Coffee with the Expert

Professor Robert Steffen is internationally recognized as the "father of travel medicine." He not only coined the term but also initiated the world’s first...

Jerome H. Kim, M.D., serves as the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) and is an international expert in vaccine development and evaluation. Before joining IVI, Dr. Kim held several prominent positions, including Principal Deputy of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program and Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Virology and Pathogenesis at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He was also the U.S. Army Program Manager for HIV vaccines and led the Army’s RV144 Phase III HIV vaccine trial, which demonstrated efficacy in preventing HIV-1.

Prof. Steven Black is a pediatric infectious disease specialist with degrees in Biology and Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MD from the University of California, San Diego. He completed a fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco.

Pediatrician and infectious disease specialist Dr. Xavier Saez Llorens serves as the Chief of Infectious Diseases and the Director of Clinical Research at the Dr. José Renán Esquivel Children’s Hospital in Panama. He has been a member of the National Committee of Bioethics in Research (NCBR) for the past 10 years and is recognized as a Distinguished Researcher in the National Research System (SNI, Senacyt) and at the Vaccine Research Center, Cevaxin.

Doctor Ron Dagan is a Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Infectious Diseases at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. He is also a founding member of the World Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases (WSPID) and a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).

The unequivocal global authority in polio, Dr. Ananda Sankar Bandyopadhyay has led disease control initiatives in diverse settings across the globe. He began his career as a surveillance medical officer with the World Health Organization’s National Polio Surveillance Project in India, where he played a key role in the country’s polio elimination and measles surveillance efforts. In a career spanning more than 15 years, he also served as a medical epidemiologist at the Rhode Island Department of Health in the United States, coordinating public health surveillance and response activities.

One of the current top experts in the field of vaccinology, Prof. Ralf Clemens did not choose vaccinology as his lifelong career plan from the beginning. Rather, vaccinology chose him.  Trained as a physician in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, he specialized in intensive and emergency care. He spent time in a refugee camp in Thailand with 100,000 refugees from Indochina, where he got interested in infectious and tropical diseases and worked with the Mahidol University, in Bangkok, where he was soon appointed visiting professor. His clinical and research interest was on the treatment of malaria and snake bites.

In the world of vaccinology, Prof. Stanley Alan Plotkin needs no introduction. In the 1960s, Prof. Plotkin played a pivotal role in the development of the vaccine against the rubella virus while working at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, where he was a prominent member of its research faculty from 1960 to 1991. Today, in addition to his emeritus appointment at Wistar, he holds the position of emeritus professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof. Rino Rappuoli is known globally for his work on vaccines discovery and immunology. He co-founded the field of cellular microbiology, a discipline combining cell biology and microbiology, and pioneered the genomic approach to vaccine development known as reverse vaccinology, an improvement of vaccinology that employs bioinformatics and reverse pharmacology practices.

Summer hit the United States Congress and it’s inferno hot in public health. Coincidentally, we had the privilege to have a candid conversation with Prof. Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, who shared his perspectives on many important health issues.