Organizing Committee

Chair: Victor Appay
French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), France

Victor Appay is Director of the INSERM unit, Vulnerability and Ageing of the Immune System, in the ImmunoConcept laboratory in Bordeaux, France. He has been working at the intersection of fundamental and clinical HIV research for the past 25 years. He has developed strong expertise and led research projects concentrating on human immunology and HIV pathogenesis. His research has yielded results on the importance of HIV-specific T cell quality in controlling HIV replication. He has also been a pioneer in the field by demonstrating the role of immune activation in the development of premature immune ageing in people living with HIV and its relevance for HIV disease progression and immune reconstitution upon antiretroviral therapy initiation. In parallel with his research activity, he has been involved in several HIV scientific advisory committees for ANRS, Sidaction and the IAS.

Cristian Apetrei
University of Pittsburgh, USA

Cristian Apetrei is a Professor of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is specialized in studies of simian immunodeficiency viruses pathogenesis in nonhuman primates. The emphasis of his work is on the study of the mechanisms of persistent immune activation and inflammation in HIV and on strategies aimed at controlling these. He is also involved in studies aimed at reversing the immunometabolic consequences of HIV/SIV infection and the impact of the western diet on reservoir seeding, maintenance and reactivation.

Guido Ferrari
Duke University, USA

Guido Ferrari is Professor at Duke University in the Department of Surgery and Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. He is the Director of the CFAR Immunology Core, affiliated faculty at the Duke Global Health Institute, Duke Human Vaccine Institute, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town Division of Immunology. Guido has identified HLA-class-I restricted and antibody-dependent cellular-mediated cytotoxic epitope-specific responses in acute HIV-1 and post-vaccination. He works for the HIV Vaccine Trial Network (HVTN), Comprehensive Antibody-Vaccine Immune Monitoring Consortium (CA-VIMC) and Primate AIDS Vaccine Evaluation Group (PAVEG). He directs projects on P01 and UM1 related to the evaluation of immune responses in NHP models for prevention and treatment of HIV-1. With Clive Gray at the University of Cape Town, he has organized 11 symposia and workshops to strengthen collaborations among more than 300 young African scientists. He is a member of the International Conference Committee for the INTEREST Conference.

Penny Moore
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Penny Moore is the South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics and Research Professor at Wits University and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa. She is the Director of the Antibody Immunity Research Unit, an extramural unit of the SA Medical Research Council, and holds a joint appointment as Honorary Senior Scientist in Virus-Host Dynamics at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), University of KwaZulu-Natal. She directs a research group that works in the fields of HIV and SARS-CoV-2 vaccine discovery, combining virology, immunology and bioinformatics. More recently, the team has expanded its work to influenza, cytomegalovirus, respiratory syncytial virus, adenoviruses and Ebola.

Tariro Makadzange
Charles River Medical Group, Zimbabwe

Tariro Makadzange is a medical social entrepreneur, infectious disease physician and viral immunologist. Her career has spanned academia and industry in Africa and the United States. She is the founder and CEO of CRMG and Mutala Trust in Zimbabwe. CRMG is a research organization focused on diversifying research by including Africa and Africans in clinical trials and understanding immunogenetics in African populations, including antibody discovery research for infectious diseases. Mutala Trust is a non-profit research organization that conducts public health and implementation science research in communicable and non-communicable diseases. Tariro is also an Assistant Clinical Professor in Medicine at Stanford University and Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Centre for Innovation in Global Health.

Tetsuro Matano
National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan

Tetsuro Matano started basic research on retrovirology and obtained a Doctor of Medical Sciences from the University of Tokyo. He started his studies of AIDS pathogenesis using monkey AIDS models at NIAID, NIH, and reported evidence of the importance of CD8+ T cell responses in immunodeficiency virus control. He has been a Professor at the Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, since 2006, Director at the AIDS Research Center at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) since 2010, and Deputy Director-General at NIID since 2022.. He has established a unique AIDS model using MHC-defined rhesus macaques for analysis of HIV/SIV-specific T cell responses. He developed a CTL-based HIV vaccine system using Sendai viral vectors; a clinical Phase I trial in Rwanda, Kenya and the UK, in collaboration with IAVI, has confirmed its safety and immunogenicity. He is working on virus-host immune interaction, microbiome and development of vaccines against HIV-1, HTLV-1 and SARS-CoV-2.

Chair: Linda-Gail Bekker
Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, South Africa

Linda-Gail Bekker is the Director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town, and Chief Executive Officer of the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation. A physician-scientist and infectious disease specialist, her research interests include programmatic and action research around antiretroviral rollout and TB integration, and prevention of HIV in women, young people and men who have sex with men. Linda-Gail has recently been involved in several COVID-19 vaccine trials and co-leads the Sisonke Phase 3B study, which has seen the vaccination of 500,000 healthcare workers in South Africa. She has led numerous investigator-driven studies in HIV treatment, prevention and tuberculosis. She is a former IAS President, served as International Co-Chair of the 9th International AIDS Conference and 22nd International AIDS Conference, and co-chaired the 4th HIV Research for Prevention Conference in January 2021.

