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 over a decade of experience supporting survivors. 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 in tech for over a decade. She learnt product management in commercial, hypergrowth startups before switching to work on Tech for Good projects in the mental health space. Nadine started at Chayn in 2021 and currently lives in Barcelona. She speaks English, Spanish and Catalan.

Paola D’Alessandra (she/they) Operations and Impact Coordinator 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. Paola joined Chayn in February 2023 as an Administrator, helping Chayn with all things finance, recruitment, governance and general office management and growing into a new unique role as Operations and Impact Coordinator, bridging the inner world of Chayn with the rest of the world, working on the impact and the reach Chayn can have by contributing to research, events and community building.

Francesca Jarvis (she/her) ****Survivor Services Lead Francesca joined Chayn as the Survivor Services Lead in 2022, and has nearly ten years experience in frontline sexual violence work, and around three years experience working with children and young people. She has an array of experience supporting survivors around and through the criminal legal system in England, managing teams of frontline workers, and developing and project managing frontline service delivery. Francesca also has some experience in community accountability, and is particularly interested in relational work, participatory and collaborative practices, and ways of being accountable for and transforming harm. She speaks English and is learning Spanish very slowly! Francesca grew up in the UK and lives in London.

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.

Abbie Tshola (she/her)

Survivor Services Administrator

Abbie joined as the Survivor Services Administrator at Chayn in 2024. Having recently graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc Political Sociology degree, Abbie has considerable experience researching higher education through a decolonial and black feminist lens and has advocated for policies which improves the experience of marginalised students. Abbie also enjoys exploring UX Research and Design and is currently building a portfolio which centres black feminist values in digital spaces.