Wesley (Wes) C. Van Voorhis, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Adjunct Professor of Global Health and Microbiology, and Director, Center for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases (CERID), University of Washington (UW), Seattle, WA, USA
Biography: Wes attended Cornell Medical College and Rockefeller University (RU) for his MD/PhD degrees. At RU, he was the first to discover and characterize human dendritic cells (antigen presenting accessory cells). Wes’ PhD advisor, Dr. Ralph Steinman, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Medicine for Dr. Steinman’s discovery of dendritic cells. He trained in Internal Medicine at UC San Francisco and in Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington (UW). Wes practices medicine, teaches, does laboratory research, and for the past 12 years is the Director of CERID, the UW Center for Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases. CERID takes a multidisciplinary approach to identifying and developing diagnostic, therapeutic and vaccine solutions to emerging IDs. For the past 30 years, Wes has worked on pre-clinical drug development for malaria, trypanosomes, leishmania, cryptosporidium, and most recently SARS-CoV-2. He has a preclinical candidate to treat Cryptosporidiosis moving to investigative new drug status and clinical trials in humans. Recently, Wes had co-founded an advocacy group called Neglected Parasite Initiative (NPI) to educate, advocate, and develop solutions for Cryptosporidiosis, the parasitic cause of over 200,000 child deaths annually and millions of children afflicted with growth stunting, malnutrition, and poor neurologic development.
Dominique Soldati-Favre, PhD
Professor, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Biography: Dominique Soldati-Favre obtained her PhD degree at the University of Zürich in 1990. She was then a postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, Assistant Professor at the University of Heidelberg and Reader at Imperial College London. In Geneva, she was appointed Associate Professor in 2004 at the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine, then full Professor in 2010. Dominique Soldati-Favre is Vice-Dean of the Faculty since 2011.
Elena Suvorova, PhD
Assistant Professor, Division of Infectious Disease & International Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, FL, USA
Biography: Dr. Elena Suvorova received an MS in Genetics from Kazan State University (Russia) and a PhD in Biochemistry from the Russian Academy of Sciences. During her postdoctoral training at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Montana State University, she studied protein transport in eukaryotes. Since 2009, Dr. Suvorova has focused on the cell division of the apicomplexan parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Her lab is located at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.