Zinat Ara (M.S.) is a Programme Officer working with ActionAid Bangladesh on its Right to Quality Health theme. She received her M.S. in Statistics from Dhaka University in 1999. After working for a local Bangladeshi NGO as well as for the International Food Policy Research Institute, she was selected by CARE Bangladesh as one of ten interns in the first batch of a newly designed internship program specifically for women. After successfully completing the internship in the Design, Monitoring & Evaluation Unit, she joined ActionAid Bangladesh where she has been working for almost three years.

Douglas A. Brownridge (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor in the Department of Family Social Sciences at the University of Manitoba. He teaches courses on family violence at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His research focuses on family violence, including a book entitled Explaining Violence Against Women in Canada (2001, Lexington Books). Dr. Brownridge’s current research includes a focus on violence against women in special populations.

Jennifer M. Graham (MSc). After completing her MSc in Health Research, Ms Graham began undergraduate medicine and is currently working towards her MD at the University of Calgary. Her work and research has focused on minority groups such as recent immigrants and aboriginal populations.

Aysan Sev’er (Ph.D.) is a professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She teaches sociology of gender and family and writes extensively on sexual harassment, intimate partner abuse of women, link between separation and violence, cross-cultural forms of wife abuse and extreme violence against women such as `honour killing’ and `dowry murders’. Her latest book on women who have left their abusive partners (Fleeing the House of Horrors, University of Toronto Press) has received the Canadian Women’s Studies Book Award (2004). She is also the founder and the general editor of Women’s Health & Urban Life journal.

Wilfreda E. Thurston (Ph.D.) is an associate professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, an adjunct associate professor in the Faculties of Kinesiology and Nursing and the Director of the Institute for Gender Research at University of Calgary. Her program of research and training includes development and evaluation of health promotion programs and health services; frameworks for effective services; public participation in health policy development; studies of determinants of health in women and prevention of violence against women.

The Women's Health & Urban Life: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal is generously funded by the Wellesley Central Health Corporation and is permanently housed at the Sociology Department, University of Toronto. The founder and the first general editor is Aysan Sev'er, University of Toronto.