Speakers

Sir Roy served as Director of the Wellcome Centre for Parasite Infections (1989 - 1993 at Imperial College London) and Director of the Wellcome Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease (1993 - 2000 at the University of Oxford). He is the author of over 450 scientific articles and has sat on numerous government and international agency committees advising on public health and disease control including the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS.

He currently is Chair of the Science Advisory Board of the Natural History Museum London, Chair of the Advisory Board of PTTGC Thailand, a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline and a member of the International Advisory Board of Hakluyt and Company Ltd.

Sir Roy was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986, a Founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998, and a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Medicine at the US National Academy of Sciences in 1999. He was knighted in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours.

He registered as internist in 2000, as infectious disease specialist in 2002 and as clinical microbiologist in 2008, all at the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands. Since August 2008 he is head of the department Medical Microbiology and leading the research group of infectious Disease Epidemiology of the Julius Center of Health Sciences and Primary Care, both at the UMC Utrecht, where he is professor of molecular epidemiology of infectious diseases since 2002. Since July 2015 he is also appointed as scientific advisor for Antimicrobial Resistance at the National Institute of Health and the Environment and the Center for Infectious Disease Control, in the Netherlands.

He serves as the chair the Infection & Immunity Focus Programme of the UMC Utrecht, served on the editorial board of Intensive Care Medicine (2008-2012), and served on several Scientific Advisory Boards (JPI-AMR, SWAB). He is a VICI laureate (2006) from the Dutch Science Association, PI of the CAPiTA study (investigator-initiated study funded by Wyeth, later Pfizer), coordinator of the EU-funded project R-GNOSIS and scientific coordinator of the IMI-funded consortiums COMBACTE-NET, COMBACTE-CARE, COMBACTE-MAGNET and COMBACTE-CDI. In May 2015 he received the Excellence Award of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

Her work is focused on understanding the mechanisms driving the spread of infectious diseases that impact the most vulnerable populations worldwide, particularly malaria. Before coming to Harvard, Dr. Buckee completed a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, and Omidyar and Wellcome Trust fellowships at the Santa Fe Institue and the Kenya Medical Research Institute, respectively, where she analyzed malaria parasite evolution and epidemiology. Dr. Buckee's group uses a range of mathematical models, experimental and genomic data, and “Big Data” from mobile phones and satellites to understand how human pathogens spread and may be controlled.

His work focuses on developing state-of-the-art statistical methods to tackle the many challenges epidemiologists face when analysing infectious disease data with a view to improve our understanding of how pathogens spread in human populations and support policy making. Dr. Cauchemez was previously at Imperial College London for 8 years, most recently as a Reader.

He conducts research on spatial temporal dynamics of dengue in Southeast Asia, the impact of socioeconomic and demographic changes on dengue epidemiology, the dynamics of immune response as well as dengue vaccination strategies. Dr. Cummings conducts studies of influenza dynamics in southern China and in school-children in the US. Dr. Cummings has also worked to characterize transmission of multiple emerging pathogens including MERS-CoV, Zika, pandemic influenza, chikungunya and ebola.

She works across a wide range of infectious diseases (from bovine TB and foot-and-mouth disease to Ebola and SARS), with a particular interest in outbreaks, bringing together statistical inference and mathematical transmission modelling. She was Deputy Chair of the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB from 1998 to 2007 which designed, oversaw and analysed the Randomised Badger Culling Trial. She was recently elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2015) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (2016).

She has developed multidisciplinary approaches to study the virology, pathogenesis, immunology, epidemiology, clinical aspects, and control of dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, the most prevalent mosquito-borne viral diseases in humans. This has been achieved through her research program at UC Berkeley and in Nicaragua and other endemic Latin American countries, where she has worked extensively for almost 30 years.  In 1997, she received a MacArthur Fellowship for her pioneering work improving the health of vulnerable populations through research and sustainable, local solutions for critical infectious disease and public health challenges. She is also the co-founder and President of the Sustainable Sciences Institute, which works to improve public health in developing countries by building local capacity for scientific research on priority diseases. She has published over 210 peer-reviewed articles, as well as a book on her international scientific work.

After a graduate fellowship at KITP, she was a Princeton Center for Theoretical Science Fellow, focusing on applying information theory to signal processing in small gene regulatory networks. Currently she is a CNRS researcher at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, interested in the effects of selection on population genealogies, collective behavior of bird flocks and statistical descriptions of the immune system. She was awarded the “Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand de l’Académie des sciences" in 2014 and the bronze medal of CNRS in 2016.