Announcing Our One Health Education for a Sustainable World Session at UN Science
9 – 26 September 2025
Summary: our session at the Science Summit 2025, alongside the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA80), was selected yesterday.
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URL of the event: https://sciencesummitnyc.org/
This coming September, during the high-level week of the United Nations General Assembly, New York City will host the 2025 edition of the Science Summit (UNGA80), a global gathering showcasing how science can address the most pressing challenges facing humanity. The Summit, running from 9 to 26 September, will focus on the crucial role of science in building sustainable futures within planetary boundaries, emphasizing public good, responsible innovation, and inclusive progress.
As an inclusive hybrid event, the Summit convenes researchers, educators, policy-makers, institutions, and leaders from around the world. It serves as a collective platform to reaffirm the role of scientific knowledge and cooperation in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), by fostering evidence-based responses to poverty, inequality, ecological collapse, and global health threats. In this shared space, science is not treated as neutral or detached, but as a field with ethical responsibilities and profound consequences.
Introducing Our Session: One Health Education for a Sustainable World
It is with a sense of both commitment and hope that I announce the confirmation of our session within the official program of the UN Science Summit 2025. Titled One Health Education for a Sustainable World: Integrating Systems Thinking, Technology, and Youth Empowerment, this online session reflects the vision of science in the service of life, justice, and sustainability. It is the fruit of long-standing efforts, and now stands fully endorsed by the Science Summit organizing bodies.
Our session will address how One Health education can empower the next generation to confront complex global challenges through systems thinking, ethical technology use, and meaningful civic engagement. This includes:
promoting the integration of ecological, animal, and human health in education,
fostering responsibility in the development and use of emerging technologies,
and ensuring that youth are not mere recipients of knowledge, but protagonists in creating sustainable futures.
One Health, as defined by major global institutions, recognizes the deep interdependence between human well-being, animal welfare, and ecosystem integrity. Yet education systems across the world are not yet aligned with this paradigm. In response, our session presents pedagogical innovations grounded in transdisciplinary approaches and sensitive to the social, cultural, and ecological contexts that shape health and learning.
This session is more than a proposal. It is an affirmation. It speaks directly to the SDGs: advancing SDG 3 (Health), SDG 4 (Education), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 16 (Justice), and SDG 17 (Partnerships). It is aligned with the ethical demands of the moment, responding to global instability not with fear or denial, but with coherent educational strategies, collaborative intelligence, and moral clarity.
Confirmed Speakers and Partners
This initiative is led by a constellation of respected professionals who combine academic expertise with ethical leadership. I am deeply honored to share this session with:
Professor Sara Soto González, ISGlobal (Spain), is a research professor at ISGlobal in Barcelona, Spain, specializing in infectious disease epidemiology, antimicrobial resistance, and global health policy. With a background in clinical microbiology and international public health, she has led numerous collaborative research projects addressing urgent health threats in both European and global contexts. Her contributions to capacity building, field epidemiology training, and knowledge translation make her a key figure in shaping resilient, evidence-based responses to emerging diseases and structural inequities in health systems.
Professor Susan Michaels-Strasser, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (USA), is a senior faculty member at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Senior Director for Human Resources for Health at ICAP. Her career spans decades of leadership in nursing, global public health, and health workforce development, with extensive field experience across sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. She has designed and managed large-scale capacity-building programs, focusing on HIV, maternal-child health, and integrated primary care. Her expertise lies at the intersection of evidence-based practice, health systems strengthening, and equity-centered global health education.
Professor Janaina Minelli de Oliveira Ramos, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain), is a scholar in education and sustainability at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain), where she serves as professor and researcher in the Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology. Her work focuses on inclusive pedagogy, epistemological justice, and environmental education. She has contributed significantly to curriculum design and institutional policy on sustainability and intercultural education. With a commitment to transforming educational systems through participatory and ethics-driven approaches, she bridges academic research with real-world application, aiming to equip educators and learners to address the social and ecological dimensions of global crises.
