Jarbas Barbosa da Silva, BRAZIL
Emerging Infectious Diseases in Latin America

Dr. Jarbas Barbosa da Silva Jr. has been Manager of the Health Surveillance, Disease Prevention and Control Area of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) since 10 January 2007. The HSD area is responsible for coordinating regional activities on surveillance, prevention and control of communicable and non communicable diseases; health information and analysis; and veterinarian public health.

Dr. Barbosa received his degree in medicine from the Federal University of Pernambuco. He later received specialized credentials in public health and epidemiology from the National School of Public Health at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), Brazil. He received a Master's degree and later a Doctoral degree in public health from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in São Paulo state, Brazil.

Dr. Barbosa began his professional career in the public health sector in 1982, working for the Secretariat of Health for the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. In 1987, he became Coordinator for the Program on Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in this state. In 1993, he was appointed Secretary of Health of the municipality of Olinda, and in 1995 Secretary of Health for the State of Pernambuco. In these positions he was the coordinator of the entire municipality health system and the state health system, respectively.

From 1997 to 2003, Dr. Barbosa da Silva worked as Director of the National Center for Epidemiology (CENEPI) in Brasilia, Brazil, in the Ministry of Health. In this position he was the national coordinator of the epidemiological surveillance system. In 2003 he was nominated as the first Secretary of Public Health Surveillance, a new branch created in the Brazilian MoH that jointed the areas of epidemiological surveillance and the prevention and control of diseases programmes. In the second semester of 2007 he was appointed as Executive Secretary (Vice Minister) of the Ministry of Health.

Dr. Barbosa is author and co-author of articles, books and chapters on several public health and epidemiological matters.

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Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, FRANCE
Edward H. Kass Lecture
The Discovery of HIV: An Example of Translational Research on Response to an Emerging Epidemic

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, PhD, is the acting Director of the "Regulation of Retroviral Infections" Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She has been involved in retrovirology research since the early 1970's and is recognized for her contributions to HIV/AIDS research, in particular as the first author of the publication that reported in 1983 the discovery of a retrovirus, later named HIV, in a patient at risk for AIDS. Dr. Barré-Sinoussi shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Dr. Luc Montagnier for their discovery of HIV. In 1988, she became responsible for her own laboratory at the Institut Pasteur and initiated research programs on viral and host determinants of HIV / AIDS pathogenesis.

Between 1988 and 1998, she has been involved in collaborative programs on HIV vaccine research using primate models. Today, the research programs of her team are focused on regulations of HIV / SIV infection (intracellular restrictions of HIV-1infection and innate immunity, in particular regulations of T cell activation resulting from the NK-dendritic cell interplay).

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is author and co-author of more than 220 original publications andmore than 120 articles in book reviews. She has been invited to speak at more than 250 International meetings and/or conferences. She has been (and is still) a member of a number of scientific committees in France and elsewhere, including scientific committees of several International AIDS Conferences. She has received 10 national or international awards for her contributions to HIV/AIDS research.

Along with her research activities, since the early 80’s Françoise Barré-Sinoussi has been strongly involved in promoting integration between HIV/AIDS research and actions in resource limited countries, in particular through the Institut Pasteur International Network and the coordination of the ANRS research programs in Cambodia and Vietnam, in accordance with her strong commitment to building capacity, training and technology transfers on site in Africa and Asia.

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Martin Cetron, USA (SLAMVI / ISTM Plenary Speaker)
The Changing Patterns of Global Migration and the Impact on Infectious Diseases

Dr. Martin Cetron is the Director for the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The DGMQ mission is to prevent introduction of infectious diseases in the U.S. and to prevent morbidity among immigrants, refugees, migrant workers, and international travelers.

Dr. Cetron received his M.D. from Tufts University and trained in Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington before joining the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service in 1992.

His primary research interests are international health and global migration with a focus on emerging infections, tropical diseases, and vaccine-preventable diseases in mobile populations. He has been in this current leadership role at CDC during responses to the key emerging infectious disease outbreaks of the 21st century including the anthrax bio-terrorism incident, the smallpox threat, the global SARS epidemic, and the U.S. Monkeypox outbreak. He is part of the CDC Pandemic Influenza planning and preparedness team and the WHO Influenza Pandemic Task Force.