Christian Brander
Irsicaixa Institute for AIDS Research, Spain

Christian Brander has broad experience in the study of T cell responses to viral infections, including hepatitis and herpes, in the setting of HIV co-infection and in transplanted hosts. He has a long track record of assessing cellular immune responses to HIV, leading to some of the largest existing data sets in cohorts in Peru, South Africa, the US and Europe to better understand the potentially protective host immunity in this setting. He is also a curator of the Los Alamos National Laboratories HIV immunology database, providing updated listings of well-defined T cell epitopes. The focus of his work is on the recognition of viral epitopes in the context of the presenting HLA structures and the role of T cell receptor genetics, functional avidity and TCR repertoire diversity in driving T cell responses with specific homing and functional characteristics.

Georgia Tomaras
Duke University, USA

Georgia Tomaras is the Director of the Duke Center for Human Systems Immunology, Immunological Sciences, and Director of the Duke Center for AIDS Research. She is a multiple principal investigator of the international HIV Vaccine Trials Network that is focused on discovery medicine and efficacy trials to prevent HIV acquisition. She is the Director of HVTN Lab Science and a member of the Executive Management Team. Her laboratory is comprised of a multidisciplinary team of scientists working on understanding immune variation among individuals to find ways to maximize immune potential. One of her laboratory’s goals is to reveal the specificities and functions of protective antibody responses that lead to prevention or resolution of disease – to directly contribute to the design and implementation of new vaccine and immuno-prophylaxis regimens. Georgia is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Glenda Gray
South African Medical Research Council, South Africa

Glenda Gray is a National Research Foundation A1-rated scientist and CEO and President of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). A qualified paediatrician, Glenda is co-founder of the internationally recognized Perinatal HIV Research Unit, an affiliate of the University of the Witwatersrand. Glenda’s global profile includes being co-PI for the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), an international collaboration for the development of HIV prevention vaccines. She has served as a Protocol Co-Chair of the multi-country Ensemble study investigating the single-dose Ad26.COV2.S vaccine as an emergency response intervention. She received South Africa’s highest honour, the Order of Mapungubwe, for her pioneering research in prevention of perinatal transmission of HIV. She is a member of the board of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership and the Access to Advanced Health Institute and a member of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Tuberculosis.

Esper G Kallas
University of São Paulo, Brazil

Esper G Kallas, MD, PhD, is an infectious diseases specialist and Full Professor of Medicine at the Department of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases, School of Medicine, University of São Paulo, Brazil, where he directs the HIV and AIDS outpatient clinic. He coordinates a clinical site for HIV treatment and prevention clinical trials. Esper also conducts projects on HIV immunopathogenesis, including senescence, immune activation, cure approaches, novel PrEP strategies and candidate HIV vaccine clinical trials.

Kenneth Mayer
Fenway Health, USA

Kenneth Mayer is a physician who trained in the Harvard programmes in internal medicine at Beth Israel Hospital and infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. As founding Medical Research Director of Fenway Health, he created a programme that has gained an international reputation for community-based research, focusing on sexual and gender minority health and bio-behavioural approaches to HIV and STI prevention. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Professor in Global Health and Population at the Harvard TC Chan School of Public Health, and an Attending Physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Since 1994, he has been a site PI of NIH-funded clinical trial units and is a member of the HPTN scientific leadership. He has co-authored more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications and served on the governing bodies of amfAR, HIVMA and the IAS. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the International AIDS Society and a member of the PEPFAR Scientific Advisory Board.

Chair: Chris Beyrer
Duke Global Health Institute, USA

Chris Beyrer is an internationally recognized epidemiologist who has been Director of the Duke Global Health Institute since 2022. He has led collaborative research on HIV prevention and treatment in Southeast Asia, Africa and eastern Europe and central Asia for more than 30 years. A former IAS President, he has served as advisor to, among others, PEPFAR, HIV Vaccine Trials Network, NIH Office of AIDS Research and WHO. Chris was the inaugural Desmond M. Tutu Professor of Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH), where he was Associate Director of the JHU Center for AIDS Research and Center for Global Health. He was the Founding Director of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights. He received his medical degree from SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University and holds a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2014 and serves on the Academy’s Board for Global Health and the Committee for Human Rights.

