Dr. Ellen Kossek is a leading U.S. social scientist and thought leader on the future of work. She is a global authority on work-family policies, women in STEM, flexible, remote, and hybrid work, job equality, and strategic employment issues. In 2025-2026, she has been awarded a fellowship to be the VMWare Women’s Leadership Lab CASBS Fellow in residence at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her appointments at Purdue University and Michigan State University include Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor of Management, and University Distinguished Professor of Labor and Industrial Relations Emeritus, and Distinguished Family Scholar. She has also been a visiting scholar and invited to talks to business, educational, and public audiences in the U.K., E.U., Australia, Asia, and Latin America. She is an affiliate with the U.K. research center, ESRC Centre for Digital Futures, at Work at the University of Sussex.  In June 2026, she will receive the Work-Family Research Network’s WFRN Lifetime Achievement award which recognizes extraordinary scholars who have made enduring contributions to the work-family community.  She served as WFRN’s first elected President.

Lucía Cirmi Obón is a feminist economist, activist, and former national government official from Argentina. As the country’s first National Director of Care Policies, she led the development of initiatives aimed at building an integrated care system, coordinated an interministerial roundtable on care policies, and oversaw the participatory drafting of the “Cuidar en Igualdad” bill. Later, as Undersecretary for Equality Policies, she advanced programs to formalize domestic workers and promote care policies within companies.

She currently coordinates the monitoring initiative La Cocina de los Cuidados at CELS, a civil society observatory developed in collaboration with social organizations to track care policies in Argentina. Deeply engaged in debates on care financing, she authored A Feminist Proposal for Financing Care, a work supported by the Red de Género y Comercio and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

She holds a Master’s degree in Social Policy for Development and is the author of the book Economía para sostener la vida (Economy to Sustain Life). She also leads Paridad en la Macro, a network of women macroeconomists, and serves as President of Futuros Mejores para Argentina, a civil association dedicated to developing progressive policy alternatives for Argentina in the 21st century.

Dr. Ito Peng is the Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy and the Director of the Centre for Global Social Policy at the Department of Sociology, and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on global social policy and political economy, specializing in the care economy, and family, gender, migration, and climate change policies. She currently leads two research projects: 1) Care Economies in Context, a global partnership research project that investigates care infrastructures in 9 countries in 5 global regions and uses that data to develop gender-sensitive macroeconomic models of care economies in these countries; and 2) Care and Climate Change Policies project, a Taskforce for the Royal Society of Canada. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the Sectoral Table on the Care Economy for the Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), and a distinguished fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, currently serving as a thought leader for the foundation’s Women’s Business Missions to Asia Pacific initiative. She was a co-lead for the Room 5 for the Rockefeller Foundation-Brookings Institute’s 17-Rooms Global Flagship project (2021-2023).

Dr. Tine Rostgaard is Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. Tine specializes in comparative welfare analysis across the life course, with deep expertise in care policies—particularly parental leave, early childhood care—and long‑term care for older adults. She serves as co‑chair of the international Transforming Care Network, an active community of over 700 scholars focused on care systems, policy and practice. As Principal Investigator, she presently drives a large Nordic‑Baltic comparative project on sustainability in long‑term care (funded by Nordforsk). Her recent publications include a Handbook on Social Care Policies at Elgar. Tine brings to the conference not only a robust academic track record—spanning qualitative and quantitative evaluation, comparative family policy, and care system innovation—but also a strong practical orientation on how work-family dynamics intersect with welfare, fertility, ageing, and care sustainability and quality.

David Smith, PhD, is co-author of the forthcoming book, Fair Share: How Men and Women Can Create a More Equitable Workplace Together (HBR Press, June 2026), a Professor and Co-Director of the Gender & Work Initiative in the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. As a sociologist, he focuses his research on gender, work, and family issues including allyship, inclusive leadership, mental load, gender bias in performance evaluations, and dual career families. He is the co-author of Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace, Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women, and numerous journal articles and book chapters that focus on gender and the workplace.

Armine Yalnizyan is a leading voice on Canada’s economic scene, and one of the country’s foremost thinkers on the evolution of the economy. She is the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers and writes a highly-regarded business column for the Toronto Star that provides big-picture thinking about economic trends affecting policy and practice. Before the pandemic, she was senior economic policy advisor to the federal Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Development Canada, whose budget is seven percent of GDP. During the pandemic she coined the term she-cession and raised awareness of the scale and role of the care economy, serving on a high-level federal task group. Armine advanced the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Inequality Project from 2006 to 2016, and provided weekly business commentary for CBC radio and TV from 2011 to 2018. Armine has also served as Vice-President and President of the Canadian Association for Business Economics. Her most recent work focuses on private equity’s growing presence in the care economy, and how to safeguard the quality of the services and jobs we rely on.