Professor Zadoks is a veterinarian and molecular epidemiologist who has worked on group B Streptococcus (GBS) for over a decade. GBS’s scientific name, Streptococcus agalactiae, refers to its impact on dairy cattle, where it causes mastitis and agalactia. Building on her background in dairy herd health and bovine mastitis, Prof. Zadoks developed a portfolio of GBS research spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia, covering animals as well as people. Her work ranges from molecular and genomic epidemiology investigations to challenge studies and the development of diagnostics, vaccines, and control recommendations for different host species. With international collaborators and postgraduate students, she documented the emergence and re-emergence of GBS in cattle, fishes, and camels, showing that there are no strict host-species barriers, and that we can only understand the GBS pangenome and its evolution using a One Health approach. Her work has been funded by academic, government, philanthropic, and industry bodies, and she is a collaborator on the global JUNO project. She takes an interdisciplinary approach, working with medical, genomic, aquaculture, bioengineering and social science experts, among others; has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers; and is a regular international speaker on GBS and One Health.

Theoklis Zaoutis, MD, PHD is currently Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens in the Second Department of Pediatrics based in the P and A Kyriakou Children’s Hospital. He is Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania (PENN)/Division of Infectious Diseases, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). He was recently appointed director of Greek National Organization for Publuc Health (Greek CDC) He is an internationally recognized infectious disease expert, epidemiologist, and pediatrician, with over 330 articles in scientific journals and has been awarded multiple distinctions, including the Healthcare Epidemiology Pediatric Investigator Award in 2009 and the Distinguished Service Award by the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society in 2015.     He has served on the ESPID research committee, the ESPID guideline committee for Bone and Joint Infections and has directed the ESPID Research Master Class. He has participated in several advisory committees in the USA and Europe including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee of Infectious Diseases (Red Book). He also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society for over 10 years.