Dr. Julia Upton is a Clinical Immunologist and Allergist at the Hospital for Sick Children, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, co-Director of the SickKids Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Programme, and the Medical Director of the SickKids Clinical Research Center. She is the immediate past Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Section Head of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and on the Health Care Advisory board of Food Allergy Canada. She graduated from Western University Medical school, completed residency at McMaster University, fellowship in Clinical Immunology and Allergy at University of Toronto, and a Master’s in Public Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Her clinical practice focuses on both clinical immunodeficiency and allergy. Her research interests include the identification and optimal care of people with immunodeficiencies and exploring the risk factors, severity, prognosis and treatment of food allergies.

Dr Britta Urban obtained her PhD at the University of Hamburg, Germany studying complement resistance in Entamoeba histolytica. In 1997, she joined Oxford University to investigate cellular immune responses to Plasmodium falciparum blood stage malaria. She was awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development Research Fellowship in 2002 and subsequently a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2006 when she moved to the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya. Her team worked on human immune responses to variant surface antigens of Plasmodium falciparum and to HIV in exposed and infected children. In 2011, Dr Urban returned to the UK and is now based at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine investigating human immune responses to malaria. More recently, she begun working closely with Prof Daniela Ferreira's team on immune responses to respiratory infections in the context of human challenge studies.