Ron Dagan is Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Infectious Diseases at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. 1974: MD degree, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1982: a 3-year Fellowship, Pediatric Infectious Diseases, University of Rochester, NY 1987: Founded the first Pediatric Infectious Disease Unit in Israel at the Soroka University Medical Center, Beer-Sheva. Member of the Israeli National Academy of Science in Medicine Member of the National Advisory on Infectious Diseases and Immunization and of the National Advisory on Corona Vaccines. Founding Member of the World Society of Pediatric Infectious Diseases (WSPID) Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) Honorary member of the European Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases (ESPID). Has served on the Executive Committee of the International Society of Infectious Disease (ISID; 2010-2016) ESPID President (2004-2006) WSPID President (2006-2009) ISPPD President (2010-2016. Editorial board member of Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics, Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Recipient of many grants and awards Contributed >550 original articles, reviews, book chapters Presented >600 papers at major scientific meetings. Professor Dagan has earned international recognition for his research, focusing largely on vaccine-preventable diseases, with particular emphasis on respiratory and pneumococcal diseases, epidemiology, and vaccines.

Wa Ode Dwi Daningrat is an Indonesian government (Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology & The Indonesia Endowment Funds for Education) scholar pursuing a DPhil in Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil research focuses on the genomic epidemiology of Streptococcus pneumoniae pre- and post- Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine Introduction in Indonesia. Her main interests are the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) of Streptococcus pneumoniae and the utilisation of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) to investigate the presence of genes and mutations in pneumococcal isolates related to AMR. Following graduation from the University of Indonesia, she has been involved in several collaborative projects with the US-CDC since 2016 on pneumococcal carriage study, vaccine impact evaluation, and AMR profiling in Indonesia. She received the 2018 International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) Research Grant Award for her research on the AMR profile of Streptococcus pneumoniae. She was granted an award in AMR by ISID and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP) for this work in 2019.

I am a medical microbiology technologist and have many years’ experience in routine microbiology diagnostics and training of personnel in the laboratory component of communicable disease diagnosis and pathogen identification. Since 1999, I have been involved in the setting up of national surveillance programmes for laboratory-confirmed disease due to Streptococcus pneumoniae, Neisseria meningitidis and Haemophilus influenzae both in South Africa, and in many African countries as a joint collaboration with WHO-IBVPD (Invasive Bacterial Vaccine Preventable Diseases) programme. I am the Laboratory Manager at CRDM, NICD in Johannesburg and am passionate about Bacteriology, and enjoy teaching and sharing my knowledge.

Wouter de Steenhuijsen Piters, MD PhD, is a full-time post-doctoral researcher at the UMCU with a clinical background as a medical resident in paediatrics (2012/2013) and lung medicine (2018/2019). He studies the infant respiratory tract bacterial communities (‘microbiota’) in the context of the host immune system and the impact of host-microbial interactions on respiratory infection susceptibility. His awards include the poster award at the Next Generation Immunology EMBO congress held at the prestigious Weizmann Institute (Rehovot, Israel) and the Eijkman-Winkler Institute Award for Excellence in Science and Presentation (University of Utrecht). He was awarded cum laude for his PhD-thesis for adapting and applying novel data-analysis tools to help answering clinically relevant questions (University of Utrecht, 2018). Over the years, he has been an invited speaker at multiple (national and international) conferences. His current work focusses on the early-life development of microbiota and immune system in the context of viral infections and host factors.

