Coffee with the Expert

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.