Dr Grant Mackenzie is an epidemiologist/paediatrician. His medical training was at the University of Melbourne. He trained in paediatrics at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and in Darwin in tropical Australia. He completed an MPH and PhD at Flinders University and Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin. Dr Mackenzie has been a Clinical Epidemiologist with the MRC Unit The Gambia at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine since 2008. He also holds appointments as Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne and at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Dr Mackenzie worked in paediatric HIV in Nairobi for several years before moving to The Gambia. He co-ordinates surveillance in rural Gambia for pneumonia and invasive bacterial disease, pneumococcal disease and carriage, evaluating the effectiveness of pneumococcal conjugate vaccination. He is currently conducting a large cluster-randomised trial of different pneumococcal vaccine schedules, including disease, carriage, acquisition, and immunogenicity outcomes. His research interests include acute respiratory infections, sepsis, and meningitis with a focus on vulnerable and malnourished children and a motivation to reduce child mortality through vaccination interventions.

Shabir Madhi is the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He also holds the position of Director of the South African Medical Research Council Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit (VIDA) and is co-Director of the African Leadership Initiative for Vaccinology Expertise (ALIVE). He is an internationally recognised for his research on vaccines against life threatening disease in childhood, in pregnant women and against respiratory diseases; which informed WHO recommendations on their use of these vaccines in low and middle income settings. Most recently he led the first two COVID-19 vaccine studies being undertaken in Africa, and has been involved in multiple epidemiological studies on Covid-19 in South Africa.

Dr Sana Mahtab is a senior program manager the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics (VIDA) Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand. She qualified with a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) in 2007 from University of Karachi and Maters in Public Health (Epidemiology) from University of Cape Town, in 2015, and is currently a PhD candidate at University of Cape Town. Her research focus with Wits VIDA is on reducing under 5 years mortality from leading causes of death. Her current responsibility includes planning, implementation and management of the surveillance and epidemiological trials, mainly in under 5 population to get better identifying and understanding the causes of death, and preparation of research outputs from the research studies.

Dr. Malley runs a research laboratory with funding from the NIH, PATH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). In collaboration with PATH, Dr. Malley led an international effort for the development of a pneumococcal vaccine for developing countries. In 2014, Dr. Malley and collaborators started Affinivax, a biotechnology company based on a novel technology called MAPS to develop vaccines. Streptococcus pneumoniae is the lead target pursued by Affinivax. A 24-valent pneumococcal MAPS vaccine received breakthrough designation by the US FDA and will soon start in Phase 3 clinical trials. Other targets at Affinivax include Gram-negative infections, Staphylococcus aureus and, more recently, Covid-19. Dr. Malley received his early education at Ecole Active Bilingue in Paris, then a BA from Yale University, MD from Tufts University, and infectious diseases and emergency medicine training at Boston Children’s Hospital. A chance meeting with Dr. Porter Anderson led to his interest in the development of a universal pneumococcal vaccine. Under Dr. Anderson’s mentorship, he shifted his research to the development of novel vaccines. His other activities include attending on the inpatient Infectious Diseases consult service, directing the Travel and Geographic Medicine clinic, while also serving as Chief Scientific Officer at Affinivax.

I have been research active for 13 years: 7 years as a postgraduate research assistant, 5 years as a PhD student and 18 months as a postdoctoral scientist (current). I have published 18 papers (4 first author), with a total of 392 citations and 83% in Q1 prestigious international journals including Frontiers of Immunology, Frontiers of Pharmacology, Vaccine and the European Respiratory Journal. I am currently in a leadership role within the Bacterial Respiratory Infectious Diseases Group, contributing to the commercialisation of our novel therapy to prevent ear infections and investigating maternal antibody transfer for specific NTHi and Pneumococcal antigens that are potential vaccine candidates.

Dr. Lesley McGee is the acting team lead for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Streptococcus Laboratory, which includes surveillance, research, and public health response to Streptococcus pneumoniae, and groups A and B streptococcus. Dr. McGee joined CDC in 2008 as a senior Microbiologist. She has worked extensively in streptococcal disease surveillance, focusing on pathogen detection, antimicrobial resistance, molecular epidemiology and evolution and genomics. Prior to this position, Dr. McGee served on the faculty of Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health as a Research Assistant Professor. In this role, she led research activities within the Hubert Department of Global Health and taught graduate students in the Master of Public Health program. Dr. McGee earned her Bachelor and Honors degrees in Microbiology and Biochemistry at the University of Natal and completed her PhD in Medical Microbiology at the Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Health Laboratory Service, and the Medical Research Council in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ian McLane is the founding CTO of Sonavi Labs, a medical device company that commercializes smart auscultation tools for the diagnosis and management of respiratory diseases and illnesses, and remote patient management software. McLane has published research and holds patents related to heart, lung, and speech sound pickup and analysis, and novel acoustic transducers designed for sounds propagating through the body and underwater. He is also a digital health expert with experience designing and deploying devices, AI algorithms, and software systems to clinical settings and trials domestically and internationally.