Professor Jonathan Carapetis is a paediatrician, infectious diseases and public health physician who has made an international contribution to the reduction of rheumatic heart disease and group A streptococcal infections. He is based at The Kids Research Institute Australia and The University of Western Australia.

Professor Carapetis is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and is a member of the Council of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council.

He served as Executive Director of The Kids from 2012 to mid-2026 and was previously Director of the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin. In 2018, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for his significant contribution to medical research.

Dr Anna Seale leads the Gates Foundation’s efforts to support the development and introduction of new maternal vaccines in low- and middle-income countries, including the first maternal vaccine for group B streptococcus.

Before joining the foundation in 2022, Anna was Professor of Public Health at the University of Warwick and a scientific adviser for the UK Health Security Agency. She previously worked at the UK Department of Health and Social Care, where she led public health analyses to inform the national response to COVID-19.

Earlier in her career, Anna held a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, investigating infectious causes of perinatal mortality in Ethiopia and Kenya. She trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, and completed her Doctor of Philosophy in epidemiology at the University of Oxford.

Professor Shiranee Sriskandan is Professor of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London and an infectious diseases consultant at Hammersmith and St Mary’s Hospitals.

She leads the Gram Positive Pathogenesis research group within the Department of Infectious Disease and is Co-Director of Imperial’s Centre for Bacteriology Resistance Biology.

Her group investigates the mechanisms that allow Streptococcus pyogenes to cause extreme clinical phenotypes in individuals and populations. Its research spans novel lineages, host immune responses and vaccines.

Professor Nina M. van Sorge obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in Immunology at UMC Utrecht and completed postdoctoral research on molecular host-pathogen interactions in Utrecht and at the University of California San Diego. She established her independent research group in 2014 and became Professor of Translational Microbiology at Amsterdam UMC in 2020.

Her research aims to clarify the molecular pathogenesis of bacterial infections associated with glycan-mediated immune recognition by innate receptors and vaccine-induced antibodies. Her work focuses on Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes.

She is also Head of the Netherlands Reference Laboratory for Bacterial Meningitis. Her work combines molecular epidemiological surveillance with fundamental research to help translate findings into guidelines and innovative antibody-based solutions, including vaccines.