Society (IPBIS), in which she chairs their Trainee/Early Career Subcommittee, as well as serving on the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) Justice and Equity Subcommittee and previously on the INS Science Committee. She is also the Regional representative for South Africa and the deputy chair of the INS Global Engagement Committee (GEC).