Professor Janet Englund, MD

Professor, Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Englund’s research interests include the study of the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of viral respiratory diseases in children, pregnant women, and immunocompromised hosts. She studies new viral vaccines and novel agents for the treatment of respiratory viruses including influenza, adenovirus, parainfluenza viruses, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Dr. Englund has a longstanding interest in maternal immunization and is a coinvestigator of maternal immunization studies with influenza virus vaccines in Nepal sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with colleagues at Johns Hopkins and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and RSV vaccines in Seattle. As a Clinical Associate at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, she is actively involved in transplant-related protocols with Drs. Michael Boeckh and Alpana Waghmare in studies of the prevention, treatment and outcome of respiratory viral diseases in transplant recipients of all ages.

Dr. Englund’s research group at Seattle Children’s Hospital is part of the New Vaccine Surveillance Network of the Centers for Disease Control (2010 through 2021), participating in respiratory and gastrointestinal viral surveillance in collaboration with Dr. Eileen Klein, Pediatric Emergency Department. This group assesses vaccine effectiveness of rotavirus and influenza virus vaccines in population-based studies of healthy and sick children and is involved in epidemiological studies of other viruses including respiratory syncytial virus, rhinovirus, EVD-68, and norovirus. Dr. Englund and her team are actively involved in studies of new respiratory vaccines and antivirals including vaccines for the prevention of RSV in infants, children, and pregnant women, and antivirals in healthy and immunocompromised children. Her group is also studying new methods to diagnose and characterize viral respiratory diseases.

Dr. Englund is active in national and international organizations including AAP, the CDC-sponsored Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRPBAC), and the maternal immunization safety group at World Health Organization. She is past president of PIDS, past member of the WHO Influenza working group, and a current member of the Board of Directors and Influenza Working Group of the Infectious Disease Society of America. She received the Pediatric Infectious Disease Society’s Distinguished Physician Award in 2015.

 

Dr. Patrick Kennedy

Reader in Hepatology, Consultant Hepatologist, Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, QMUL

Dr Kennedy is a Reader in Hepatology & Honorary Consultant Hepatologist at Barts and The London School of Medicine & Dentistry, QMUL. He trained at University College Dublin and completed his post-graduate medical training in Gastroenterology & Hepatology in London. He undertook doctoral research with Professor Antonio Bertoletti at The Institute of Hepatology, UCL, investigating T cell responses in chronic hepatitis B and C. He was subsequently appointed as a HEFCE Clinical Senior Lecturer at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

His primary research focus is in Hepatitis B virus (HBV) within a translational platform. He has a special interest in liver disease in young people, specifically HBV; he set up and runs the dedicated young adult liver service at The Royal London Hospital and leads the HBV service at Bart’s Health, the largest NHS Trust in the UK. He has produced novel work redefining disease categorisation in HBV, the foundation for the re-evaluation of treatment candidacy in Chronic Hepatitis B (CHB). Developing these themes, an important focus of his current work is individualized treatment strategies for CHB and changing current management paradigms.

He is an expert advisor for NICE and a member of the viral hepatitis clinical guideline committee for CHB. He provides expert opinion for the United Kingdom Advisory Panel on blood-borne viruses and is the Hepatology lead for the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Section at the Royal Society of Medicine. He is also the chief/principal investigator for a number of investigator-led and commercial phase 1, 2 and 3, clinical trials for novel HBV therapies. This clinical trial portfolio dovetails Dr Kennedy’s longstanding research interest and publication record in the HBV field.

 

Martin McNally

MB BCh MD FRCSEd FRCS(Orth)

Martin McNally is the Lead Surgeon in the Oxford Bone Infection Unit at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford University Hospitals, UK and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Oxford University. He spends almost all of his time in infection management, treating around 150 new cases of osteomyelitis per year. He was trained in Northern Ireland, USA and Oxford. He has a particular interest in bone reconstruction in osteomyelitis, infected fractures and non-unions. He runs research projects in outcome of treatments for bone infection and local antibiotic delivery systems. He is Vice-President of the European Bone and Joint Infection Society and Honorary Secretary of the Girdlestone Orthopaedic Society. He has published about 100 papers, articles and book chapters and contributes regularly to instructional courses and international meetings on bone infection and limb reconstruction.

