By Emmanuel Weedee-Conway

IPNEWS: The Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rescue Place International (RPI), Dr. Mosoka P. Fallah will share platform with the winner of Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences at the May 14 session of Social Policy Live Conference.

The conference is organized by the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE) for its Masters Students.

LSE in a communication points out that the ensuing conference forms a core part of learning on the Masters of Science programmes at LSE.

Social Policy Live, according to the organizers, will include talks and sessions from external speakers and Social Policy faculty exploring Social Policy in the time of COVID-19. The conference will cover topics such as Global Health, Education, Ethnicity, Welfare State, and the Penal System.

Specifically, Dr. Fallah, a Visiting Faculty Member of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Director-General of the National Public Health Institute of Liberia (NPHIL), will speak about COVID-19, global health and the colonial gaze at the conference.

“Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey and Dr Hakan Seckinelgin will talk with Dr Mosoka P. Fallah (Founder/Executive Director, Refuge Place International; Visiting Faculty Member, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and former Director-General, National Public Health Institute of Liberia) about COVID-19, global health and the colonial gaze,” said the communication dated March 22, 2021 and addressed to the former NPHIL boss.

The renowned Liberian public health expert, despite exciting the helm of NPHIL, remains notable figure across the globe owing to his crucial role played in the health sector of Liberia, especially during the most deadly period of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) that ravaged the country for more than a year (March 2014-May 2015) claiming more than 5,000 lives and over 6,000 more infected and cured.

In 2017, he was awarded USAID Liberia Health Worker and the Development Person of the Year for his work with Refuge Place. He is also the co-founder of the Community-Based Initiative – Liberia, a non-profit organization providing research services on issues that emanated from the 2014/2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For his work building community-level trust in the Ebola response, Dr. Fallah was named a Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2014. He holds a PhD in Immunology from the University of Kentucky, and a Masters in Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Accordingly, the organizers (LSE) disclosed that Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Sir Angus Deaton will serve as keynote speaker at the event.

Professor Sir Angus Deaton, winner of the of the 2015 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University.

His main current research areas are in poverty, inequality, health, wellbeing, economic development, and randomized controlled trials.

The conference will bring together other knowledgeable personalities and speakers including Professor Lucinda Platt, who will provide insights into how research can inform policy, with specific reference to her experiences, thus informing various policy-makers on the impact of COVID-19 on ethnic minority groups and migrants.

Among the many speakers, Dr. Amelia Peterson, Dr. Sonia Exley, and Dr Yifei Yan will discuss how COVID-19 has accelerated virtual and home-learning. They will draw on examples from around the world to talk about how it has widened the considerable educational inequalities that exist within and across countries.