Dr. Dawn Bowdish, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, McMaster University. She is the Canada Research Chair in Aging and Immunity and the Executive Director of the Firestone Institute of Respiratory Health. Her lab studies how the innate immune system changes with age and how this impacts host-microbiome interactions, vaccine responses and anti-pneumococcal immunity.

Dr Boyle is the Chief Scientific Officer/co-lead of the PATH Diagnostics Program. He leads a team that investigates infectious diseases and nutrition with a specific focus to identify and develop diagnostic tools for use in low resource settings. His primary interests are in improving the diagnosis and management of HIV and TB infections and in providing better population surveillance systems to inform on transmission of vaccine preventable diseases such as pneumococcal pneumonia, polio virus and typhoid.

Dr. Branche is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Rochester. She is currently Co-Principle Investigator for the UR Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (UR VTEU) one of ten NIH funded network sites in the US. Her current research activities explore clinical disease, pathogenesis, development of therapeutics and vaccine biology related to infection with viral and bacterial respiratory pathogens. Studies include assessment of asymptomatic carriage of Streptococcus pneumoniae and the impact of pneumococcal vaccination, surveillance of epidemic influenza infections and immunologic mechanisms of protection following natural infection versus vaccination, the development of pandemic influenza vaccines, population-based studies of RSV infection and the development of vaccine and anti-viral agents for RSV and the national response to COVID19 pandemic through helping conduct, natural history, therapeutic and vaccine studies.

Dr. Nicholas Brousseau is a specialist in preventive medicine and completed his education at Laval University in 2011. Following his education, he completed a research fellowship on vaccine-preventable diseases at Public Health England in London. Dr. Brousseau joined the Institut national de santé publique du Québec in 2015 and the Centre de recherche du CHU de Québec - Université Laval in 2019. He has been a Member of the Quebec Immunization Committee since 2016. He is also a Clinical Associate Professor at Laval University. Dr. Brousseau conducts research on vaccine-preventable diseases. His areas of expertise are vaccination against pertussis, tetanus, pneumococcus, influenza and COVID-19 (immunogenicity, efficacy and impact of vaccination). He also conducts work on the optimization of vaccination services in Quebec.

Professor Brown is an academic respiratory consultant at University College London where he leads a team investigating the pathogenesis and mechanisms of immunity for the bacterial causes of pneumonia Streptococcus pneumoniae and Acinetobacter baumannii, including the development of novel vaccine approaches. He has investigated phenotypic differences between S. pneumoniae and its closest genetic relative Streptococcus mitis to try and understand why S. pneumoniae is a frequent cause of severe infections whereas S. mitis is a relatively rare cause of significant infections in humans. His clinical practice concentrates on clinical respiratory infection, including bronchiectasis, aspergillosis, and pneumonia in immunocompetent and immunocompromised patients. He is a member of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, contributing to national decisions on vaccine policy including the COVID-19, influenza, and S. pneumoniae vaccination programme.

Prof Brueggemann has worked at the University of Oxford since 2000 across four different departments and two colleges, initially as a doctoral student and then progressing through several research fellowships and teaching posts. She also worked at Imperial College London for two years and joined her current Oxford department and the Big Data Institute in 2019. Prof Brueggemann also sits on a vaccines and antimicrobial resistance advisory group at the World Health Organisation and is the ISPPD secretary. The Brueggemann research group analyses thousands of bacterial genomes to better understand diseases like meningitis and pneumonia, and the impact of vaccination and antimicrobial resistance. Current research projects are focused on IRIS, a large international consortium of laboratories investigating the impact of COVID-19 on bacterial invasive disease; bacteriocin peptides that might have potential as novel antimicrobials; bacteriophages and pneumococcal disease; and the diagnosis of meningitis in Africa. A central component of the research includes making genomic data and analysis tools freely accessible to the international community through a large suite of databases in PubMLST (https://pubmlst.org/).