Prof Nick Andrews is Head of Vaccines Analysis within the Immunisation Department of the UK Health Security Agency. In this role he has worked extensively on post licensure vaccine safety, impact and effectiveness assessment, clinical trials and correlates of protection. He is currently part of the Global Vaccine Datanet, works on European influenza vaccine effectiveness projects with the IMove group, and was a member of the World Health Organization Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety from 2012-2018. He is currently on the WHO Ebola vaccine sub-committee and is on the advisory group for pilot implementation of RTS,S malaria vaccine in Africa. He is a project lead on a research collaboration on using electronic health records for vaccine assessment with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). During the COVID-19 pandemic he has worked on sero-epidemiology, risk factors, excess mortality, and has published multiple studies on vaccine effectiveness and safety. He regularly provides evidence on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. He lectures at the LSHTM, New York University in London and on vaccine courses internationally. He has over 400 publications with more than half of these in the vaccine field.

I am a rising 6th year student in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics PhD program at Emory University. My research focuses on determining the molecular mechanisms for the dissemination of macrolide resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae. My interests include antibiotic resistance, host-pathogen interactions, and pathogenesis while my future career plans are to pursue a post-doctoral position or fellowship at a public health institution.

Dr Zein ASSAD is a pediatric infectious diseases specialist, practicing at the Infectious Diseases Team of Robert Debré University Hospital in Paris. He has achieved a master’s degree in Public Health with specialization in Infectious Risks at Institut Pasteur in Paris. During his research project for the master’s in Public Health, he used the methodology of interrupted time-series analysis to assess the impact of PCV13 implementation on the incidence of acute chest syndrome in children with sickle-cell disease. He has a real interest in the challenges of implementing preventive measures in populations at risk of severe infections such as pneumococcal diseases. He plans to carry on with a PhD in pneumococcal disease epidemiology and a postdoctoral training internship at the Sainte Justine Hospital in Montreal, with research topics focused on pneumococcus.

Dr. Taj Azarian is currently an assistant professor at the Burnett School of Biomedical Science, University of Central Florida. His lab uses pathogen genomics to investigate the emergence and spread of bacterial infectious diseases, with a specific interest in antibiotic-resistant pathogens that are frequent causes of healthcare-associated infections. To accomplish this, they use a variety of tools including epidemiology, bioinformatics, computational biology, population genomics, and phylogenetics. The Azarian lab’s goal is to understand the factors that contribute to pathogen success and to develop new genomic epidemiological methods to detect, monitor, and combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance.

My PhD and post-doctoral work centered upon identifying genes required for bacterial cell division and sporulation (1985-1993). During my 28 years at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I have focused primarily on surveillance of circulating strains of the 3 major streptococcal pathogens, S. pneumoniae, S. pyogenes, and S. agalactiae. Up until about 12 years ago I naively believed that PCR-based detection of sequences specific for pneumococcal capsular serotypes in upper respiratory specimens would also be specific for the pneumococcal species itself. I soon realized that in different pneumococcal carriage surveys that “pneumococcal serotype-specific” PCR amplicons were more commonly indicative of non-pneumococcal species such as Streptococcus mitis, Streptococcus oralis, and Streptococcus infantis that expressed these same serotypes. It is possible that the broad species diversity of capsular serotype expression in the human upper respiratory tract has profoundly affected the global landscape of pneumococcal disease and population immunity. It follows also that analyses of more representatives of pneumococcal cps operons within related streptococcal species might answer questions of the species origins of different serotypes and frequencies of interspecies cps transfer events. The elucidation of the capsular serotype overlap between the Mitis group species is at a very early stage. Here I will summarize some of our findings.

I am working towards understanding global spatiotemporal dynamics of Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcal) populations. The migratory pathways and connectivity of pneumococcal populations has implications for estimating the geographic impact of emerging phenotypes and can inform prevention and treatment strategies.

Julia is a research associate in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins and a Epidemiology PhD student at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work on the PSERENADE project aims to summarize and assess the impact of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines on invasive pneumococcal disease incidence and serotype distribution in the setting of PCV10/13 programs. Julia received her MSPH in Global Disease Epidemiology and Control and certificate in Vaccine Science and Policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her BS in Psychobiology from the University of California, Los Angeles.