Seilesh Kadambari is a paediatric infectious diseases consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. During his postgraduate training, Seilesh spent three years working at St George’s University of London. He led a series of surveillance studies with Public Health England to define the burden of viral meningitis in infants and children. Seilesh also developed a programme of cohort studies that investigated the feasibility of integrating testing for cCMV into the Newborn Hearing Screening Programme. During his clinical lectureship at the University of Oxford, Seilesh published the largest epidemiological study of congenital infections and hopes these will inform future vaccine development. Seilesh won best paper of the year by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for “Strategies to improve detection and management of human parechovirus infection in young infants.” Seilesh was awarded young investigator of the year for clinical research by ESPID. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Seilesh engaged with over 200 community organisations that provide support for minority groups in the U.K to improve vaccine uptake. He also led a national surveillance study to describe the epidemiology of childhood infections during the pandemic. In the long term, Seilesh plans to establish a programme of clinical cohort studies that allow translation of research to inform and improve the evidence based management of severe neonatal infections.

Gunnar Kahlmeter, M.D., Ph.D., Head of the EUCAST Development Laboratory and the Swedish Reference Laboratory for phenotypic susceptibility testing. Former president of ESCMID (2012-14) and Chair of the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing 2001 – 2012, EUCAST Technical Data Coordinator and webmaster 2012 – cntd. GK has been in clinical microbiology 1971 – cntd and between 1985 and 2016 he was the head of three microbiology laboratories.