Natalya Murakhver has long been a tireless advocate for children’s health and well-being. In 2018 she produced the NYU Exposome and Family Health panel and partnered with the New York City Healthy School Food Alliance to improve school food for New York City's public school children. In 2020, she helped organize #KeepNYCSchoolsOpen, and brought a lawsuit against NYC to reopen public schools in person with teachers in classrooms.

In 2021, she founded the #MaskLikeAKid campaign to raise awareness to the prolonged restrictions placed on children in the name of safety. In January 2022 she worked with an international team of scientists and pediatric, infectious disease, emergency, and ICU doctors to launch the Urgency of Normal Toolkit to raise awareness of the effects of Covid19 mitigations on children, and create a path to restoring normalcy. She holds a Masters in Food Studies from NYU.

Follow her on Twitter @AppletoZucchini

Dana Hensley is a founding member of Western New York Students First, a grassroots organization focusing on giving students and families an organized and active voice in their children’s education, recentering students' needs as the primary focus for school districts.

Dana’s volunteer experience ranges from leading a mother of preschoolers group, starting a sustainable community garden in a Section 8 housing complex, coaching travel soccer, serving in multiple executive board roles at her children’s school PTAs. She serves as a legal coordinator and plaintiff in a parent lawsuit against Governor Hochul and associated parties against the mask mandate for children ages 2 and up (Hensley et al v Hochul et al).

Dana also served as legal coordinator and as a plaintiff in a parent lawsuit in 2021 against then Governor Cuomo, Health Commissioner Howard Zucker and local school districts to allow all children to attend school five days a week, in person, regardless of Covid transmission rates. This lawsuit was successful and schools reopened for her district five days a week for all students in May 2021.

Dana lives outside Buffalo, NY, with her husband and four children.

Follow her on Twitter @DanaMarie262

Emily Burns previously worked in the tech world, first in enterprise software, then at Learnivore, a company she founded. COVID policies turned her into an accidental activist. She is an active member of the grassroots, data-based pushback on our poor public policy response. Her work helped shed some of the first light on the severity of the red/blue divide in school access. Since May of 2020, she has been researching, analyzing and writing on these topics, with her work featured at The Brownstone Institute, Rational Ground, Real Clear Politics and on her substack and The Smile Project. 

In October 2021, Emily announced a run for U.S. Congress in Massachusetts. Ultimately, she and her husband decided that a more lasting solution was simply to move. They are now happily re-building their lives in Austin, Texas with their three children. Emily holds a B.S. with majors in biochemistry and piano performance from Sweet Briar College, and a culinary certificate from Boston University’s school of hospitality.

Follow her on Twitter @Emily_Burns_V

Dr. Ram Duriseti is a Clinical Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine Stanford Health, Community Emergency Medicine, and a physician-scientist specializing in optimization and decision modeling.

Dr. Duriseti received his MD from the University of Michigan and his medical training and PhD in Computational Decision Modeling from Stanford University. He has been practicing clinical Emergency Medicine in both community and academic settings for over 20 years. At Stanford, he primarily works in the Pediatric Emergency Department.

Scott Davison is an intellectual property attorney and parent advocate in Carlsbad, California. In the Fall of 2020 when his son’s public school did not reopen for in-person instruction, Scott worked with parent groups across the country to advocate for reopening schools, organizing data and sharing studies to show that schools were safe and the harm to children from remote learning was far greater.

In the Summer of 2021, Scott turned his legal efforts toward ending restrictive and ineffective mitigation strategies including quarantines, testing and masks, and served as co-counsel on a second lawsuit against the State of California. Although unsuccessful, the scientific arguments which formed the basis for the lawsuit were validated shortly thereafter as the state soon ended quarantines of healthy students, stopped requiring oversensitive PCR testing, and began to acknowledge the ineffectiveness of cloth and surgical masks.

Scott was also involved in a lawsuit - together with numerous parent groups - against the State of California for using arbitrary and unscientific health rules to keep schools closed. In March 2022, after over a year of school closures, a judge issued an injunction against the California Department of Public Health that allowed all schools in California to reopen for full-time, in-person learning.

Scott continues to advocate at the local, state and national level for an end to harmful and ineffective COVID restrictions on children, including efforts to help students affected both academically and emotionally by the country’s failed response to the pandemic. He is a currently a candidate for his local school board.