Dr John Nkengasong currently serves as the first Director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). He is a leading virologist with nearly 30 years of work experience in public health. Prior to his appointment with Africa CDC, he was the Deputy Principal Director (acting) of the Centre for Global Health at the United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and Associate Director of Laboratory Science and Chief of the International Laboratory Branch at the Division of Global HIV/AIDS and TB. Earlier in his career (1993 to 1995), Dr Nkengasong worked as Chief of Virology Laboratory at the Collaborating Centre on HIV Diagnostics at the Department of Microbiology, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium and later joined US CDC in 1994 as Chief of the Virology Laboratory in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. Earlier this year, the Director was appointed as one of the WHO Director-General’s Special Envoys on COVID-19 Preparedness and Response.

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Professor Elizabeth A. Bukusi, MBChB, M.Med (ObGyn), MPH, PhD, PGD (Research Ethics), Masters in Bioethics, CIP, FAAS, he is a Senior Principal Clinical research Scientist at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), a Research Professor at the University of Washington (Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Global health), an honorary lecturer at Aga Khan University in Nairobi (Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology) and Volunteer Clinical faculty – Professor at the University of California San Francisco (Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences).  She also serves as visiting faculty at SIUT in Karachi Pakistan. Her primary areas of interest in research focus on sexually transmitted infections, reproductive health, and HIV prevention, care and treatment and she has a keen interest in research and clinical ethics/ research regulatory systems.

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Jennifer G. Cooke is director of the Institute for African Studies at The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. The Institute serves as central for research, scholarly discussion, and debate on issues relevant to Africa. She is a professor of practice in international affairs, teaching courses on U.S. Policy Toward Africa and Transnational Security Threats in Africa.

Cooke joined George Washington University in August 2018, after 18 years as director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she led research and analysis on political, economic, and security dynamics in Africa. While at CSIS, Cooke directed projects on a wide range of African issues, including on violent extremist organizations in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, China’s growing role in Africa, democracy and elections in Nigeria, religion and state authority in Africa, “stress-testing” state stability in Africa, Africa’s changing energy landscape, and more. She was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Envisioning a Strategy for the Long-Term Burden of HIV/AIDS.  She holds an M.A. in African studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in Government from Harvard University.

Maryam Z. Deloffre is Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Humanitarian Assistance Initiative at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University.

Dr. Deloffre’s research explores the nature of global order and how it is organized. Her research on the governance and coordination of global humanitarian and health assistance focuses on collective accountability standard-setting, and the coordination of emergency response. In a related area of research, she investigates the coordination and governance of global pandemic response with empirical focus on the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Together with Sigrid Quack, a second project investigates NGO-NGO interactions. In this multi-stage book project, they propose a typology of NGO-NGO interactions ranging from conflict to coopetition to collaboration and investigate when and why these interactions occur.

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Dr. Peter H. Kilmarx, MD, FACP, FIDSA, is Deputy Director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health.

After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1983, Dr. Kilmarx served in the Peace Corps in Zaire (DRC) as a fisheries volunteer.  Dr. Kilmarx earned his MD degree in the Dartmouth-Brown combined program in medicine, graduating in 1990.  After completing internship and residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins in 1994, Dr. Kilmarx joined the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service at the CDC in Atlanta.  He moved to Thailand in 1996 where he directed CDC’s northern Thailand HIV/STD prevention field station.  In 2002, Dr. Kilmarx moved to Botswana where he directed CDC’s Botswana office implementing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and conducting HIV and TB prevention research, returning to Atlanta in 2005.  He served in the CDC Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention as the Chief of the Epidemiology Branch from 2006 to 2010 and the Senior Advisor to the Director for Health Reform from 2010 to 2011. Dr. Kilmarx participated in CDC the response to Ebola outbreaks in DRC in 1995 and 2007, Sierra Leone in 2014, and Guinea in 2015.

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Jonathan LoTempio, BS, is a PhD candidate in the George Washington University Genomics and Bioinformatics program. His dissertation research is conducted at Children’s National Hospital in Eric Vilain’s laboratory. He previously served as a Scientific Program Analyst at the National Human Genome Research Institute and as a member of the Fast-Track Action Committee on Mapping Microbiomes of the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Ass. Prof. Enock Matovu obtained his PhD in Molecular Parasitology from the University of Bern, Switzerland in 2001. Since then he has continued his work on drug resistance and later diagnostics for African Trypanosomiasis. In 2004, he relocated to the Makerere University, where he was employed as a Lecturer.

In 2008, Enock received the prestigious Royal Society Pfizer Award in recognition of his work on molecular mechanisms of drug resistance in African trypanosomes. The previous year (2007) he had obtained the Joint Third World Academy of Science Award for Young Scientists, for his contribution to Molecular Parasitology. He has vast experience in Human African Trypanosomiasis including surveillance, diagnostics, drug resistance and clinical trials. Under the EFINTD, Enock with Anne Kazibwe have investigated HAT spread into northern Uganda and typed trypanosomes in humans, animals and tsetse. In collaboration with FIND, Enock has to-date executed several projects on novel HAT diagnostics. He is presently PI of a Wellcome Trust funded project “TrypanoGEN” under the human heredity and disease H3Africa initiative, to investigate the genetic basis for HAT and schistosomiasis susceptibility.

Dr. Jennifer L. Troyer joined the National Human Genome Research Institute as a program director in 2013. Her main responsibility is as part of the team administering Human Health and Heredity in Africa (H3Africa), a Common Fund (trans-NIH) initiative that facilitates applying contemporary research approaches to the study of genomics and environmental determinants of common diseases with the goal of improving the health of African populations.

Dr. Troyer earned a B.A. in Biology from Earlham College, a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Connecticut, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute and Colorado State University. She started her career in classical and molecular genetics using Drosophila as a model organism to study the phenomenon of concerted evolution. She then moved on to lentiviruses and became interested in viral and host interactions. Her research has ranged from cats to lions to humans, but primarily focused on genetic variations in the virus and host that alter the outcome of infection. 

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Dr. Desire Tshala-Katumbay is an expert in tropical neurology and neuro-epidemiology, clinical neurotoxicology, and experimental neurotoxicolgy. He is Professor of Neurology at the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine. and affiliated with the Department of Tropical Medicine, University of Kinshasa and the National Institute of Biomedical Research (INRB), Democratic Republic of Congo. Dr. Tshala-Katumbay earned his M.D. degree (Neurology) from the University of Kinshasa, Zaire; MPH degree (Epidemiology and Biostatistics) from Oregon Health & Science University; and a Ph.D. degree (Neurology) from the University of Uppsala, Sweden.

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D’Andre Spencer, MPH, is an epidemiologist who specializes in global health threats specifically in underserved communities. He is a staff scientist at the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children’s National Hospital where his work focuses on capacity building in health and genetic research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and developing database infrastructure for multi-center translational research.

Eric Vilain, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children’s National Health System and the Chair of the Department of Genomics & Precision Medicine at George Washington University.

His laboratory explores the impact of genetic changes on human development in health and disease. Dr. Vilain has a longstanding interest in the genetics of sexual development, focusing on the molecular mechanisms of gonad development, as well as on the genetic determinants of brain sexual differentiation, including sexual orientation and gender identity. He has identified a large number of mutations in sex-determining genes and developed animal models with atypical sexual development. In addition, he has published extensively in the fields of genetics and endocrinology.

He earned his medical degree from the Paris Children’s Hospital Necker, his Ph.D., from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in medical genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became professor of Human Genetics, Pediatrics and Urology in the David Geffen School of Medicine and the Chief of Medical Genetics.

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