Professor Philippe De Wals, MD, PhD Philippe De Wals gained his Medical Degree and a Doctorate in Public Health in his home country of Belgium, at the Louvain Catholic University. His early academic and professional career combined teaching and epidemiologic research at the Louvain Catholic University School of Public Health in Brussels with the practice of family medicine. In 1990, he moved to Canada and became the Head of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Sherbrooke. In 1997, he was appointed visiting Professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, USA. In 2002, he became Head of the Department of Social and preventive medicine at Laval University, Quebec City, until 2010. He retired from Laval University in 2019 and remains associate professor at Sherbrooke University and at Laval University, and emeritus professor at the Louvain Catholic University. Professor De Wals’ research is centered on the epidemiology of infectious diseases, reproductive abnormalities, and the assessment of health services and public health programs and policies. He is the author of more than 200 articles published in scientific journals and has contributed several chapters to textbooks. Currently, Professor De Wals is a member of research centers at the Quebec University Hospital, the Sherbrooke University Hospital and the Quebec Heart and Lung University Institute. He also serves as medical advisor to the Quebec National Institute of Public Health and the Public Health Agency of Canada. In 1990, Professor De Wals was awarded the Jean Van Beneden Prize in recognition of his excellent work in the public health field in Belgium. In 2005, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium. He was awarded the price for excellence of the Quebec Community Health Specialists Association in 2007. In 2020, he was an awardee of the Collen-Francqui International Professorship at Antwerp University.

Stefanie Desmet is a PharmD and PhD in Biomedical Sciences . As a medical microbiologist she is working at UZ Leuven, Belgium. She is head of the National Reference Centre for invasive S. pneumoniae in Belgium since 2018. Her main research topics are the investigation of the IPD epidemiology during the use of (different) PCVs and the genomic characterisation of S. pneumoniae in this context.

Sarah attained a Master’s in Molecular Biology and Phylogeny from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in 2012. Sarah first became interested in public health as an NGO volunteer through Operation Bobbi Bear (OBB), an award-winning NGO in Durban, South Africa. She was the project manager responsible for reporting on a pilot study, that lead to a Comic Relief “Women and Girls” grant involving HIV treatment literacy and test counselling for abuse survivors in South Africa. Sarah’s passion for health research and policy matured working as the DNA analyst within the SADC region ECORat project. This work aimed at identifying, through gene target sequencing (DNA Barcoding), rodent species with potential for causing disease outbreaks in humans. Sarah followed her path in infectious diseases as a junior medical scientist at Wits Vida. At Vida, she was initially involved in hospital-based surveillance projects for respiratory viruses, pertussis, and Group B Streptococcus. Sarah progressed to a PhD under Prof Shabir Madhi, Prof Marta Nunes and Dr Courtney Olwagen's supervision, that has involved the innovative design of a comprehensive high-throughput PCR assay for pneumococcal serotyping, including difficult capsular targets regions of serogroups 6 and 18. Her project involved field sample collection, in rural and urban communities in South Africa to assess the temporal relationship between routine PCV implementation and pneumococcal carriage of vaccine- and non-vaccine-serotypes. Sarah contributes to EPI vaccine literacy for caregivers, as a core-team member for “Pro-Vaccination South Africa”, a group with almost 10 000 members. Recently, Sarah was also selected and served as a reference group member for a novel project on water-based COVID-19 Epidemiology Surveillance for Non-Sewered Communities.

I work for a public health institute with a focus on respiratory and meningitis-causing pathogens (bacterial and viral). I have a backgound in laboratory/medical science which includes testing of clinical samples for surveillance, diagnosis and outbreak response. I have experience in molecular diagnostics and pathogen characterization using a variety of molecular methods including PCR and sequencing. I am involved in accreditation and quality management, technical training of laboratory staff and postgraduate supervision of MSc and PhD students. We are the reference centre for laboratory-based surveillance for S. pneumoniae, N. meningitidis, H. influenzae, and group A and group B streptococcus in South Africa. We also serve as a regional reference laboratory for WHO-AFRO for bacterial pediatric meningitis surveillance.

Felix Dube is a Royal Society/ African Academy of Sciences FLAIR Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Cape Town. His research uses the power of omics to understand the transmission dynamics of the pneumococcus and its interaction with the broader microbiome. This is modelled towards more effective public health intervention such as vaccine design and drug discovery.