Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Jeanne Marrazzo (Bethesda, United States)

Keynote Scientific Interview - The syndemic of HIV and STIs

Dr. Marrazzo is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she oversees a $6.3 billion budget that supports research to advance understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases.  She was previously the C. Glenn Cobbs Endowed Chair and Director of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine. She is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), and was Treasurer of the IDSA from 2021-2023, having served on the board since 2018.

Dr. Marrazzo researches the vaginal microbiome, sexually transmitted infections, and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. She has had leadership roles in the NIH HIV Prevention Trials Network and the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium. She has been a leading voice in communicating science during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Photo credit: NIH/Chia-Chi Charlie Chang

Mihai Netea (Nijmegen, Netherlands)

Keynote Lecture - The role of trained Innate immunity in infections

Mihai Netea studied medicine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He completed his PhD at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, on studies investigating the cytokine network in sepsis. After working as a post-doc at the University of Colorado, he returned to Nijmegen where he finished his clinical training as an infectious diseases specialist, and where he currently heads the division of Experimental Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center. He is mainly interested in understanding the memory traits of innate immunity (trained immunity), the factors influencing variability of human immune responses, and the immune dysregulation during bacterial and fungal infections. He is the recipient of the Spinoza Prize 2016 and an ERC Advanced grant in 2019, and since 2016 he is a member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW).

Kathryn Holt (London, United Kingdom)

Keynote lecture - Genomic surveillance for AMR: supporting public health interventions against typhoid and Klebsiella pneumoniae

Kat is a computational biologist specialising in infectious disease genomics. She is Professor of Microbial Systems Genomics, and co-Director of the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Centre, at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Kat holds a BA/BSc, Master of Epidemiology, and PhD in Molecular Biology. Kat and her team are particularly interested in the evolution and spread of AMR, and vaccine design and deployment against AMR pathogens. Two organisms of particular focus are Salmonella Typhi (the agent of typhoid fever), and Klebsiella pneumoniae (a leading cause of neonatal sepsis and healthcare-associated infections globally). To support genomics-informed research and surveillance for these pathogens, Kat’s team have developed organism-specific genomic typing tools (Kleborate and Kaptive for Klebsiella, GenoTyphi for Typhi), and cofounded international collaborative consortia (KlebNET, and the Global Typhoid Genomics Consortium).

Nicola Segata (Trento, Italy)

Keynote lecture - Harnessing the human microbiome for personalised health

Nicola Segata, Ph.D., is Professor and Principal Investigator at the CIBIO Department of the University of Trento (Italy) and Principal Investigator at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan (Italy). He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Trento in 2009 and he then moved to Harvard School of Public Health for his post-doctoral training where he started studying the human microbiome with computational metagenomics approaches in the Laboratory of Prof. Curtis Huttenhower. He came back to University of Trento (Department CIBIO) where he started his laboratory in 2013 which employs experimental meta’omic tools and novel computational approaches to study the diversity of the human microbiome across conditions and populations and its role in human diseases. His work is supported by the European Research Council and by several other European agencies. The projects in his laboratory bring together computer scientists, microbiologists, statisticians, and clinicians and focus on profiling microbiomes with strain-level resolution and on meta-analysing very large sets of metagenomes with novel computational tools.

Sodiomon B. Sirima (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso)

Keynote lecture - Innovations in diagnosis, treatment and prevention of malaria

Sodiomon Bienvenu Sirima, is an expert on clinical trials and is one of the African pioneer in ICH-GCP implemented Malaria vaccine trials. He is holding a Doctorate in Medicine and Surgery (MD), a Bachelor Socio-anthropology (BA) and a PhD in epidemiology. Since 2016 Dr Sirima is the scientific Director of the Groupe de Recherche Action en Santé, Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso, an independent, local, non-governmental research center founded in 2008 an actively partnering with the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Science and Technology of Burkina Faso. During these last 25 years Sodiomon B. Sirima has led more than thirty epidemiological and community-based studies and more than fifteen ICH-GCP compliant clinical trials. These studies have generated over 165 scientific publications and led to a significant policy changes in malaria control strategies. At Burkina Faso level, he is one of the key opinion leaders in the malaria field. Current research projects include Typhoid, Schistosomiasis, shigella and malaria vaccines and, drug clinical trials.

Mervyn Singer (London, United Kingdom)

Keynote lecture - Redefining sepsis: past and future

Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at University College London, UK. Published mainly on sepsis and multi-organ failure, infection, shock, monitoring. Developed various monitoring and support devices and has two ‘home-made’ drugs and two devices in current development. Co-chaired Sepsis-3 Definitions International Task Force and past-Chair, International Sepsis Forum. Sepsis Topic Advisor to NICE. Written various textbooks e.g. Oxford Handbook of Critical Care. Has run Medical Emergencies Courses for >25 years.  Emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator. Loves being iconoclastic and gently provocative

Shiranee Sriskandan (London, United Kingdom)

Keynote lecture - Emergence of group A streptococcal diseases: from Strep throat to invasive infections

Shiranee Sriskandan is Professor of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London and a Clinical Infectious Diseases consultant at Hammersmith and St Mary’s Hospitals.  She leads the Gram-Positive Pathogenesis research group within the Department of Infectious Disease, and is clinical director of Imperial’s new Centre for Bacteriology Resistance Biology. Her group works on the mechanisms that allow Streptococcus pyogenes to cause extreme clinical phenotypes in individuals and populations. The group’s work ranges from pathogen virulence to host immune response and vaccines, and relies heavily on collaboration with colleagues in the UK and abroad.

Margreet Vos (Rotterdam, Netherlands)

Keynote lecture - A journey from microbiology to infection prevention and control in the era of AMR

Prof Dr Margreet C. Vos is a Clinical Microbiologists and since 2012, she is a professor of Healthcare related Infections at the ErasmusMC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her main interests are infection prevention, in particular MSSA/MRSA, the Search and Destroy strategy, hand hygiene, outbreaks, transmission, innate environment, hospital environment and hospital design and endoscope related contamination and infections. She initiated and chaired for many years a national working group (HIP) as part of the Dutch Society of Medical Microbiology (NVMM) and initiated, developed and chaired the committee on infection control national guideline on the organization and quality of hospital infection prevention and developed audits for quality of hospital infection prevention. She was the project-leader of an international (UK FR NL) JPI MACOTRA consortium on (un)success of MRSA clones. She is the scientific officer of ESGNI and chair of the MRSA-ISAC working group.