 

Dr. Clare Rock

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Md.

Dr. Clare Rock is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and a faculty member of the Armstrong Institute of Patient Safety at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

She graduated from UCD School of Medicine in 2004 with honors. Dr. Rock completed internal medicine and infectious diseases higher specialist training (2004-2011). In 2008 she was awarded University College Cork and South Tipperary General Hospital Outstanding Teaching Award, Ireland

Following her higher specialist training in Ireland Dr. Rock completed an ACGME accredited clinical infectious diseases fellowship program at the University of Maryland. She then pursued advanced fellowship in hospital epidemiology, and a masters of science in epidemiology clinical research track, during which she was awarded the MS scholar award and the society for healthcare epidemiology of America (SHEA) epidemiology competition prize for her thesis work on hospital onset bacteremia.

Dr. Rock has a leadership role in the SHEA research network and is an active committee member of the SHEA research committee. She is an active researcher including funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her main area of interest is the role of the environment in transmission of pathogens in the healthcare setting.

In 2015 she started in her current position at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She also is an associate hospital epidemiologist and also attends on the infectious disease consult service in addition to consulting for Johns Hopkins International.

 

Dr Alison Rodger

Reader in Infectious Diseases, University College London; Consultant in Infectious Diseases & HIV and Director of Public Health, Royal Free London

Dr Alison Rodger is a Reader in Infectious Diseases in the UCL Institute for Global Health, University College London and Consultant in Infectious Diseases and Director of Public Health at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. Alison’s research interests are in HIV transmission and testing, economic evaluation of health care interventions and the impact of the colonising microbiome in early life on subsequent health. She was the lead author on the PARTNER HIV transmission study, and is PI on the current PANTHEON NIHR programme grant looking at cost-effectiveness of HIV prevention and testing strategies, including a large RCT on HIV self-testing, among MSM in the UK. She is also developing a programme of research activities centred on meeting the challenge of rising morbidity and mortality from non-communicable diseases in east and southern Africa.

 

Professor. Andrej Trampuz

Andrej Trampuz is Professor for Infectious Diseases, Clinical Consultant and Head of the Infectious Diseases research laboratory at the Charité – University Medicine Berlin, Germany. He received his MD degree from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1994, internal medicine board in 1997 and infectious diseases board in 2001. He performed his postdoctoral research fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, USA (2001-2004), where he developed the sonication procedure for improved diagnosis of infection in removed implants. Thereafter, he established his research group at the University Hospital Basel, Switzerland, relocated to the University Hospital Lausanne, Switzerland in 2009 and was appointed Head of the interdisciplinary septic surgery unit in 2013 at the Charité – University Medicine Berlin in Germany.

He is one of the founders of the European Implant Cohort Study (EICS), which will include infected joint prostheses from over 100 institutions across Europe and other continents. In addition, he is principle investigator of several clinical trials involving implant-associated infections. The laboratory research involves the development and validation of novel methods for diagnosis and treatment of implant-associated infections, including animal models, emergence of antimicrobial resistance and development of new diagnostic methods.

Together with Dr. Olivier Borens, Head of septic surgery unit at the University Hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland, he organizes workshops on prosthetic joint infection in Berlin, supported by the PRO-IMPLANT foundation (www.pro-implant-foundation.org). In addition, the University hospital Charité offers clinical observership for osteoarticular infections as the Collaborative Centre of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases(ESCMID, www.escmid.org).

His current research group consists of postdoctoral scientists, lab technicians, PhD and master students. From 2011 to 2013, 25 internal medicine assistants and 13 infectious diseases fellows rotated under his supervision for 3-6 months and performed consultations for orthopedic & traumatology, plastic & reconstructive, thoracic & cardiovascular, visceral, and neurosurgical units.

He has authored 96 peer-reviewed publications and 6 book chapters related to biofilms, implant infections, microcalorimetry, sonication and rapid microbiological diagnosis.