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Myron S. Cohen, USA
Richard K. Root Memorial Lecture
Transmission and Prevention of Transmission of HIV:
Clues from the Early 21st Century

Myron S. Cohen is the J. Herbert Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology and Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Associate Vice Chancellor for Medical Affairs-Global Health. Dr. Cohen received his BS degree (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, an MD degree from Rush Medical College, Chicago Illinois and he completed an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Yale University.

Dr. Cohen serves as the Director of the UNC Division of Infectious Disease and the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Disease, and he is Associate Director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research. Dr. Cohen serves on the Senior Leadership Group of the NIH Center for HIV Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), and serves as part of the leadership group of the NIH HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN). Dr. Cohen serves as an Associate Editor of the journal, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and the comprehensive textbook, Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

Dr. Cohen received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rush Medical College in 2000. He received the Thomas Parran Award (2005) for lifetime achievement in STD research from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association. In 2008 Dr. Cohen received the O. Max Gardner Award for "contributions to mankind," the greatest honor in the University of North Carolina 16 campus system. Doctor Cohen has been repeatedly recognized as one of America's "Top Doctors" and "Best Doctors".

Dr. Cohen's research work focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of HIV, with emphasis on the role played by STD co-infections. He has conducted landmark studies related to the biology of HIV transmission and use of antiretroviral agents for prevention. In 2005, Dr. Cohen received an NIH MERIT Award for ongoing support of this work. Dr. Cohen is the author of more than 400 publications. Much of Dr. Cohen's research has been conducted in internationally, especially in the African country of Malawi and in the People's Republic of China.

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Keith Klugman, USA
Pneumococcal Infections in Children and their Impact on Adults

Keith Klugman is the William H. Foege Chair of Global Health in the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases of the School of Medicine at Emory University and a Visiting Researcher in the Respiratory Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He is also the co-Director of the Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit of the University of the Witwatersrand, the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Professor Klugman is the Treasurer of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, and Chair of the International Board of the American Society for Microbiology. He has chaired expert committees for the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Wellcome Trust in London, and currently serves as an editor or member of the editorial board of 8 international journals on medicine, infectious diseases and antimicrobials.

Professor Klugman's research interests are in antibiotics, antimicrobial resistance and vaccines for bacterial pathogens - particularly the pneumococcus. He has published more than 375 papers on these subjects to date.

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Roberto Kolter, USA
Microbial Chemical Ecology and the Future of Antibiotics

Roberto Kolter has been a highly influential microbiologist for a period that spans four decades. Early in his career he made enduring advances in our understanding of the regulation of DNA replication as well as practical advances in the development of the most widely used "suicide delivery vectors" of today.

Since establishing his own laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 1983, Dr. Kolter has made contributions in diverse areas of microbiology. Initially, he worked on peptide antibiotic synthesis and secretion, providing some of the earliest knowledge on "ABC exporters". This was followed by an exploration of the starvation physiology of E. coli at a time when virtually no one else thought of investigating stationary phase cultures. In part as a result of those efforts, the control of gene expression in non-growing cells became an area of intense investigation by others that continues to this day. Dr. Kolter's work on the population dynamics of stationary phase cultures, the so-called
"GASP" (growth advantage in stationary phase) phenomenon, established such cultures as excellent model systems for experimental evolution studies. Since the mid-1990's he has applied genetic approaches to study bacterial biofilms; Dr. Kolter's laboratory developed the most widely used high-throughput assay for detection of biofilm development. His studies with Bacillus subtilis as a model system to understand biofilms continue to be at the leading edge of the field. Most recently, Dr. Kolter is investigating the chemistry of interspecies communication in bacteria. In this area he discovered that a bacterium's quorum sensing signal can also act as a fungal morphogen. In addition, he has developed screens that have led to the discovery of novel secondary metabolites produced by one species that profoundly affect the developmental patterns of other species.

