Professor William Baah-Boateng Vice Chancellor at Methodist University Ghana and one of Ghana’s leading economists, celebrated for his expertise in economics, development policy, and institutional transformation. With over two decades of experience, he brings a powerful blend of academic rigour, policy innovation, and thought leadership that has shaped both national and continental economic landscapes. He is currently the Director of the African Centre for Advanced Studies (ACAS) and immediate past Head of the Department of Economics at University of Ghana. He is also an Editor of the Ghanaian Journal of Economics, a key platform for advancing economic scholarship in West Africa.

Professor Baah-Boateng has held pivotal roles in both academic and policy spaces. Notably, he served as Senior Research Fellow at the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET), where he contributed to high-impact research and policy analysis aimed at driving inclusive growth and structural transformation across Africa. He also served as a Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Development and Decent Work (ICDD), University of Kassel, Germany, where he helped to enrich global discourse on employment and decent work.

His policy influence is far-reaching. As a Long-Term Advisor to Ghana’s Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations, he played a key role in labour market diagnostics and employment strategy design. He is a trusted consultant to several international organisations, including the International Labour Organisation (ILO), World Bank, African Development Bank (AfDB), and multiple agencies of the United Nations.

Professor Baah-Boateng’s academic engagements span several prestigious institutions. He has served as Visiting Professor at the African Economic Research Consortium’s (AERC) Joint Facility for Electives in Nairobi, and the United Nations Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar. His appointment as a Fellow at Harvard University in 2017 further affirms his global scholarly stature.

Emmanuel Akyeampong is the Ellen Gurney Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and the Minister for Worship and Formation at Harvard University Memorial Church. He served as the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies from July 2016 to June 2023. Akyeampong is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK). Akyeampong was co-founder in 2006 of the International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise (IIAS), renamed Africa Center for Advanced Studies (ACAS) in 2023. He obtained his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 1993, and his MDiv from Andover Newton Theological School in 2014. He was ordained as a Minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC) in 2017. He received an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Ghana in 2018, and an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Cape Coast in 2023. Akyeampong is the author and editor of several books and articles including Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (2023); Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana (2001); and Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times (1996). He served as co-chief editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for the Dictionary of African Biography, 6 vols. (2012). Akyeampong is a principal investigator for one of the inaugural grants from the Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, “Examining the Impact of Sea-Level Rise, Urban Flooding, and Coastal Erosion on Settlement and Livelihoods in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria.” Akyeampong has been a co-editor of the Journal of African History, of African Diaspora and served on the editorial board of African Arguments.

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at Stanford University. He is inaugural chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was previously also chair of the Department of English. He holds a BA (Hons) in Arabic and English from the University of Ghana, and PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. Prior to arriving at Stanford in 2019, he held research, faculty and administrative positions at the University of Oxford (1994-1995), the University of Cambridge (1995-2005), the University of Toronto (2005-2017), and New York University (2017-2019). He has published widely in African literature and cultural studies, Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora Studies, Disability Studies, and Urban Studies, among others. He has published 6 monographs and ten edited collections, including the award-winning Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2014) which was co-winner of the Urban History Association Prize (non-North American region) in 2015 and was also named by the Guardian newspaper among the Best 10 Books on Cities in 2014. Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature 9Cambridge University Press, 2021) was winner of the Warren-Brooks Award for Literary Criticism in 2022.

Professor Raymond Akongburo ATUGUBA is currently the Acting Director of Legal Education and of the Ghana School of Law. He is Professor of General Jurisprudence and immediate past Dean of the University of Ghana School of Law (2019-2025), where he has taught since 2002. He was also the Consulting Foundation Dean of the Faculty of Law, University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana (2024-2025). He has been a Visiting Professor of Law and the Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Harvard Law School (2018–2019) and a Bok Visiting International Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (Spring 2024). He has taught over 40 related courses at different universities in Africa, Europe, the United States of America, Canada, and Australia. His research interests are in Policy, Law and Development in the Global South; Constitutional and Administrative Law in Africa; and Transnational Perspectives on Human Rights, Law and Organising and Community Lawyering.
Professor Atuguba is a graduate of the University of Ghana and of Harvard Law School, where he obtained a Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) and did doctoral studies (S.J.D). Professor Atuguba has also worked in the public sector (he was one time the Executive Secretary to the Constitution Review Commission of Ghana and later Executive Secretary to the President of Ghana); the private sector (he is founder and former Team Leader of Law and Development Associates (LADA) and Managing Partner of Atuguba and Associates); and the non-profit sector (he is co-founder, former Executive Director and former Board Chair of the Legal Resources Centre and Board Chair of LADA Institute).
Professor Atuguba has over 100 publications, been engaged in over 100 research and advocacy projects and produced over 100 research and technical reports. In over 25 years, he has delivered more than 500 papers and presentations on all continents of the world, and been involved in the audit, review, and drafting of over 500 constitutions, policies, main legislation, strategies, regulations, guidelines, manuals, and procedures, mainly in African countries and around the world. He has consulted for many African governments (The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zimbabwe, etc.); major local and international development organisations and agencies (The UN, UNDP, UN-OHCR, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNODC, UNMIL, FAO, The World Bank, ILO, IOM, EU, AU, ECOWAS, USAID, DFID (UK-AID), GIZ (GTZ), DANIDA, FES, KAF, ICHRP, OXFAM, IBIS, IIED); and Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) (ActionAid International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, CARE International, Plan International, Ford Foundation, OSI, OSIWA, etc). He has also designed, led or co-led over 100 training programmes and workshops and chaired or sat on over 100 boards and committees, national and international.

