Our globally distributed team is made up of full-time and part-time staff, contractors and volunteers. Our expertise ranges from mental health care to design, research and technology. These are our staff members.

Hera Hussain (she/her) Founder and CEO Hera has years of experience supporting survivors and is responsible for oversight of the project, as well as being our Safeguarding Lead. Born in Scotland, raised in Pakistan and living in the UK, Hera knew from early on she wanted to empower women. Hera was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 list and was awarded the British Empire Medal by Her Majesty the Queen. Hera speaks English, Urdu, and Punjabi.

Eva Blum-Dumontet (she/her) Head of Movement Building and Policy Eva is a policy expert who has been working on technology, gender and human rights for over ten years. Prior to joining Chayn, she worked as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, where she covered issues related to the use of AI in scientific research. She previously worked for eight years as a Senior Researcher at Privacy International, where she authored investigations, reports and numerous articles on the intersection of gender, privacy, and technology and built bridges between organisations working on gender issues and organisations working on digital rights. Her work there included a widely-covered investigation exposing the data sharing practices of menstruation apps.

Nadine Krish Spencer (she/her) ****Head of Product and Experience A born and bred North Londoner, Nadine has been working with tech startups for the last ten years. After developing her skills in product management in a commercial, hypergrowth environments, Nadine has spent the last year working on Tech for Good projects in the mental health space. She's joining the tech team to ensure we build a simple, human and user-centric Bloom platform. She lives in Barcelona and speaks English, Spanish and Catalan.

Paola D’Alessandra (she/they) Administrator Sicilian, queer and proud: Paola is an anthropologist with over a decade of experience in wellbeing, coaching and facilitation. She loves to talk about how connected everything is, and has an intersectional approach to anything, that’s why she studied medical and social anthropology, as well as sex and relationship education, gender and Indigenous studies, and is passionate about permaculture: earth, care, culture. Paola joined Chayn in February 2023 as an Administrator, helping Chayn with all things finance, recruitment, governance and general office management.

Francesca Jarvis (she/her) ****Survivor Services Lead Francesca grew up in the UK and lives in London. Before joining Chayn as the Survivor Services Lead for our Bloom project, Francesca worked in frontline support services for survivors of sexual violence and in youth work. She has a lot of experience supporting survivors around and through the criminal legal system, managing teams and developing ways of working. She speaks English.

Nooreen Khan (she/her) ****Community and Culture Lead Nooreen is a public health professional focusing on gender-based violence prevention, community education, and social justice. She is responsible for recruitment and team leadership, and is a course facilitator for Bloom. Nooreen grew up in the UAE and now lives in Canada. She speaks English, Bengali, and Hindi.

Ellie Re-em (she/her) ****Full Stack Engineer

Ellie did a software engineering short course in her early 20s and has been working as an engineer ever since. She worked in a few different industries such as green energy, gardening industry and at charitable foundations like the Wellcome Trust. She used to speak Chinese as a child but unfortunately has forgotten most of it and these days only speaks English. Currently, she is working on developing the Bloom platform and maintaining Chayn’s tech services.

Jenny Winfield (she/her) ****Head of User Research

Jenny is a specialist in trauma-informed research and she leads all of our qual and quant studies, as well as our impact measurement work. She embeds the principles of safety, trust and accountability, agency, power sharing, equity and hope into her research practice. It’s her job to bring the voices and needs of survivors into our product design work and to ensure that we’re delivering resources that are supporting survivors as they navigate their healing journey. She works with Bumble’s safety team to share insights we develop about users who come to us at Chayn via our partnership with Bumble.

We also work with therapists and a network of gender-based violence experts to check the accuracy of our resources.