Edwina Wright
Monash University, Australia

Elzette Rousseau
Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, South Africa

Elzette Rousseau is a socio-behavioural scientist at the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation and has a PhD in behavioural medicine. She has more than 10 years of experience implementing and evaluating community-based access to new HIV prevention biomedical technologies and sexual health services co-created by adolescents and is part of South Africa’s National PrEP Technical Working Group. Currently, Elzette is co-investigator of the “Fast-PrEP a bridge-to-scale ”implementation science project, which provides a choice of PrEP products (oral, vaginal and injectable PrEP) delivered to more than 20,000 adolescents and young people through differentiated models, including mobile clinics, government facilities, courier delivery and peer PrEP clubs.

José Arturo Bauermeister
University of Pennsylvania, USA

José Arturo Bauermeister is the Albert M. Greenfield University Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds positions in the Department of Family and Community Health in the School of Nursing and the Department of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine. José synergizes systems-level approaches with community engagement, behavioural sciences and biomedical innovations in order to advance HIV prevention and care among sexual and gender minority populations. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico and his graduate degrees in public health from the University of Michigan.

Kelika Konda
University of Southern California, US, and Cayetano Heredia University, Peru

Kelika Konda is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and an Associate Research Professor at Cayetano Heredia University. Kelika has worked in Lima since 2004, focusing on HIV and STI prevention research with gay men and trans women. She has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles. She serves on the HVTN and ACTG social and behavioural sub-committees, contributing to the networks’ clinical trials. She has worked with gender and sexual minority populations since the start of her career and has continually focused on strategies to improve HIV prevention and care among these populations.

Lut Van Damme

University of Antwerp, Belgium

Since November 2023, Lut Van Damme has worked at the Vaccinopolis centre, University of Antwerp. She is the project manager for an international human challenge study with a SARS-CoV-2 variant. In this role and as sponsor representative, she is responsible for all aspects of the trial. Lut worked in biomedical HIV prevention research since the early 1990s. She was the international principal investigator on multiple multinational trials assessing the effect of drugs on HIV acquisition in women, mostly in central, eastern, southern and western Africa. From 2013 to 2023, Lut worked at the Gates Foundation. Her portfolio comprised grants related to research and development of biomedical HIV prevention technologies; she also collaborated with colleagues working on the delivery of products. Lut obtained her medical and doctoral degrees at the University of Ghent, Belgium, and her Master’s degree in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Chair: Jorge Sanchez
Centro de Investigaciones Tecnológicas, Biomédicas y Medioambientales, Peru

Jorge Sanchez is an infectious diseases specialist from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia with a Master of Public Health from the University of Washington. From 1992 to 2000, he worked as a University of Washington consultant at the Center for AIDS and STI Training, focusing on Central America and Caribbean countries. From 1995 to 2000, he directed the Peruvian STD and AIDS Control Program and was an advisor to the Minister of Health. Since 2000, Jorge has been the principal investigator for DAIDS-funded research sites in Peru serving the HIV Prevention Trial Network and the HIV Vaccine Trial Network (HVTN), the AIDS Clinical Trials Group and the Microbicides Trial Network. Jorge has been actively involved in the development and implementation of the research agenda of these HIV networks, serving as chair, co-chair or protocol team member of several studies and a member of several network research committees. Currently, he is Vice-President of the Centro de Investigaciones Tecnologicas, Biomedicas y Medioambientales in Lima, Peru.

Emilia Jalil
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Brazil

Emilia Jalil is a tenured researcher at FIOCRUZ. She is a medical doctor with a PhD in medicine and is experienced in trans and cisgender women’s health, youth and STI/HIV. Her research interests have been HIV and STI prevention and care, especially among cisgender women and trans people.

Imelda Mahaka
Pangaea Zimbabwe AIDS Trust (PZAT), Zimbabwe

Lobna Gaayeb
Medicines Patent Pool, Switzerland

Lobna Gaayeb is the Head of Scientific and Medical Affairs at the Medicines Patent Pool Foundation (MPP), where she is responsible for identification, prioritization and monitoring of medicines targeted for MPP’s in-licensing efforts. Lobna coordinates identification and licensing of innovative health products that offer the possibility of reducing the frequency of medicine administration. She has established the Long-Acting Patents and Licenses Database (LAPaL), a free resource that curates technical and intellectual property information on selected long-acting technologies and compounds. She draws from her experience at the Institut Pasteur, where she managed the One Health Network, “MediLabSecure”, focused on enhancing preparedness and response to emerging viral threats. Lobna’s previous endeavours have included infectious diseases research and capacity-building efforts in low- and middle-income countries. She holds a Master’s in biology and a PhD in clinical research, technological innovation and public health. Lobna is proficient in Spanish, Arabic and French and fluent in English and Italian.