Since 2002, Dr. Kolter has played a key role in the organizing and launching of the Microbial Sciences Initiative at Harvard (MSI) and is currently its co-director. The MSI (www.msi.harvard.edu) is an innovative University-wide interdisciplinary science program aimed at developing new approaches to explore the microbial world. MSI is playing a leadership role in microbial sciences worldwide by bringing together scientists from diverse backgrounds to think about and discuss key issues in microbiology.

Presently, Dr. Kolter is the President-Elect of the American Society for Microbiology and will become its President in July 2009.

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Prof. Louis Loutan, SWITZERLAND
The Challenges of Travel Medicine in the 21st Century

Louis Loutan, MD, MPH is the head of the Division of International and Humanitarian Medicine since its creation in the Department of Community Medicine and Primary Care at the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also Associate Professor in International and Humanitarian Medicine at the University of Geneva. Dr. Loutan is a specialist in internal medicine and tropical medicine and has a Master’s in Public Health from Harvard SPH.

Dr. Loutan has extensive field experience in international health projects in Africa, the Balkans, Nepal and Central Asia conducting research projects and organizing training programmes. He has spent five years in the Republic of Niger running epidemiological surveys in nutrition and tropical medicine, and organising programs in community health for nomadic populations. He spent two years in the Department of Community Health at Tufts University School of Medicine (Boston) organising training courses in international health. He also served as technical advisor and coordinator of training and research programmes in the family medicine reform in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Dr. Loutan has been the founder and head of the Geneva travel and migration medicine unit since 1991. He has conducted research in various aspects of travel medicine including immunogenicity and tolerance of vaccines, security and the health of humanitarian expatriates. The unit also offered various services for migrants and refugees in Geneva, developing the new field of migrant health. Dr. Loutan serves as senior consultant in tropical medicine at the Geneva University Hospitals and as Medical Director of the HUG laboratory of parasitology.

His appointments included: president of the Swiss Society of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology; president of the International Society of Travel Medicine; board member of the Federation of European Societies for Tropical Medicine and International Health; chair of the organising committee of the 5th International Conference on Travel Medicine (Geneva 1997); president of the HUG Committee of humanitarian and international cooperation activities; president of the Geneva Forum: towards Global Access to Health, held in Geneva in 2006, 2008 and in preparation for 2010.

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Christopher V. Plowe, USA
Malaria Eradication

Christopher Plowe is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Medicine, of Microbiology and Immunology, and of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he is Chief of the Malaria Section of the University's Center for Vaccine Development. Plowe received his B.A. in Philosophy from Cornell University, an M.D. from Cornell University Medical College, and an M.P.H. in Tropical Medicine from Columbia University School of Public Health. He completed fellowships in Malaria Research at the National Institutes of Health, USA and in Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University. He has received a Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award and the Bailey K. Ashford Medal for distinguished work in tropical medicine from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Dr. Plowe leads a multidisciplinary clinical translational malaria research program with field sites in Mali, West Africa and Malawi, Central Africa. He is best known for his work on the molecular epidemiology of drug resistant malaria. Working with African colleagues, his group at the University of Maryland developed rapid molecular assays to detect drug resistant malaria using dried blood spots on paper. These tests have been used to understand the population genetics of malaria and to control malaria outbreaks and inform treatment policy decisions. Dr. Plowe's work encompasses malaria drug resistance, molecular epidemiology, molecular evolution, rapid diagnostics, pathogenesis, immunology, international research ethics, interactions between HIV and malaria, and clinical trials of drugs and vaccines. His group is currently concentrating on understanding and mitigating the impact of genetic diversity on malaria vaccine efficacy and on developing strategies to deter the emergence and spread of drug resistant malaria. Dr. Plowe directs the Molecular Module of the Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN). With colleagues in Mali, he has also designed and led several clinical trials of malaria vaccines.

Dr. Plowe provides expert advice on malaria research and control to national and international agencies and has testified before Congress on tropical medicine research priorities and before a Presidential commission on international research ethics. He divides his time between his laboratories in Baltimore, the Bandiagara Malaria Project in Mali and the Blantyre Malaria Project in Malawi, and is developing new collaborations in Southeast Asia. He is the author of more than 100 publications on malaria.

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