Prof Shamez Ladhani PhD MRCPCH(UK) MSc(distinction) MBBS(hons) BSc(hons) is a paediatric infectious diseases specialist at St. George’s Hospital, a reader in paediatric infectious diseases at St. George’s University of London and consultant epidemiologist at UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), where he is the clinical lead for a number of national vaccine preventable infections, including Haemophilus influenzae, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Neisseria meningitidis, which are all major causes of childhood bacterial meningitis. He completed his medical training at Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals, London, and then worked in a children’s hospital in rural Kenya. Upon returning to London, he obtained his PhD in genetic epidemiology and vaccine failure in children and completed his specialist paediatric infectious diseases training at St. George’s and Great Ormond Street Hospitals, London. In the current pandemic, he is the clinical lead for of SARS-CoV-2 surveillance in children at UKHSA. His work has focused on national surveillance of SARS-CoV-2, PIMS-TS and long COVID, immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 in children compared to adults, as well as infection, transmission and outbreaks in educational settings and COVID-19 vaccines for children

Mathias Lalika is an MPH candidate in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. He is also currently working as a Research Assistant at the Strategic Analysis, Research & Training (START) Center, where he provides analytic support to help inform the decisions of the local and global health organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, and others. He was trained as a physician, and he has more than six years of experience in academic research. His interests include infectious diseases, chronic diseases, improving maternal and child health outcomes, and addressing health disparities.

Medical doctor, specialist in Clinical Microbiology, Master in Disease Control. Professor of Microbiology department, Faculty of Medicine, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Staff member of Fundacion Santa Fe de Bogota, teaching Hospital, Bogota, Colombia. Member of Neumored Colombia and Grupo para el control de la resistencia bacteriana de Bogota (GREBO)

I’m a research group leader at EMBL-EBI, where I run the Pathogen Informatics and Modelling Group. I work on bioinformatics and software, statistical genetics, genomic epidemiology, GPU programming, and mathematical modelling – often with emphasis respiratory bacterial pathogens and the Streptococcus genus. Our group aims to develop innovative approaches to help apply the power of sequencing to controlling pathogen threats. We are interested in producing methods, and generating biological insights by applying these methods to data from various sources.

Luciana C.C. Leite, has a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of São Paulo (USP) and a Post-Doc at Institut Pasteur. She is currently Senior Researcher at the Vaccine Development Laboratory at Instituto Butantan, Brazil. She has worked in molecular biotechnology for development of vaccines, such as Pertussis, Pneumococcus and Schistosoma, especially vaccines based on recombinant BCG, having over 120 papers in peer-reviewed journals and several patents. She is currently member of the Academic Management Board of the master program of the Leading International Vaccinology Education of Erasmus/European Union and of the Ethics Committee for Research in Humans of USP.

Dr Lewnard is an assistant professor of epidemiology in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley with a research focus on vaccine-preventable and respiratory pathogens, in the US and in global settings. He has led studies of the real-world impact and effectiveness of pneumococcal conjugate vaccination among both children and adults, addressing a variety of endpoints, providing new insights into the clinical spectrum of pneumococcal infection and burden of illness preventable by vaccination. Ongoing work addresses pneumococcal interaction with respiratory viruses in the pathogenesis of both mucosal and invasive illness, and implications for disease control strategies.

Wei Shen Lim is a consultant respiratory physician at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and Honorary Professor of Medicine, University of Nottingham. He is Chair of COVID-19 Immunisation on the Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), UK. He was chair of the British Thoracic Society (BTS) Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) Guidelines Committee and is leads the BTS National CAP Audit Programme, He is Chief Investigator of a longitudinal population-based pneumonia cohort study in Nottingham which has been running for over 12 years. His research interests are in the fields pneumococcal pneumonia, community acquired pneumonia, influenza and COVID-19. In 2016, he was awarded the British Thoracic Society Meritorious Award for contributions towards respiratory infections.

Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is an internationally-recognized expert in methods and disease transmission modeling, and has been a leading scientific authority during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Lipsitch is an author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, epidemiologic methods, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, bacterial and human population genetics, immunity to Streptococcus pneumoniae, and COVID-19 epidemiology. His research informs the use of transmission-dynamic simulations to improve the design of randomized and observational studies of infectious disease interventions, and bioethics related to infectious diseases and clinical trials in emergencies.

Dr Stephanie Lo is a scientist at Sanger Institute. She oversees the Global Pneumococcal Sequencing (https://www.pneumogen.net/gps/) by setting overall scientific strategy, communicating with collaborators, and delivering outputs through publications and presentations. Funded by the Gates Foundation, the GPS project sequenced ~26,000 pneumococcal isolates collected around the globe, especially from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), to investigate the adaptive changes that mediate the emergence, expansion and persistence of pneumococcal lineages after the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. She is particularly interested in analysing large-scale of genomic data to generate evidence to inform future pneumococcal vaccine design. She is also actively involved in delivering bioinformatics training and capacity building to researchers in LMICs. Twitter: @stephlo_lo Webpage: https://www.sanger.ac.uk/person/lo-stephanie/