Vana Spoulou is Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Consultant at “Aghia Sophia” Children’s Hospital and Head of the Immunobiology and Vaccinology Research Lab (ΙVRL) in Athens. She has been trained in Paediatrics and Paediatric Infectious Diseases in Athens and London, UK, and obtained an MPhil in Immunobiology from UCL, and a PhD in Epidemiology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the Clinical Lead of the Infectious Diseases Unit and the National Reference Centre for Paediatric HIV at “Agia Sophia” Children’s Hospital, a busy tertiary teaching hospital with more than 600 pediatric beds. Over the last 20 years, she has been actively involved in medical research in the field of Immunobiology and Vaccinology and in 1997 she established the first Immunobiology and Vaccinology Research lab in Greece aiming to promote cutting edge “bench to the bedside” research. Her research activity is focused on the investigation of humoral and cellular immune responses to bacterial and viral vaccines aiming to identify immunological correlates of vaccine-induced protection by innovative methodology developed in the IVRL. An important focus of her research is the development of methods for the investigation of antigen-specific B cell memory following vaccination with pneumococcal and COVID19 vaccines. Another area of her research is the discovery and evaluation of pneumococcal protein antigens and their deployment in immunogenic formulations of serotype-independent pneumococcal vaccines. She is grant holder of many National and European research grants and chief investigator in many pharma-funded clinical trials. She is member of many scientific societies including the Hellenic Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases, ECCMID and the European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases (ESPID) where she has been recently elected as Board Member. She is also member of the Rotavirus and Varicella and Zoster Experts groups. For the period 2015 -2019 she was member of the Education Committee of ESPID and co-director of "Wiser Immunizer online course» developed by ESPID and WHO. For her research, aiming to enrich the science behind PIDs, she has received many national and international awards. She is author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and co-author of the Pediatric Vaccines and Vaccination Textbook (Springer 2nd edition).