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About MCSA

The People Behind MCSA

The people who contribute to MCSA as knowledge holders, researchers, citizen scientists and community organizers.

People who make MCSA

MCSA is built on the contributions of migrants, citizen scientists, researchers and community organizers who work together as knowledge holders and contributors — not merely as participants or research subjects. The association brings together people from many backgrounds as active leaders and collaborators in its work.

MCSA Leadership

The people who lead MCSA and drive its day-to-day work.

Judy Love Gonzales Malundo

Judy Love Gonzales Malundo

Founder | Chairperson | Feminist and Citizen Science Advocate

lovemalundo@mcsainternational.com

Love founded MCSA to open space for migrants in science — not as research subjects, but as people who shape what research asks and how it is done. A teacher by profession, her work connects citizen science with migration, feminist perspectives, education and pedagogy. She keeps returning to a set of questions: who produces knowledge, whose knowledge is recognized, and who has a voice in research and decision-making. She looks at how lived experience can shape research and technology — including newer fields such as Extended Reality (XR) — while drawing attention to the biases and forms of exclusion that run through them. Her background spans international social welfare and health policy, gender studies, and women and development, alongside environmental and gender-related advocacy.

Jones Kwame Adom Danquah

Jones Kwame Adom Danquah

Co-founder | Deputy Chair | Social and Citizen Science Advocate

jonesdanquah@mcsainternational.com

Jones co-founded MCSA and serves as Deputy Chair. His work is grounded in social welfare and development geography, and centers on marginalization, social exclusion, poverty and the conditions that allow people to take part on equal terms. He is concerned with equality, fairness and equal opportunity across race, gender, ethnicity and religion — and with how communities often left out of research and public life can be recognized as contributors to knowledge. At MCSA he helps shape the association’s direction and its insistence that migrants are active participants in science and society, not merely its subjects.

MCSA Team and Advisory Board

The people contributing to MCSA’s work and guidance on migrant participation in citizen science.

Davina Hang

Davina Hang

Grants and Communications Lead | Community Worker

davinahang@mcsainternational.com

Davina’s work is built around people. Her background spans community engagement, social welfare, global health and international research, and her particular strength is connecting across cultural, professional and social contexts — and making complex information land clearly with different audiences. She leads grant development, communications and dissemination at MCSA: identifying funding opportunities, supporting applications, and helping the organization’s work reach the people and partners it needs to reach. The relationship-building side of her role is as central as the technical one — much of what MCSA does depends on trust across communities and institutions.

Macel Ingles

Macel Ingles

Journalism and Media Lead | Journalist

macelingles@mcsainternational.com

Macel spent more than two decades in Philippine media, holding senior editorial and production roles — News Bureau Chief, Executive Producer, News Desk Editor — before moving into education and research. Her journalism has covered sustainable agriculture and labor conditions, and her work draws on development studies as well as newsroom craft. At MCSA she leads media and communications, bringing an editorial sensibility to how migrant participation and citizen science are reported and shared. The question of which stories get told, and who gets to tell them, runs through both her journalism and her work with the association.

Reina Regis

Reina Regis

Website and Communications Coordinator | Human Rights Advocate

reinaregis@mcsainternational.com

Reina came to communications through years of volunteering with a non-governmental organization, then moved into developing digital content and communications work professionally. Her advocacy centers on pro-poor public policy, social justice, and the protection and promotion of human rights — using media to amplify communities that are often underrepresented or unheard. As Website and Communications Coordinator she shapes how MCSA presents its work online and reaches migrant and marginalized audiences. The thread running through her role is communication as a route to representation: making sure the people most affected by an issue are visible in the conversation about it.

Remegio Confesor, PhD

Remegio Confesor, PhD

Senior Environmental and Agricultural Research Advisor

remconfesor@mcsainternational.com

Remegio is an agricultural and biological engineer with more than 25 years in hydrology, environmental management and water resources. His expertise runs from hydrological research and diffuse-source pollution to watershed management, agricultural best practices and the water-related impacts of climate change, including the development of hydrologic models. As Senior Environmental and Agricultural Research Advisor to MCSA, he brings this depth to questions of sustainable agriculture, environmental protection and climate resilience — areas where whose knowledge counts, and whose land and water are at stake, are inseparable from the science itself.

Hilda Chavez

Hilda Chavez

Community and Welfare Advisor | Social Worker

hildachavez@mcsainternational.com

Hilda is a social worker with a background in psychology, anthropology and international social welfare, and a particular interest in inclusion and individual empowerment. Her day-to-day practice at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) involves supporting people from many backgrounds to strengthen their capacities, opportunities and participation in society. She joined MCSA as a voluntary member, contributing a front-line welfare perspective — one grounded in individual support rather than research — to an organization that takes participation seriously at every level, from policy down to the person.

Sandesh Shrestha

Sandesh Shrestha

Health and Community Engagement Advisor | Physical Therapist

sandeshrestha@mcsainternational.com

Sandesh trained in physiotherapy and rehabilitation and now works across health, disability and community engagement, with additional study in international social welfare. His clinical and rehabilitation experience includes supporting people with disabilities and other support needs. Based in Oslo, he has a strong interest in migrant empowerment, health and social welfare. As Health and Community Engagement Advisor he brings a rehabilitation and disability perspective to MCSA — one that asks how people with support needs, including migrants, can take part in research and community life on their own terms.

Maria Hecimovic

Maria Hecimovic

Community Inclusion Lead | Social Worker

mariahecimovic@mcsainternational.com

Maria is a social worker whose work centers on migrant participation, social inclusion, community empowerment and integration. She is curious about how cultural exchange can build understanding and connection across communities, and she values arts and performance as ways to share experience and open dialogue. Citizen science sits close to the center of her interests: how people who are usually spoken about in research can take part in producing knowledge about their own lives. As Community Inclusion Lead she brings that social-work and community perspective to MCSA’s work on migrant participation in science.

Michael Yisfashewa, PhD

Michael Yisfashewa, PhD

Health and Welfare Research Advisor

michaelyisfashewa@mcsainternational.com

Michael is a global health and welfare researcher whose work focuses on access to and the quality of health and welfare services. His particular interests are health inequalities and equitable access to healthcare among migrant populations, and he has a strong interest in migrant-led research — studies shaped by the people they concern rather than only about them. As Health and Welfare Research Advisor he brings this lens to MCSA’s work on the disparities that affect migrant communities, where questions of who is studied, who is left out, and who interprets the findings are central to the evidence that results.

Advisory Board

Advisory Board members provide external guidance to MCSA, separate from the operational team.

MCSA Community

Community members contribute their experience and perspectives to MCSA. They are part of the wider MCSA community rather than the formal team structure.

“I am a recent graduate of the ACCRA Business School with a Bachelor’s degree in Operations Management and Global Leadership, as well as a Master’s degree in International Relations from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. My passion for international business and leadership drives me to pursue career opportunities that allow me to work with global teams and make a positive impact on the world.”
Cynthia — Norway
“I am an early-stage researcher and recent graduate with MPH and environmental epidemiology as my concentration. My interest in joining citizen science is to globalise local research results so they are accessible regardless of English competence. During my internship project as part of my master’s programme, I found that local research results were not reflected to the global community due to language barriers, creating a knowledge gap that leads to Western-centred research results.”
Haniena — Indonesia
“I am interested in open science to de-colonise public health research by addressing inequalities and the challenges non-Westerners face in governing their own country- and region-specific health-related issues.”
Novra — Indonesia

Work hand-in-hand with MCSA

Let us work together to change how science includes the people it concerns. Let science, society and the rest hear our voices.

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