Prof. Marion Koopmans is Professor of Public Health Virology of the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus Medical Centre in The Netherlands, the WHO collaborating centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, scientific director for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Netherlands, Centre for One Health NCOH and scientific director of the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Centre in Rotterdam/Delft The Netherlands.

Her research focuses on emerging infections with special emphasis on unravelling pathways of disease emergence and spread at the human animal interface. Creating global networks to fight infectious diseases systematically and on a large scale is a common thread in Koopmans' work. Koopmans coordinates the EU funded consortium VEO, which develops a risk based innovative early warning surveillance in a One Health context, and is deputy coordinator of a recently awarded HERA funded network of centres of excellence for EID research preparedness. In 2021, Koopmans founded the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Centre PDPC, a research centre with a focus on the occurrence and prevention of pandemics and climate-related disasters, combining expertise from technical, bio-medical, environmental and social sciences.

Prof Madhukar Pai, MD, PhD, FCAHS, FRSC is the Inaugural Chair, Department of Global and Public Health at the McGill School of Population and Global Health. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology & Global Health. He was previously Director of the McGill International TB Centre. He was the inaugural Editor-In-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

Dr Tahmeed Ahmed is the first Bangladeshi scientist to serve as Executive Director of icddr,b, where he has dedicated forty years to research and institutional leadership. A physician and public health researcher, his career spans pioneering work in nutrition, gastroenterology, and infectious diseases, with lasting contributions to improving public health in resource-limited settings.

He guided icddr,b’s research teams to undertake a wide range of COVID-19 studies, covering infection, transmission dynamics, treatment, and diagnostics. Among his notable achievements is the work on Microbiota Directed Complementary Food (MDCF) with Professor Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University at St. Louis, recognised in TIME magazine’s Best Inventions 2025 for its social impact on childhood malnutrition. He also developed Sharnali, a locally produced therapeutic food for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Named among TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in Health, Dr Ahmed continues to promote evidence-based health solutions globally. He is a member of the Global Task Force on Cholera Control (GTFCC) and Professor of Public Health Nutrition at the BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health.

Laurent Servais is Professor of Paediatric Neuromuscular Diseases at the University of Oxford in the UK, and invited Professor at the University of Liège in Belgium. He graduated in medicine and pediatrics from the University of Louvain (in Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels in Belgium) then trained as a child neurologist in the Robert Debré Hospital in Paris, France, and as a myologist at the Institute of Myology, Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, Paris.

Professor Servais’ main research interests cover innovative outcome measures and clinical trials design and newborn screening (NBS). He has been involved as Principal Investigator in several clinical trials in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), Angelman Syndrome X-linked myotubular myopathy, and Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), and in leading the NBS program for SMA NBS in Belgium and in the UK. He is the coordinating investigator of two large natural history studies in Angelman in the UK and in Belgium that aims to identify and validates innovative outcome measures and biomarkers.

Prof. Joacim Rocklöv is a globally recognized expert in climate change, infectious diseases, and data science. As Director of the Heidelberg Planetary Health Hub and Chair of the Climate-Sensitive Infectious Diseases Group (CSIDlab), he leads cutting-edge research to advance health surveillance, pandemic preparedness, and data-driven solutions to global health challenges.
He co-directs the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change in Europe and contributes to major international research activities, such as the IPCC reports. His interdisciplinary approach fosters collaboration between fields such as epidemiology, public health, environmental science, ecology, microbiology, and computational sciences.

Elaine O. Nsoesie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. She is an internationally recognized data scientist and a leading voice on the use of data and technology to advance health equity. She is a Data Science Faculty Fellow and was a Founding Faculty of the Boston University Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. She co-edited and contributed to the book, Urban Health in Africa – a collection of essays by thirty eight scholars focused on addressing critical issues related to urbanization in Africa.
She served as a program lead and senior advisor to the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) Program at the National Institutes of Health through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) Mobility Program. She also led the Racial Data Tracker project at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
She has expertise in the application of data science methods (including, machine learning and artificial intelligence) and data from non-traditional public health sources (such as, mobile phones, satellites, and social media) to address major global health challenges. Her work approaches health equity from multiple angles, including increasing representation of communities typically underrepresented in data science through programs like Data Science Africa and AIM-AHEAD; addressing bias in health data and algorithms; and using data and policy to advance racial equity. She has collaborated with local departments of health in the U.S. to improve disease surveillance systems, international organizations like UNICEF and UNDP, and served as a Data & Innovation Fellow in the Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI), The President’s Office, Sierra Leone.

Dr. Mina is the Chief Science Officer of eMed. Prior to eMed he was a professor of Epidemiology and of Immunology & Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was also a professor in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and associate medical director of molecular virology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Mina’s research focused on how vaccines and infections impact how people’s immune systems respond to other infections, and how they impact the epidemiology and spread of infectious diseases, including outbreaks and pandemics. With colleagues at Princeton and the US National Institutes of Health he developed the idea of a Global Immunological Observatory that could serve as a “global weather system for viruses.”

Dr. Mina’s research combines epidemiological and mathematical models, data science, software development, clinical studies, molecular engineering, and the building and development of novel high throughput tools for immunological profiling using phage display, sequencing and molecular engineering.Dr. Mina is one of the leading global experts regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly around vaccines and testing. During the COVID pandemic his research shifted towards how testing can help limit spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Prior to coming to eMed, his research created much of the theory around how both PCR and rapid tests should be used in the context of a pandemic of a fast moving respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2. In addition, he was instrumental in setting up some of the largest PCR testing laboratories in the nation, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and quickly grew to prominence as a leading international authority on rapid antigen testing in the pandemic. Throughput the COVID-19 pandemic he has advised both White House administrations, the US Congress and Senate, many US states, corporations and numerous international governments about their testing and vaccine programs.Dr. Mina went to Dartmouth College for his undergraduate studies where he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and public health. He earned both his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Emory University. His Ph.D. was in vaccine immunology and infectious diseases modeling, which he performed across numerous institutions including Emory Vaccine Center and Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa. He performed his postdoctoral research in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases at Princeton University and in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His medical residency training was in clinical pathology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA at Harvard Medical School.Dr. Mina is the recipient of numerous national and institutional awards for his research, including a recipient of the prestigious NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. He was identified by the Economist Magazine as one of 8 Global Progress makers for his global health research and not-for-profit work helping bring clean water to rural areas of the world. He is on the board of directors or the scientific or medical advisory boards of numerous public and private companies.

Assoc/Prof Kelly Wyres is a computational microbiologist who’s research focusses on genomic and metabolic diversity of bacterial pathogens. Most notably, these include the World Health Organization’s #1 ranked priority antimicrobial resistant organism- Klebsiella pneumoniae. Kelly is a Research Group Leader and Co-Lead for the Infectious Diseases Genomics program at the Department of Infectious Diseases, Monash University. She also co-leads the KlebNET Genomic Surveillance Platform, a multi-national consortium working to develop and harmonise resources that support global surveillance for Klebsiella species and Escherichia coli. Kelly has received prestigious research funding awards, including a National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia Investigator Grant, Australian Research Council Discovery Project awards and Gates Foundation Investments. Her work has gained international recognition, as evidenced by a recent Australian Society for Microbiology Frank Fenner Award and nomination as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher.