Katie Ewer is an Associate Professor and Senior Immunologist at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford. She leads a program of exploratory immunology studying vaccine-induced immunity to malaria and emerging pathogens, including Ebola, COVID-19 and MERS. In 2013, she reported the first CD8+ T cell-mediated correlate of protection induced by vaccination. Assessing immunity induced by malaria vaccines has led to vaccine trials in several developing countries including The Gambia, Senegal, Kenya and Burkina Faso and her team collaborate with local scientists to assess immunogenicity in age de-escalation and efficacy studies. She leads the immunology for clinical trials of the R21 vaccine, performing studies on samples from the trials in the UK, Burkina Faso and Kenya and defining immunological correlates of protection.

Fidel P. Zavala is a professor in the department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He obtained his MD at the University of Chile in 1976. He was a post-doctoral fellow in Immunology at New York University School of Medicine from 1980 to 1983. In 1985 he joined the faculty as Assistant Professor at New York University School of Medicine and in 1999 he became Professor. His research activities are focused on studying the molecular characteristics of the immune responses against malaria and vaccine immunology.

Evelina Angov is currently the Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Parasitology in Biologics Research & Development (formerly the Malaria Biologics Branch) at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR). Dr. Angov, received M.SCD. and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry from the Biochemistry Division in the Chemistry Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. While at WRAIR, in collaboration with Jeffrey A. Lyon, and Randall Kincaid (Veritas, Inc.), she developed an algorithm for optimizing codon usage in heterologous expression systems; termed ‘codon harmonization’, a paradigm shifting approach which was widely applied to improve on soluble protein expression. Recently her laboratory has focused on evaluating the mRNA platform for malaria pre-erythrocytic targets in preclinical studies.

Mary M. Stevenson is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Department of Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and Biological Sciences at McGill University in Montreal, QC. Dr. Stevenson completed her PhD (Microbiology) in the Department of Biology at The Catholic University of America, Washington DC and carried out her thesis research at the National Cancer Institute at NIH on the immune biology of macrophages in cancer. She was a post-doctoral fellow in immunology at the Montreal General Hospital Research Institute and joined the McGill Faculty in 1982. Her research focuses on host-parasite interactions in immunity to Plasmodium and gastrointestinal nematode infections.

Robin Stephens was trained in basic and malaria immunology in the US and UK. Dr Stephens is a Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas, soon to be at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. The Stephens lab studies the Immunology and Pathology of Malaria, which led to an interest in Neuro inflammation to better understand cerebral malaria.

Gregoire Lauvau is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY, USA). The Lauvau lab has a broad interest in understanding immunological mechanisms associated with protection against microbial pathogens, including malaria. Specific area of investigations relate to defining i) immune cellular correlates of protection and immune drivers of malaria severity (i.e., type I interferon) in promoting distinct clinical outcomes in patients infected with Plasmodium falciparum and using mouse models of malaria. The most recent work is studying a cohort of Pf-infected patients in Mfera, Malawi to define new correlates of protection, using the power of high dimensional flow cytometry and single cell transcriptomic approaches.

Dr. Pancera is a Principal Staff Scientist in the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Division (VIDD) at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Her main research interest is to use structural biology as a tool to understand host humoral immune response and design vaccines against HIV-1, malaria, and other pathogens. She obtained her PhD from the University of Paris VII and the Graduate Partnership Program at The Vaccine Research Center (VRC), NIH with Dr. Richard Wyatt. She pursued her scientific career by doing a postdoc with Dr. Peter Kwong, also at the VRC, NIH. She then moved to Seattle and joined the Fred Hutch where she is currently. She is author of over 70 publications. Most of her work focuses on understanding the structure, function and immunogenicity of the HIV-1 Env and on applying the atomic level tools of structural biology to the development of an effective HIV-1 vaccine. In the last five years, she applied this paradigm to various other pathogens, including malaria.