Edward Kissi is a professor at the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, University of South Florida, and a member of the Africana Studies faculty. His research focuses on the post-20th century history of West and East Africa, the comparative history of genocide and human rights, and sub-Saharan African perspectives on the Holocaust. He has published on a wide range of issues including genocide and human rights in Africa, and the prospects and challenges of genocide prevention and global Holocaust and Genocide Education. In 2009, Kissi was invited by the United Nations to write “The Holocaust as a Guidepost for Genocide Detection and Prevention in Africa” for the landmark United Nations’ Discussion Papers Journal. He has since been involved in major national and international activities on Holocaust and Genocide Education, including UNESCO’s on-going initiatives on Holocaust and Genocide Education in Africa. His latest book Africans and the Holocaust (Routledge, 2019/2020) is a pioneering effort to integrate sub-Saharan African perspectives on the Holocaust into Holocaust Studies and incorporate Holocaust content into African history, and Africana Studies. Kissi has also been featured in the new National Geographic documentary Nazis at Nuremberg: The Lost Testimony which made its US debut in January 2023.

Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. He holds a PhD in History from Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research and teaching have focused on African History, Culture, and Development. He has promoted historical studies at the graduate level by researching and teaching courses related to historiography and methodology, Africa’s colonial and post-independence history, the slave trade and Africa, Pan-Africanism, economic history among others. He has developed a course on Chieftaincy and Development with a focus on the role of chiefs in economic development and democratic governance in Africa. He has several articles and book chapters to his credit. Ntewusu has collaborated with several scholars, practitioners, and institutions in Ghana and abroad. He was the recipient of the 2016 Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Fellowship. He was the recipient of the African Distinguished Speaker Series at California State University, Long Beach in 2019, and again awarded the Distinguish Africa Lecture in 2025 by the University of Texas at Austin. He has also given several public lectures in institutions in Ghana, the USA and the Caribbean. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Voorhees University in South Carolina, USA.

Professor Yegandi Imhotep Paul Alagidede (YIPA) is a scholar of Africa’s renewal, advancing an Afrocentric, systems-based economics grounded in Ma’at— balance, reciprocity, and justice. As Bank of Ghana Chair in Finance and Economics (University of Ghana), Professor of Finance (Wits), and Metanomic Architect (Nile Valley Multiversity), he develops a rigorous framework that fuses ancestral knowledge with modern finance and digital infrastructure.
He is founder of Porthologos Press, a decentralised “Fifth-World” print-and-publishing commons dedicated to Open Science, Open Data, and Open Access, through which his network curates and disseminates high-impact scholarship—including the African Review of Economics and Finance, Journal of Indigenous and Shamanic Studies and the Ghanaian Journal of Economics. A philanthropist, policy maker, and adviser of international repute, he provides strategic consultancy to governments and multilateral organisations on monetary innovation, inclusive finance, and institutional reform. Across research, pedagogy, and practice, YIPA’s systems offer clear, palpable, and efficient alternatives to orthodoxy—turning moral philosophy into operational design and transforming development from a narrative of scarcity into one of endogenous capability and shared prosperity.

Seyram Avle is Associate Professor of Global Digital Media in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research, funded by various institutions including the National Science Foundation (US), focuses on digital technology cultures and innovation across parts of Africa, China, and the United States. This work primarily takes a critical approach towards understanding how digital technologies are made and used, as well as their implications for issues of labor, identity, and futures
Link to personal website: https://www.seyramavle.com/

John M. Kusimi is an Associate Professor of Physical Geography in the Department of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana. He holds a PhD in Geography and Resource Development and an MSc in Environmental Engineering and Sustainable Infrastructure. He has a multidisciplinary background that straddle between physical geography with focus on geomorphology as well as environmental science and natural resources management. He possesses two decades of research on coastal erosion and flooding, riverine/urban flooding, bank erosion and river sediment transport and the impacts of small-scale mining in Ghana. He has won several international and local grants from institutions and organizations such as the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana; the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, Harvard University; Building Global Partnerships for Global Challenges, University of Bristol; Africa Climate Collaboration (Mastercard Foundation) and Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)for research and has several peer-reviewed publications to his credit. He is a fellow of the African Center for Advanced Studies, University of Ghana and the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa. John Kusimi was a visiting fellow of Canadian Commonwealth to Simon Frazer University – Canada, TRECCAFRICA Staff Mobility Scholar to Institute of Resources Assessment in University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Cambridge studentship to Cambridge University and Linnaeus Palme Scholar to the Royal Institute of Technology – Sweden. He is a member of some editorial boards including Advisory Board Member of the Journal of Earth Surface Processes and Landforms. John Kusimi is also a member of several professional bodies; National Scientific Member (Representative of Ghana) of the International Association of Geomorphologists (IAG) and the President of Ghana Association of Geomorphologists (GAG).He is currently the Board Chairperson of the Ghana Hydrological Authority.