Dr. Safieh Shah, IGDORE (Pakistan), is a medical doctor and global health researcher affiliated with the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), currently based in Pakistan. She is known for her contributions to climate health, ethical research methodologies, and advocacy for gender equity in science and medicine. A strong proponent of open science and human rights, Dr. Shah combines clinical acumen with a deep engagement in international development and community-based health research. Her work is widely respected for its clarity, compassion, and interdisciplinary rigor, particularly in low-resource and crisis-affected settings.
Professor Dr. Mahmoud El Fiky, Cairo University (Egypt), is a leading Egyptian pediatric and general surgeon at Cairo University, where he directs the International Relations Office and modernizes medical education and e-health systems. With over 130 scientific publications and extensive international collaborations, including roles in WOFAPS and IPEG, he is recognized for advancing surgical outcomes, pediatric care, and global health equity. A graduate of Harvard Medical School’s Global Clinical Scholars Research Training, he also serves as Egypt’s Health National Contact Point for Horizon Europe, fostering cross-border research and innovation in medicine and education.
These excellent colleagues have exemplified integrity, dedication, and brilliance in fields ranging from infectious disease and medical education to global health ethics, open science, and participatory learning. Their presence affirms the strength and diversity of the global scientific community when it works in the spirit of equity and collective care.
We are also proud to announce that this session, on my end and that of several among the speakers, was intended to represent and support the recently awarded EU BEACON One Health education action as well, a network I founded under conditions of great adversity, as you know by now. This formal support enables us to expand the reach of our work and ground it in long-term scientific collaboration across Europe and beyond. Hope is not lost this may still be the case, despite hurting betrayals are ongoing, and inhuman treatment still is sadly the norm by those that can and will derail my own leadership and participation. Not only in communications, but deeds. Loathing and despising, in scorn, as usual, ignoring the severity of the need for simple respect and a little bit of support, instead of more violence. The simplest need to allow us to continue working, not creating more problems. That wasy of being is a repeating, very common pattern of racism, of institutional abuses and violence, that we need to gather the strength to stop at every step we encounter it, if the action has to keep its soul, and us all in the receiving end, have a living chance out of this Hell on Earth. We owe this not only to ourselves and ours, but to the countless children and communities who suffer from the same power structures that deny us protection and dignity.
I have lived in fear for years, enduring physical violence and deliberate ruin to keep me from seeking justice or affording even basic legal support. The derailment of the action only deepens the sorrow, compounding already severe and ongoing abuse. I trust it will all be back on track, and not even one single attempt to abuse power, do anything wrong, will be ever allowed in our EU BEACON One Health education. My striving, through the action and all work, is to halt on its tracks all violence.
How tragic it is that those with the capacity to uphold justice and strengthen our shared efforts are often the very ones enabling harm. This cannot be denied. And yet, I hold onto hope. Professor María Jesús has stepped into leadership, and I trust in her strength, clarity, and fairness to guide the action forward, safeguarding the purpose we began with. I believe she will lead with both firmness and humanity, and I hope that under her guidance the work we initiated will continue despite efforts to fracture it. I hope to be around, alive, fully involved, as I was proudly until recently, against my will. It only takes one, sometimes two, or a few bad actors within a network to bring harm to many. But the damage they cause reaches everyone. We have had more than enough of that. There is no excuse, at this level of responsibility and harm suffered. I continue to work, to contribute the little I can, and to believe in the value of what we are building together. I write this sincerely, even as I live with the shadow of death, not as metaphor, but as the result of years under torture, cruelty, poisoning, and systemic violence. What was inflicted on me has never truly ended; it has only paused, barely, thanks to my physical escape. Yet the institutional layers of that violence persist. Despite this, I still write, I still teach, I still build. For as long as I can, I will continue. This session is to be delivered by good people, capable professionals, principled expert hands and voices, excellent souls. By people of good conscience, with the strongest ethical backing, always too uncommon and a pride to present.
These are not faceless administrators, but good people who recognize the difference between integrity and abuse. Violence, against each other, and nature itself. In times when many institutions collapse into moral compromise, these individuals have chosen truth. They understand the weight of responsibility that comes with power, and the cost of its misuse. When injustice is committed by those meant to protect, we are all left more exposed, more fragile. And yet, in this fragility, we still rise.
The session will be free to attend online, as far as I am currently informed. I will confirm any updates in due course. Wishing each of you a moment of peace this weekend, and may we continue, together, in both truth and care.