Pedro Alonso, SPAIN
Malaria Eradication

Pedro L. Alonso graduated in Medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, followed by post graduate training at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona. Currently he is the Director of the Barcelona Center for International Health Research at the Hospital Clinic (CRESIB), and Professor at the University of Barcelona, and the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Fundaçao Manhiça, Mozambique.

Prof. Alonos’s professional career has been focused on the most important global health problems, especially those affecting developing countries. The cornerstone of his research activity has been the development and testing of new control tools against the main infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, acute respiratory infections and other communicable diseases, especially those tools which help to reduce the morbidity and mortality in less developed countries. Having worked in West, East and Southern Africa, most of his professional life has been devoted to Public Health in Africa, with a major emphasis on research and capacity building.

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Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, FRANCE
The Discovery of HIV

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, PhD, is the acting Director of the "Regulation of Retroviral Infections" Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She has been involved in retrovirology research since the early 1970's and is recognized for her contributions to HIV/AIDS research, in particular as the first author of the publication that reported in 1983 the discovery of a retrovirus, later named HIV, in a patient at risk for AIDS. Dr. Barré-Sinoussi shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Dr. Luc Montagnier for their discovery of HIV. In 1988, she became responsible for her own laboratory at the Institut Pasteur and initiated research programs on viral and host determinants of HIV / AIDS pathogenesis.

Between 1988 and 1998, she has been involved in collaborative programs on HIV vaccine research using primate models. Today, the research programs of her team are focused on regulations of HIV / SIV infection (intracellular restrictions of HIV-1infection and innate immunity, in particular regulations of T cell activation resulting from the NK-dendritic cell interplay).

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is author and co-author of more than 220 original publications andmore than 120 articles in book reviews. She has been invited to speak at more than 250 International meetings and/or conferences. She has been (and is still) a member of a number of scientific committees in France and elsewhere, including scientific committees of several International AIDS Conferences. She has received 10 national or international awards for her contributions to HIV/AIDS research.

Along with her research activities, since the early 80’s Françoise Barré-Sinoussi has been strongly involved in promoting integration between HIV/AIDS research and actions in resource limited countries, in particular through the Institut Pasteur International Network and the coordination of the ANRS research programs in Cambodia and Vietnam, in accordance with her strong commitment to building capacity, training and technology transfers on site in Africa and Asia.

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Martin CETRON, USA (SLAMVI / ISTM Plenary Speaker)
The Changing Patterns of Global Migration and the Impact on Infectious Diseases

Dr. Martin Cetron is the Director for the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The DGMQ mission is to prevent introduction of infectious diseases in the U.S. and to prevent morbidity among immigrants, refugees, migrant workers, and international travelers.

Dr. Cetron received his M.D. from Tufts University and trained in Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington before joining the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service in 1992.

His primary research interests are international health and global migration with a focus on emerging infections, tropical diseases, and vaccine-preventable diseases in mobile populations. He has been in this current leadership role at CDC during responses to the key emerging infectious disease outbreaks of the 21st century including the anthrax bio-terrorism incident, the smallpox threat, the global SARS epidemic, and the U.S. Monkeypox outbreak. He is part of the CDC Pandemic Influenza planning and preparedness team and the WHO Influenza Pandemic Task Force.

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Myron S. COHEN, USA
Transmission and Prevention of Transmission of HIV:
Clues from the Early 21st Century

Myron S. Cohen is the J. Herbert Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology and Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Associate Vice Chancellor for Medical Affairs-Global Health. Dr. Cohen received his BS degree (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, an MD degree from Rush Medical College, Chicago Illinois and he completed an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Yale University.

Dr. Cohen serves as the Director of the UNC Division of Infectious Disease and the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Disease, and he is Associate Director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research. Dr. Cohen serves on the Senior Leadership Group of the NIH Center for HIV Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), and serves as part of the leadership group of the NIH HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN). Dr. Cohen serves as an Associate Editor of the journal, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and the comprehensive textbook, Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

Dr. Cohen received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rush Medical College in 2000. He received the Thomas Parran Award (2005) for lifetime achievement in STD research from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association. In 2008 Dr. Cohen received the O. Max Gardner Award for "contributions to mankind," the greatest honor in the University of North Carolina 16 campus system. Doctor Cohen has been repeatedly recognized as one of America's "Top Doctors" and "Best Doctors".

Dr. Cohen's research work focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of HIV, with emphasis on the role played by STD co-infections. He has conducted landmark studies related to the biology of HIV transmission and use of antiretroviral agents for prevention. In 2005, Dr. Cohen received an NIH MERIT Award for ongoing support of this work. Dr. Cohen is the author of more than 400 publications. Much of Dr. Cohen's research has been conducted in internationally, especially in the African country of Malawi and in the People's Republic of China.

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Keith Klugman, USA
Pneumococcal infections in Children and their Impact on Adults

Keith Klugman is the William H. Foege Chair of Global Health in the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases of the School of Medicine at Emory University and a Visiting Researcher in the Respiratory Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He is also the co-Director of the Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand, the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Professor Klugman is the Treasurer of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, and Chair of the International Board of the American Society for Microbiology. He has chaired expert committees for the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Wellcome Trust in London, and currently serves as an editor or member of the editorial board of 8 international journals on medicine, infectious diseases and antimicrobials.

Professor Klugman's research interests are in antibiotics, antimicrobial resistance and vaccines for bacterial pathogens - particularly the pneumococcus. He has published more than 375 papers on these subjects to date.

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Roberto Kolter, USA
Microbial Ecology of Infectious Diseases

Roberto Kolter has been a highly influential microbiologist for a period that spans four decades. Early in his career he made enduring advances in our understanding of the regulation of DNA replication as well as practical advances in the development of the most widely used "suicide delivery vectors" of today.

Since establishing his own laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 1983, Dr. Kolter has made contributions in diverse areas of microbiology. Initially, he worked on peptide antibiotic synthesis and secretion, providing some of the earliest knowledge on "ABC exporters". This was followed by an exploration of the starvation physiology of E. coli at a time when virtually no one else thought of investigating stationary phase cultures. In part as a result of those efforts, the control of gene expression in non-growing cells became an area of intense investigation by others that continues to this day. Dr. Kolter's work on the population dynamics of stationary phase cultures, the so-called
"GASP" (growth advantage in stationary phase) phenomenon, established such cultures as excellent model systems for experimental evolution studies. Since the mid-1990's he has applied genetic approaches to study bacterial biofilms; Dr. Kolter's laboratory developed the most widely used high-throughput assay for detection of biofilm development. His studies with Bacillus subtilis as a model system to understand biofilms continue to be at the leading edge of the field. Most recently, Dr. Kolter is investigating the chemistry of interspecies communication in bacteria. In this area he discovered that a bacterium's quorum sensing signal can also act as a fungal morphogen. In addition, he has developed screens that have led to the discovery of novel secondary metabolites produced by one species that profoundly affect the developmental patterns of other species.

Since 2002, Dr. Kolter has played a key role in the organizing and launching of the Microbial Sciences Initiative at Harvard (MSI) and is currently its co-director. The MSI (www.msi.harvard.edu) is an innovative University-wide interdisciplinary science program aimed at developing new approaches to explore the microbial world. MSI is playing a leadership role in microbial sciences worldwide by bringing together scientists from diverse backgrounds to think about and discuss key issues in microbiology.

Presently, Dr. Kolter is the President-Elect of the American Society for Microbiology and will become its President in July 2009.

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