Dr. Noni MacDonald is a Professor of Paediatrics (Infectious Diseases) at Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia and a former Dean of Medicine there. She was first woman in Canada to be a Dean of Medicine. Her two current major areas of interest involve global health. The first is Vaccines including vaccine safety, hesitancy, demand, pain mitigation, education and policy especially through her work with the World Health Organization (WHO). The second area of interest is MicroResearch (www.microresearch-international.ca),a program founded in 2008 that is building community focused research capacity in developing countries and in Canada to help find local solutions for community health problems that fit the context, culture and resources.MicroResearch is about decolonizing and democratizing community focused research .

I am a Clinical Epidemiologist based at the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia at LSHTM. My clinical work in paediatrics and research focusses on acute respiratory infections, pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis and measurement of the impact of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) on these conditions. I now lead a large project evaluating an alternative schedule for PCV, which includes disease, pneumococcal carriage, and immunogenicity endpoints. The project also incorporates a sub-study to detect biomarkers to differentiate bacterial from other causes of pneumonia. I supervise three PhD students and am a tutor on a distance learning module in LSHTM MSc programme.

I am Fidel Mackenzie Visbal, second year Pediatric Resident, I work at the Hospital Nacional de Niños "Carlos Saenz Herrera" in San José, Costa Rica.

Over the last 20 years I have been based full-time at the East Africa, where I lead a research group that have highlighted the unique importance of emergency-care research, previously poorly appreciated as an area for specific funder or policy investment, as a highly targeted and cost-effective means of tackling childhood mortality in resource-limited sub-Saharan Africa. My most notable work, as the principal investigator, was the landmark fluid resuscitation trial (FEAST trial). FEAST demonstrated that fluid boluses resulted in increased mortality in African children with severe febrile illness and excess mortality was largely a result of cardio-vascular collapse. My team recently completed the TRACT trial which tested two transfusion strategies in nearly 4000 African children that aimed to reduce deaths and illness those hospitalised with severe anaemia. Both trial papers were published in 2019 and are likely to lead to significant refinements to WHO transfusion guidelines. My team has also recently published a large controlled trial of oxygen (COAST) in Intensive Care Medicine 2021.

*PROFESSOR OF PEDIATRICS AND NEONATOLOGY, FACULTY OF MEDICINE, CAIRO UNIVERSITY, CAIRO - EGYPT (2012 till now). *I GRADUATED FROM FACULTY OF MEDICINE, CAIRO UNIVERSITY- DECEMBER'1993 *I HELD VARIOUS POSITIONS ON MY WAY TO BECOMING PROFESSOR: - HOUSEOFFICER (MARCH' 1994-MARCH' 1995) - RESIDENT IN PEDIATRICS AND NEONATOLOGY, ABOU ELRISH HOSPITAL (1995-1998) - ASSISTANT LECTURER OF PEDIATRICS AND NEONATOLOGY (1998-2001) - LECTURER OF PEDIATRICS AND NEONATOLOGY ((2001-2007) - ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PEDIATRICS AND NEONATOLOGY (2007-2012) *28 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE IN THE FIELD OF PEDIATRICS AND NEONATOLOGY. *SOME OF MY PUBBLISHED RESEARCHES: • H1N1 Influenza A in Children: A Descriptive Clinical Study.(International publication) - 2012 • Vitamin D deficiency in children living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (International publication) - 2012 • Helicobacter Pylori and Recurrent Abdominal Pain in Children: Is there any relation? (International publication) - 2012 • Epidemiology and antimicrobial resistance of community-acquired pneumonia in children (International publication) - 2017 *MEMBERSHIP: • Egyptian Society of Pediatrics • Saudi Society of Pediatrics • International Society of Pediatric Infectious Diseases • African Society of Pediatric Infectious Diseases (Executive member) *REVIEWER FOR THE FOLLOWING JOURNALS: • Annals of Saudi Medicine • Indian journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism • Annals of Medical and Health Sciences Research

Professor Ben Marais works in Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the Westmead Children’s Hospital. He is co-Director of the Sydney Institute for Infectious Diseases (Sydney ID) at the University of Sydney (www.sydney.edu.au/infectious-diseases-institute) and co-leads the WHO Collaborating Centre in Tuberculosis and the NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Tuberculosis (www.tbcre.org.au). His research focuses primarily on how children are affected by the global tuberculosis epidemic and the spread of drug resistant TB. He is deputy-Chair of the WHO/STOP-TB Partnership Child and Adolescent TB working group.

ederico Martinón-Torres is pediatrician and clinical researcher, and obtained his medical degree from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 1995, getting his PhD in 2005. Coordinator and head of Pediatrics and Director of Translational Pediatrics and Infectious Diseases at the Hospital Clínico Universitario and Associate Professor in Pediatrics at the University of Santiago, he’s also member of the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery of Galicia. He runs the Genetics, Vaccines, Infections and Pediatrics Research Group on vaccines and infectious diseases at the Healthcare Research Institute of Santiago. He has received the Best-in-Class award for infectious diseases unit (2018, 2019 and 2020) and Zendal international research award (2020). Member of the WHO European Technical Advisory Group of Experts on immunization, he coordinates the WHO Collaborating Centre in Spain for vaccine safety. He authored over 300 articles, seven books and 160 book chapters and is coordinator or lead investigator in 40 ongoing trials and research projects and member of over 20 international societies. He currently coordinates the Spanish Network of Pediatric Clinical Trials and co-coordinates the Translational Research Network in Infectious Diseases.

Dr Meiring is the Clinical Coordinator for the GERMS-SA surveillance network. GERMS-SA coordinates and runs national and sentinel, laboratory-based and clinical surveillance programmes of ‘diseases-of-public-health-importance’ for the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. From the many surveillance programmes, special studies arise which are planned and coordinated by the GERMS-SA staff. Dr Meiring has been the principal investigator for three special studies, namely i. meningococcal carriage study in university students, ii. Baby GERMS: neonatal bloodstream infections and meningitis study in secondary level institutions, and iii. SARS-CoV-2 clinical characterisation and evaluation of shedding duration amongst patients hospitalised with COVID-19; and a co-investigator on many other surveillance studies.