Dr. Kazutoyo Miura has served as Scientific Director of the Growth Inhibition Assay and Standard Membrane Feeding Assay reference center (GIA/SMFA reference center) at the Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research/NIAID/NIH since 2010. The GIA/SMFA reference center has been supporting blood-stage and transmission-blocking vaccine development against P.falciparum malaria by evaluating biological activity of >2,000 samples every year, from novel antigen discovery in animals to human phase 1/2 clinical trials. His expertise is malaria vaccine development, assay standardization & validation, immune responses, and statistical analysis

Dr. Bunnik obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 2010, where she studied neutralizing antibody responses in HIV-infected individuals. For her postdoctoral work, she moved to the University of California in Riverside to study epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation in Plasmodium falciparum. In 2016, she joined the Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Molecular Genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio as an Assistant Professor to build an independent research program that aims to unravel the nature and acquisition of protective B cell responses in malaria-experienced individuals using a combination of flow cytometry, cell-based assays, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) applications. In parallel, her lab also studies parasite gene regulation, with a focus on the stages surrounding cell-to-cell transmission in the blood stage.

Dr. Michael Haley completed his PhD at the University of Manchester, where he is currently a research associate in the lab of Dr. Kevin Couper. Dr. Haley’s research has focused on the role of neuro-inflammation in preclinical models of cerebral malaria and cerebral ischaemia. His latest work in a mouse model of cerebral malaria may provide insights into how cerebral oedema could be more rapidly resolved in cerebral malaria patients.

Dr Nielsen is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof Simon Draper’s Blood-Stage Malaria Group in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. Her research centres on interrogating the impact of vaccine platform and dosing regimen on the cellular drivers of humoral immunity using a combination of flow cytometry, systems serology, and single cell RNA sequencing. Carolyn also runs the upstream single B cell sorting for a variety of mAb production projects and is involved in the Draper group’s controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model and transfer of this model to colleagues at the Ifakara Health Institute (Tanzania). Prior to moving to Oxford, Carolyn completed her PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine under the supervision of Prof Eleanor Riley. Her PhD work, supported by an MRC Vaccine Research studentship, focused on the impact of human cytomegalovirus infection on natural killer cell responses to vaccines.

Alvaro Baeza Garcia has a broad background in molecular and cellular immunology applied infectious diseases and Immuno-oncology, with a primary interest in characterizing small molecule agonists and antagonist and their translational potential. After his Ph.D. thesis, He joined Prof Bucala's laboratory at Yale University as a Postdoctoral associate in Dec 2010. His research in Prof Bucala laboratory concerned the study of Plasmodium ortholog MIF, PMIF in modulating the host inflammatory response. At Dijon, He co-led a project to characterize the role of MIF in T cell activation and differentiation applied to cancer immunotherapy. In the meantime, he continues working on malaria by developing better PMIF inhibitors to control PMIF-driven immunomodulation and improving host immune responses against infection.

Ilka Wahl is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of Hedda Wardemann at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg. She is interested in the interplay of B and T cells and investigates whether suboptimal T cell help by T follicular helper cells might explain the difficulties in generating long-lived, high-quality B cell responses against P. falciparum. During her PhD in Hedda’s Lab she developed a platform for the in-depth analysis of human T cell responses at monoclonal level, which she applied to investigate CSP-specific T follicular helper cell responses induced upon malaria immunization.

Dr. Komi Gbedande have been studying malaria immunology since 2010. His academic and professional accomplishments begin with a BSc degree in Biochemistry and MSc degree in cell biology and immunology. Then he earned his PhD in Immunology from Paris Descartes University in France and conducted intensive research on pregnant women and neonatal immunology, with a particular focus on malaria in pregnancy and clinical development of a vaccine to prevent malaria during pregnancy. Presently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he focusing on the immune mechanisms associated with protection to blood stage malaria in mice using a novel chronic vaccine booster strategy.