Suwat Chariyalertsak
Chiang Mai University, Thailand

Suwat Chariyalertsak is Emeritus Professor in Community Medicine in the Faculty of Public Health, Chiang Mai University. He has an MD from Mahidol University Siriraj Hospital and DrPH in infectious epidemiology from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, USA. Suwat is the foundation Dean of the Faculty of Public Health and PI for the CMU Prevention Clinical Research Site at the Research Institute for Health Sciences at Chiang Mai University. His background is in epidemiology of HIV and AIDS and related infectious diseases. He has been PI for a number of multi-site RCT Phase III studies for the HIV Prevention Trial Network for more than 15 years. He has been invited to sit on national committees and sub-committees and is currently the Chair of the Burden of Disease Committee under the Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. He is a member of the WHO South-East Asia Regional Immunization Technical Advisory Group for 2023-2026.

Albert Liu
San Francisco Department of Public Health, USA

Chair: Deborah Donnell
The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, USA

Deborah Donnell is a Professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has participated as a biostatistician in the design and analysis of seminal HIV prevention trials conducted in the United States and internationally for over 20 years, primarily with the HIV Prevention Trials Network. She was lead statistician for PrEP efficacy trials of both FTC/TDF and cabotegravir, and made integral contributions to trials testing the impact of antiretroviral treatment as prevention. Ongoing work includes both efficacy and implementation trials integrating these effective biomedical tools with behavioural and structural interventions in populations vulnerable to HIV through sexual and injection practices. Deborah is active in pursuing novel trial design approaches to advance additional HIV prevention tools.

Carlos Cáceres
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Peru

Carlos Cáceres is Professor of Public Health at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) in Lima. He has an MD from UPCH and an MPH and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He founded the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality, AIDS and Society at UPCH and was its Director until he was appointed Vice-President for Research at UPCH in 2021. For more than 20 years, he has led studies on HIV and sexual health with men who have sex with men, trans women and people living with HIV, as well as the Peru components of the C-POL Trial and ImPrEP. Carlos has focused on social drivers, structural interventions and human rights, and consulted for UN bodies. Previously, he was President of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society, which he founded, and a member of the IAS Governing Council (2010-14), WHO Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (2012-16) and Global Fund Technical Review Panel (2014-18). Carlos has over 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Elizabeth Irungu
Jhpeigo, Kenya

Elizabeth Irungu is Regional Technical Advisor for Implementation Science at Jhpiego. Her work focuses on introduction and scale up of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). She currently serves in a leadership role in the design and conduct of implementation science studies for new PrEP products under Maximizing Options to Advance Informed Choice for HIV Prevention (MOSAIC), a USAID-funded project, and is protocol Co-Chair for the CATALYST study. She is also involved in testing effective delivery models for PrEP in Kenya and other countries in Africa. She participated in the Partners PrEP study and led the introduction of oral PrEP for HIV serodifferent couples in public health facilities in Kenya. She has served on PrEP-related working groups at WHO and sits on the PrEP Technical Working Group for the National AIDS and STD Control Program of Kenya.

Matthew Spinelli
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), USA

Matt Spinelli is an Assistant Professor and HIV and Infectious Diseases physician in the Division of HIV, ID, and Global Medicine at UCSF, with a focus on implementation science approaches to support PrEP, HIV and doxycycline STI PEP implementation, adherence and retention in care. He leads projects on the intersection of the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics, and a national project examining HIV viral suppression among people living with HIV who use stimulants, called the American Remote HIV Epidemiology Study (ARCHES). He also co-directs the Implementation Science Short Course and the Individual-Level Intervention Design course in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology. 

Rena Janamnuaysook
Institute of HIV Research and Innovation (IHRI), Thailand

Rena Janamnuaysook is a Program Manager, Implementation Science for Transgender Health at IHRI in Bangkok, Thailand, where she established the Tangerine Community Health Clinic, the first trans-led health clinic in the region. She manages and provides technical guidance for the development and implementation of HIV research and programmes for trans populations. Rena is a fellow of the NIH CHIMERA D43 programme, part of the IeDEA network, which conducts HIV and mental health implementation research. She also worked as Project Management Specialist in HIV Key Populations for the US Agency for International Development and was co-founder of the Thai Transgender Alliance, the first trans-owned human rights organization in Thailand. Rena has a Master’s in international development from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and is doing her PhD at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Renee Heffron
University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA

Renee Heffron, Professor of Medicine at the University of Alabama (UAB), is a clinical epidemiologist and HIV prevention researcher with experience that incorporates execution of implementation science, clinical trials, behavioural science and qualitative research. She leads numerous research projects focused on biomedical HIV prevention using pre-exposure prophylaxis, including studies of novel products and optimizing delivery of efficacious products with close collaborations in Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. She is the Director of the Center for AIDS Research at UAB; the centre has a 35-year history of supporting HIV research across disciplines of basic, clinical, implementation and community sciences. Throughout her career, Renee has been a mentor to dozens of trainees, including doctoral students, fellows and early-career investigators at US and African institutions.