Keynote Speaker

Dr. Bjorkman is the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech and a Merkin Institute Professor. Her laboratory does basic and translational research to understand immune recognition of viral pathogens. They are particularly interested in understanding antibody responses against viruses in order to develop improved therapeutics and potential vaccines. As part of their approach, they investigate the structural correlates of broad and/or potent antibody-mediated neutralization of HIV-1, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, and hepatitis C virus.

Jacinta Bustamante is a pediatrician and immunologist by training. She is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in Cellular Biology in Paris Cité University. She is an expert in cellular and molecular immunology as well as in human genetics of infectious diseases. She has made outstanding contributions to the field of bacterial diseases such as Mendelian susceptibility to mycobacterial disease or MSMD, chronic granulomatous disease and Whipple’s disease. She is responsible for the diagnosis of deficiency in innate immunity in patients attending the Center for the Study of Primary Immunodeficiencies at Necker Hospital for Sick Children. She is coordinator for health, medicine and life sciences in ECOS-NORD program. She has published over 250 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and books since 2003.

Kim Lewis is a University Distinguished Professor and Director, Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Microbiology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics) and an Expertscape World Expert in Microbial Drug Resistance (top 0.1% of scholars in the field).

He obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Moscow University in 1980, and has been on the Faculty of MIT, University of Maryland, and Tufts University prior to coming to Northeastern.

Dr. Lewis has authored over 100 papers and is an inventor on several patents. His notable findings include the development of general methods to grow previously uncultured bacteria that make up >99% of biodiversity on the planet, the discovery of the culprit of recalcitrant biofilm infections, drug-tolerant persister cells; and several novel antibiotics, including teixobactin and darobactin.

Dr. Lewis has served as a panelist and contributor to reports on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by National Academies Institute of Medicine, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the European Academies of Science. He is a recipient of the MIT C.E. Reed Faculty Initiative Award, the NIH Director’s Transformative Award, and the American Society for Microbiology Applied Biology and Biotechnology Research Award.

Apart from his work in Academia, Dr. Lewis is a co-founder of NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, Arietis Pharma, Holobiome, Flightpath and Odyssey Therapeutics.  

Yang Li is a computational biologist focusing on integration of multi-omics and single cell omics data to study the interaction between genetic background and the environment, and its contribution to infection and immune-related diseases. Y. Li has demonstrated how genetic risk factors of the host and their downstream molecular pathways determine and predict the human immune functions, which are crucial for treating infectious and allergic diseases in an individualized manner (Cell 2016, Nat Med 2016, Nat Immunol 2018). Recently, she conducted the first multi-omics study of dysfunctional immune system in mild and severe COVID19 patients (Cell 2020) and revealed the epigenetic and genetic regulators of innate immunity in COVID-19 (Cell Genomics 2023). For her research, she received the prestigious ERC Starting Grant “ModVaccine” on improving vaccine efficiency (2020). 

Barbara Testoni is a PI in the “Viral Hepatitis” team at CRCL – INSERM U1052 in Lyon. Her research interests mainly include the investigation of the epigenetic mechanisms at the basis of host and viral gene regulation during HBV infection, with particular focus on the transcriptional regulation of the HBV minichromosome. She is also involved in translational studies, to the aim of understanding the relationships between HBV persistence and intrahepatic innate immunity perturbations and to characterizing new serum biomarkers for intrahepatic cccDNA activity. She is a member of the Emerging Scholars Scientific and Medical Advisory Board of the HepB Foundation.