Keynote Speakers

Megan-SandelMegan Sandel, MD, MPH
Founder | Boston Medical Center’s Affordable Housing Initiative

Monday, October 16 | Opening Plenary Session

Dr. Megan Sandel has studied the relationship between housing insecurity and health for the last 20 years and is committed to creating programs and influencing public policies that address the root causes of homelessness and lack of access to healthy food. She is the founder and lead of Boston Medical Center’s $6.5-million housing and place-based community health initiative.

A nationally recognized expert on housing and child health, Dr. Sandel also is the co-director of BMC’s Grow Clinic for Children — a multi-specialty clinic for children with failure to thrive — and the co-lead principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch. In addition, Dr. Sandel is the principal investigator for the Boston Opportunity System Collaborative, which helps underserved Boston neighborhoods with employment and affordable housing opportunities.

She is as a professor at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and the School of Public Health, both at Boston University, and she serves on the boards of a number of regional and national organizations including Enterprise Community Partners and national advisory committees at the American Academy of Pediatrics and CDC Advisory Committee for Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention.

Dr. Sandel has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and delivered testimony multiple times at both the state and federal levels regarding children’s health, housing, and social determinants of health. In 1998, she published with other doctors at Boston Medical Center the DOC4Kids report, a first-of-its-kind national report on how housing affects child health.

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Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, PhD
Head of Translational Research | MIT Center for Constructive Communication

Tuesday, October 17 | Tuesday Plenary Session

As the head of Translational Research at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, Dimitra leads sociotechnical research at the intersection of dialogue, technology, and design. By bringing deep expertise in participatory methods, qualitative analysis, and design research, she focuses on the design, prototyping, and advancement of social dialogue technologies and oversees the transfer of research methods, tools, and systems to practice and deployment.

Dimitra also holds a tenured Assistant Professor’s position (currently on leave) at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 – the European Union’s flagship initiative for Research & Innovation – Dimitra was a Marie Curie Global Fellow (joint visiting appointment at MIT and the University of Zurich, Switzerland) from 2019 to mid-2022, focusing on studying vaccine misinformation.

Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Digital Journalism, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Media, War & Conflict, South European Society and Politics, and Critical Discourse Studies. She currently serves as an International Liaison for the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association.