Biography : Bart is a medical entomologist with a PhD from Wageningen University and an MBA from the UK Open University. He has managed large-scale research and vector control programs when working for ministries, international research institutions, the private sector, and the United Nations across Africa and Asia. He directs K&S Consulting, a small and agile Netherlands-based consultancy firm with 13 years experience in consultancy work. It was founded and registered in 2007 by Bart and Ingeborg van Schayk who share more than 20 years of working and living in low- and middle income countries, notably in East- and Southern Africa with an exclusive focus on development and public health issues in the field of malaria & infectious diseases. K&S Consulting is the founder and manager of MalariaWorld (www.malariaworld.org), the world's scientific network for malaria professionals with more than 10.000 members from 140 countries. Bart has published >140 scientific articles and (co)edited several books on malaria and other vector-borne diseases. He is currently working on a book titled ‘Malaria: The biting truth’.

Biography : Dr. Yanow is a Professor in Global Health within the School of Public Health and cross-appointed in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Alberta. She leads a research program focused on different aspects of malaria, from basic pathogenesis to translational development of diagnostics and vaccines. A major focus of her work is on malaria infection in pregnancy. Together with her partners in Uganda, Colombia, Brazil and Australia, she is developing a novel vaccine approach to protect pregnant women in Africa from the devastating consequences of malaria infection. She is also engaged in a multidisciplinary collaboration to transfer molecular diagnostic tests for malaria to a platform to be used at the point-of-care in limited-resource areas.

Biography : Dr. Nathan W. Schmidt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine where he is a member of the Ryan White Center for Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Global Health. Dr. Schmidt’s laboratory investigates the host immune response to Plasmodium and how gut microbiota impact the severity of this infection.

Biography : Dr. Alexandra Spencer is a Senior Immunologist within the Pre-erythrocytic Malaria group at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford. Her primary area of interest is understanding the immune response induced and required for protection against liver-stage malaria, with a particular focus of identifying new vaccines and vaccination regimens which can be translated to the clinic.

Biography : Dr Martin R. Goodier is an assistant professor at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, specialized in human innate immunity to infection including HIV, HCMV, Ebola and Malaria. His current research focus is on the basic biology of natural killer cells and their role in vaccine induced protection against viral and parasitic infections. Dr. Goodier will present recent work on the requirements for activation of canonical and adaptive natural killer cells by Plasmodium falciparum infected erythrocytes.

Biography : Dr. Gutierrez is currently the Director of Biologics for Leidos’ Explorations in Global Health (ExGloH) division. ExGloH maintains a portfolio of vaccine and bio-therapeutic programs in the public health space including malaria, HIV, and cancer. He is responsible for all products within this portfolio of novel internally funded R&D work. Specifically, He direct the discovery and preclinical testing of novel microbiome-derived immuno-modulatory peptides with the mission to translate the tools of cancer for infectious disease.

Biography : Dr. Kwadwo Asamoah Kusi is a Senior Research Fellow in the Immunology Department of Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR), a constituent of the College of Health Sciences, University of Ghana. He is currently working on identifying HLA-restricted epitopes that elicit potent T cell responses in individuals with a natural history of P. falciparum infection, and the association of these responses with protection from disease/infection. He also has on-going studies on multi-allele vaccine formulation strategies that aim to overcome the strain-dependent effects of polymorphisms in immunogenic antigens such as apical membrane antigen 1 (AMA1) on antigen-specific immune responses. He also has on-going studies whose aim is to identify antibody correlates of protection against malaria using ELISA/Luminex and antibody-dependent functional assays.

Biography : Mary Lopez-Perez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen. For several years, she has been working in immunology and pathogenesis of malaria, including P. vivax controlled human malaria infection studies. Her current research focus is on naturally acquired immunity to malaria in pregnant women, serum factors in malaria pathogenesis, and the malaria-protective effect of hemoglobinopathies. Part of her work is carried out in collaboration with researchers from malaria-endemic countries, Ghana, Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela.

Biography : Rajagopal Murugan is a post-doctoral fellow in B Cell Immunology Divison in German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany. He is working on understanding protective antibody response against Circumsporozoite protein, a major vaccine target, expressed in Plasmodium falciparum sporozoites. Trained in B cell immunology, he addressed how the antibody response evolves in humans over repeated parasite exposure. In his recent work, he studied the epitopes targeted by protective antibodies and how cross-epitope binding antibodies develops in humans. His work sheds light on how to design the next generation immunogen and the immune parameters to look for in deducing protective responses.