Alinane Linda Nyondo-Mipando
Linda Nyondo-Mipando is a registered nurse midwife and an Associate Professor of Health Systems and Policy at the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences in Malawi. Her research interests are in health systems and implementation science research with a focus on health service delivery, including quality management. She is keen on redesigning health services with end-users, healthcare workers and policy makers. Her areas of interest are HIV and AIDS across different populations, malaria, and maternal and newborn health.
Cissy Kityo Mutuluuza
Cissy Kityo Mutuluuza, the Executive Director of the Joint Clinical Research Centre, is a medical doctor, public health specialist and researcher with over 30 years’ experience in AIDS research and care for people living with HIV. She has a Master’s from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. A pioneer of ART use in Africa and a mover in scaling up treatment in Uganda, Cissy has worked on more than 100 trials of treatment of HIV and related conditions. She has been closely involved in studies of prevention of HIV and preparation for vaccines, which have informed policy and practice in low- and middle-income countries. She is an executive member of scientific committees in HIV research, prevention and treatment. Cissy is leading the first long-acting ART trial in Africa and catalysed the alliance of experts in gene therapy to support bridging gaps in HIV cure research between high- and lower-income countries. She has published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Gad Murenzi
Research for Development and Rwanda Military Referral and Teaching Hospital (RMRTH), Rwanda
Gad Murenzi
Gad Murenzi is the Director of the Einstein-Rwanda Research and Capacity Building Program based at Research for Development and the Rwanda Military Referral and Teaching Hospital (RMRTH) in Kigali, Rwanda. He is responsible for leading scientific research and capacity-building activities of the programme, which focuses on HIV/HPV and co-morbidities. His research interests and expertise include HIV, cancer (mainly HPV-related cancers) and other NCDs. Previously, he served as the site investigator and primary colposcopist of a cervical cancer screening project among 5,000 women living with HIV and coordinator of research laboratory development at RMRTH. In addition, he leads studies on HPV vaccine effectiveness among women living with HIV, anal/penile HPV and anal squamous intraepithelial lesions and cancer. He is also a high-resolution anoscopy provider and an anatomic pathologist.
Kathryn Anastos
Kathryn Anastos, MD, is a physician executive, clinician and medical researcher who has provided clinical care and operational and clinical leadership in the South Bronx of New York City for more than 20 years. Kathryn trained and practices as a primary care internist with expertise in the comprehensive care of people living with HIV and HIV in women. A founder of WE-ACTx (Women’s Equity in Access to Care and Treatment), a community-based organization devoted to developing high-quality ambulatory medical services for women living with HIV in Rwanda, she now serves as its Director of Clinical Systems and Scientific Programs. WE-ACTx collaborates with the Rwandan government and 24 NGOs to provide comprehensive HIV primary care to women survivors of genocidal rape. She has also developed and serves as principal investigator of the Rwandan Women's Cohort Study, funded by the National Institutes of Health. She is a Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Morkor Newman Owiredu
Morkor Newman Owiredu is a Medical Officer at the World Health Organization in Geneva, leading work on the elimination of vertical transmission and women’s health in HIV in the Treatment and Care team of the Global HIV, Hepatitis and STI Programmes. She is currently coordinating the implementation and assessments of responses to the WHO flagship “triple elimination initiative” to end vertical transmission of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B.
Paul Dietze
Paul Dietze, PhD, is the co-Director of the Disease Elimination Program at the Burnet Institute and Head of the Melbourne office of the National Drug Research Institute. He has over 25 years’ experience in research on alcohol and other drugs, focused on opioid overdose epidemiology and responses, as well as harms related to injecting drug use, methamphetamine smoking and risky alcohol consumption more broadly. He was a member of the Guidelines Development Group for the Community Management of Opioid Overdose Guidelines developed by WHO and led the WHO/UNODC Stop Overdose Safely study of take-home naloxone implementation in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Ukraine. He is the Executive Editor of Drug and Alcohol Review.
Penny Moore
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 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 to work on influenza, cytomegalovirus, respiratory syncytial virus, adenoviruses and Ebola. In the past 20 years, she has contributed towards more than 190 papers, focusing predominantly on neutralizing antibodies and their interplay with evolving viruses, a result of extensive collaborations. She has a very strong focus on mentorship and capacity development, and supervises several postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Placide Mbala Kingebeni
University of Kinshasa and National Institute of Biomedical Research, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)
Placide Mbala Kingebeni
Placide Mbala Kingebeni is an Associate Professor at the University of Kinshasa, School of Medicine, and Head of the Epidemiology and Global Health Division and Director of the Clinical Research Center at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in the DRC. With extensive experience in medical biology, his research focuses on viral zoonoses with risk factors for human contamination. As PI and co-investigator for university and US-funded grants, Placide Mbala laid the groundwork for research projects in remote DRC areas, where most outbreaks occur. He contributed to several study projects, such as clinical characterization of human mpox infection in the DRC, molecular identification and characterization of novel simian T cell lymphotropic viruses in DRC nonhuman primate bush meat, and investigations and characterization of zoonotic pathogens, such as Ebola and mpox. He has been involved in investigations of the COVID-19 pandemic and Ebola outbreaks in the DRC since 2014.

Xu Yu
Harvard Medical School and the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT and Harvard, United States
Xu Yu
Xu Yu is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Core Member at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT and Harvard. Her laboratory focuses on understanding molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in viral immune control, with a focus on the interplay between innate and adaptive immune responses. Recently, her team pioneered the use of next-generation sequencing technologies for characterizing HIV-1 reservoir cells in people who achieve spontaneous, drug-free control of HIV (so-called “elite controllers”) and in people who receive long-term suppressive antiretroviral therapy. For her work on viral reservoir profiles in HIV elite controllers, Science magazine selected her as one of nine runners-up to the 2020 scientific breakthrough of the year. She is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.