International Women's Day 2023

Talk: Body Inclusivity and Social Media: Celebrating beauty from beyond our screens

Rosalind Main is an Artist, Body Image Campaigner and Model from Leith, Edinburgh.

Since graduating with a BA with Honours in Three Dimensional Design from Gray’s School of Art in 2016, Rosalind has been working both solo and collaboratively around Scotland on projects and events, curating exhibitions in venues such as Whitespace Gallery in Edinburgh and The Vacant Space in Glasgow.

Rosalind has been a fashion model for over a decade and in 2017 Rosalind co-founded the I Am More Than Project (instagram: @iam_more_than) with friend and fellow model Morgan McTiernan who shared the same vision to work towards more inclusivity and representation in the fashion industries and beyond through amplifying voices and collaborating.

Together they have curated exhibitions, events, fashion shows and have appeared on national television and radio, talking about important issues surrounding body inclusivity and social media. Rosalind completed a MA in Contemporary Art Practice in 2020 from Edinburgh College of Art and an MSc in Modern and Contemporary Art: History, Curating and Criticism in 2022 from The University of Edinburgh.

Since early 2022 Rosalind has been making content for BBC The Social on social media, body image and creative industries.

Pronouns: she/her

Twitter | Instagram

Talk: Working as a scientist during the COVID-19 pandemic

Devi Sridhar is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School and holds a Personal Chair in Global Public Health.  She is the founding Director of the Global Health Governance Programme and holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award.

She was previously Associate Professor in Global Health Politics and a Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University.

She was also a visiting Associate Professor at LMU-Munich and guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Public Health Foundation of India.

Her books include ‘Preventable - How a pandemic changed the world & how to stop the next one’ (Penguin, 2022), ‘Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?’ (OUP, 2017) and ‘The Battle against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance and the World Bank’ (OUP, 2007) and she has published in Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.

She served on the board of Save the Children UK, on the World Economic Forum Council on the Health Industry and co-chaired the Harvard/LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola. She holds a DPhil and MPhil from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a B.S. from the University of Miami in the Honors Medical Program.

Her work is concentrated in three areas: international health organizations, financing of global public health and developing better tools for priority-setting.

Pronouns: she/her

Twitter 

Talk: What's your flavour? Being a woman of influence

Ceewhy currently works at Ravensbourne Students Union as the Student Union Manager. Her cumulative experience has endowed her with experience in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion issues. She enjoys sharing the stories of her struggles and the lessons learned along the way in the hope that it encourages and empowers someone to take the next step.

Ceewhy’s enthusiasm for student activism and engagement began when she was an undergraduate at Middlesex University (Mauritius campus) where she formed the international association as the first student group on the campus in 2011, and was then elected as the first president. One of her significant achievements in Mauritius was working alongside the university to lobby the Mauritian government to give international students the right to work in Mauritius.

Ceewhy is founder and CEO of Black Impact, a national African and Caribbean student network that seeks to support the leadership development and career aspirations of Black students in the UK. Its key objectives are the desire to challenge structural racism, social and economic injustice and discrimination within higher education and wider society in general. Black Impact’s mission is to raise, train, support and empower African and Caribbean students in three main areas of development: ethical leadership, social/community activism and political representation/engagement as well as promoting good Black mental health and wellbeing. Through owned and collaborative events and activities, Black Impact strives to achieve each stream of its mission under Ceewhy’s leadership.

Ceewhy is passionate about young Black people and believes in the potential within them and Black Impact is one of the ways she works with that group of the society to support them to realising their potential.

Pronouns: she/her

Twitter 

Talk: Beyond the Chinese Takeaway: How to be an ally for diversity and inclusion.

(streamed from TEDx Aberdeen YouTube)

A graduate in French and Hispanic Studies, Lyly works in Paris, France as the Corporate Website Manager at Sanofi and has over a decade of international experience in marketing and communications across multiple sectors.

Outside of her professional life, Lyly is a member of the GlobalScot Network and the Scottish Black and People of Colour Writers Network. She was also the 2019 Winner of the Toulmin Prize by the Elphinstone Institute, a centre for the study of Ethnology, Folklore, and Ethnomusicology at the University of Aberdeen.

Lyly’s talk will invite you to look beyond the ordering hatch of your local Chinese takeaway, Lyly Fong shines a spotlight on the Scottish Chinese community and explores social cohesion, racial integration and community by sharing the stories and experiences of her friends and family.