Ruth Freed is the Program Manager for two programs, Brain Health & GMRx2 (hypertension polypill) and is responsible for operational leadership including strategic planning, funding management, resourcing and oversight of delivery of several research projects in line with the programs' goals. For the GMRx2 program, Ruth is supporting academic activities related to global commercial development of the GMRx2 product.

Ruth has more than 25 years' clinical trial experience in the hospital, academic and pharmaceutical sectors, joining TGI in 2009 working her way up in project operations roles and most recently held the role of Head of the Academic Project Operations group for over 2 years. Prior to this she worked for Australian company Pharmaxis Ltd on drug registration trials and at GlaxoSmithKline, UK in drug safety. She has spent the last 15 years predominantly working on large scale drug intervention multinational cardiovascular endpoint trials mainly in stroke neurology and is acting as the Global Project Manager for the TRIDENT trial, a secondary prevention stroke randomised controlled trial in 1500 participants in 10 countries.

Mercian Daniel is Senior Research Fellow in, Mental Health Program at George Institute India. He has done his M.Phil. from Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi and his Ph.D. from JNU, New Delhi.

He has over 15 years of research and program implementation working in different capacities at Deptt. of Psychiatry, Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, New Delhi; IIMC, Dept. of Communication Research, New Delhi; Praxis, New Delhi and Save the Children, Calcutta. More recently, he was with PHFI working in reproductive health and urban health governance projects. He has also taught postgraduate students at Delhi School of Social Work, New Delhi and prepared MSW curriculum for St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata.

His research interest lies in evaluating the impact of different forms of anti-stigma campaigns in mental health, first-person accounts of living with mental illness and its contribution to policy narratives, the social determinants and gradient in mental disorders.

Mark Woodward is Chair of Statistics, Epidemiology and Women’s Health at Imperial College London and Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is also a visiting /honorary professor at the universities of Dundee, Glasgow and the West Indies. He is an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. Mark was Professor of Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford from September 2013 to July 2020 and has also been a professor at the universities of New York, Sydney and Johns Hopkins (adjunct). 

He is the author of over a thousand scientific articles and two text-books on statistical methods in medical research, one of which has its fourth edition commissioned for 2025. He was named by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics as one of ‘The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds’ in each of the last 11 years. As of June 2025, he has a H Factor of 188 with total citations of 164,594; 16 of his papers have over a thousand citations.

Mark has led four major international studies and directed the analytical research on three landmark collaborative studies, worldwide. His work on cardiovascular risk scores formed the basis of national guidelines in Scotland, and his work on kidney disease was used to produce new staging criteria for this disease. His total career grant awards total over £100 million from 64 successful applications.

He also has extensive experience in student teaching, postgraduate supervision and mentoring, including 14 PhD and 20 MSc students successfully completed. He has given training workshops in Botswana, China including Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Mark served on the governing council of the Institute of Statisticians and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and is a fellow of the RSS, the European Society of Cardiology and the New York Academy of Medicine. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians of Thailand.

He has wide experience of development aid work in Africa and Asia, having undertaken 25 missions for aid agencies, such as the WHO. He has also assessed grants for six national medical research councils (including NHMRC) and served on the editorial boards of seven international journals.
 

Maarinke is the Program Lead for the Global Thought Leadership Program, in the Impact and Engagement team. She is an innovation specialist, translating research insights for different audiences into a range of formats and complimenting advocacy efforts on preventable disease and injury. Maarinke is particularly interested in finding links between silos, working across specialisations, and connecting people and ideas, joining skills and expertise to deliver strong outcomes.

Maarinke joined the George Institute in 2018, establishing activities such as data visualisation, interactive stories and podcasts. Since then, Maarinke has further developed The Global Thought Leadership program, designing the Emerging Thought Leader Program - a 6 month capacity strengthening program to train and coach early-mid career researchers and subject matter experts- as well as the Distinguished Fellow Program, engaging and collaborating on thought leadership activities with a network of renowned experts around the globe.

Prior to working at The George Institute, Maarinke worked in other technical industries, including medicines education, insurance, finance and IT. Maarinke has a Masters in International Law and International Relations, Graduate Certificate in Health Policy and Health Communications, and a Bachelor of Business with double major in Marketing and Management.