Invited speakers

Alessandra Buoninfante is Scientific officer at the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Alessandra oversees and assesses non-clinical and clinical aspects of vaccines for emerging health threats. She also provides scientific support to the EMA Emergency Task Force and to the EMA Vaccines Working Party. Previously Alessandra worked in big pharma in translation vaccine research and received a PhD degree from the Department of Immunology at the NKI-AVL in Amsterdam.

Professor Anna Seale is Principal Officer, Maternal Immunization Product Development and Surveillance at the Gates Foundation. She is an Honorary Professor of Public Health at the University of Warwick and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Anna is clinically qualified and specialized in paediatrics prior to public health. She has worked extensively on the epidemiology of perinatal infection, particularly Group B Streptococcus. She has set-up surveillance platforms in East Africa, and studied outbreaks, leading an analytical team in the Department of Health, UK, at the height of COVID-19. She currently leads the Maternal Immunization and Group B Streptococcus Vaccine Initiatives at the Gates Foundation. She is now based in the UK, having lived for several years in East Africa (Kenya and Ethiopia).

Dr. Brechje de Gier works as senior epidemiologist at the Vaccine Preventable Diseases department of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in the Netherlands. Her main focus of study is vaccine effectiveness against several VPDs, with a particular interest in methodology. Since 2020, she has been highly involved in national and international studies on COVID-19 epidemiology and vaccine effectiveness, mainly employing large registry datasets. She is currently acting as chairperson of the interdisciplinary RIVM committee on vaccination against invasive pneumococcal, meningococcal and Haemophilus influenzae disease, advising the Dutch NITAG.

Brechje enjoys teaching, and supervises junior colleagues and a PhD student on COVID-19 and RSV immunization effectiveness, including maternal vaccination. She has also supervised several projects for fellows in training as field epidemiologists (EPIET fellowship). Brechje is particularly motivated to contribute to heath of mothers and infants during the perinatal period, building expertise in methodology of maternal vaccine effectiveness and safety. Next to VPD research, she is also active in surveillance and research on group A and B streptococcal infections.

Associate Professor Erzsébet Horváth-Puhó is a leading researcher in maternal and child health epidemiology. Her work has advanced understanding of newborn and infant vulnerability, particularly the short- and long-term impacts on children and their families.

Associate professor Horváth-Puhó has played a key role in international research on Group B Streptococcus (GBS) infection, contributing to high-impact studies focused on long-term consequences of invasive GBS disease on children and their caregivers. These findings have contributed to global disease burden estimates and informed vaccination strategies developed by WHO in collaboration with London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2021. As a founding member of the GBS Vax-Ready European Consortium and Danish principal investigator in the Vulnerable Newborn Measurement Collaboration, she continues to strengthen preparedness for GBS maternal immunisation and advance maternal and child health research worldwide.

Erzsébet has played a central role in establishing comprehensive nationwide cohorts based on Danish registry data, including the Birth & Pregnancy Cohort, which links data across generations to enable analysis of short- and long-term outcomes in children and their parents. She is dedicated to advancing research through novel methodologies, including biostatistical and machine learning approaches.

Pediatrician and public health professional trained in pulmonology and infectious disease epidemiology, with expertise in vaccine policy, new vaccine introductions, and a focus on equitable vaccine access. He has conducted research across LMICs, including as Research Associate and Head of Pharmacovigilance at the Infant Foundation, and in roles at Johns Hopkins IVAC. 

At Gavi, he leads analyses and efforts on new introductions, including work on RSV, GBS, TB and dengue, to support and promote the introduction of these vaccines in low-income countries.

Professor Joy Lawn is a Ugandan-born, paediatric/neonatal clinician, and perinatal epidemiologist with 35 years’ experience notably in sub-Saharan Africa including trials, complex evaluation of newborn and child health services, and epidemiological burden estimates for WHO and UNICEF. She has published >400 peer-reviewed papers with a H-index of ~130, including Lancet series, and has been in the top 1% of cited scientists worldwide since 2017. She led novel estimates on Group B Streptococcus (GBS) burden with WHO that helped accelerate progress towards maternal immunisation, and was the 2023 Carol Baker prize winner.

Joy’s main contribution to global health has been in developing the evidence-base to measure and address the global burden of 2.3 million neonatal deaths, 2 million third trimester stillbirths, and 13.4 million preterm births. Since 2005, she co-led several Lancet Neonatal and Stillbirth series linked with the Every Newborn Action Plan, resulting in first SDG for neonatal survival endorsed at World Health Assembly, supported by 195 countries. She is co-chair of The Lancet Commission of Evidence-based Implementation.

She is Professor of Maternal, Reproductive & Child Epidemiology, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and from 2013-2023 was Director of Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive & Child Health (MARCH) centre. Joy and her research team, many based in Africa, working on multi-country studies regarding newborn health, stillbirths and child development worldwide, including large scale implementation research on small and sick newborn care with NEST360 Alliance linked to the widely used www.newborntoolkit.org.

She has served on many Global committees, such as WHO’s STAGE, Global Statistics and GBS committees. She is a champion for equitable and diverse research leadership and has supervised many PhDs and mentored scientists especially across Africa. Joy is one of the few women nominated to both UK Academy of Medical Sciences and USA National Academy of Medicine.

Kirsty Le Doare is a Professor of Vaccinology and Immunology and chief investigator for the SGUL@MUJHU maternal vaccine and seroepidemiology studies. Professor Le Doare chairs the DNDi maternal and neonatal health COVID-19 research Coalition and is a WHO scientific advisor on maternal vaccination.

Her group aims to understand why some infants develop severe infections and die in the first months of life, and how protection transferred from mother to child via the placenta and breast milk can be harnessed.

Kirsty Le Doare’s groups in Uganda and the UK use a range of approaches to study Group B Streptococcus and other neonatal pathogens, including E. coli and Klebsiella. Their work range from clinical studies and whole-genome sequencing to in vitro and in vivo models and complex immunology.

Lidia Oostvogels, MD, is Chief Medical Officer at MinervaX ApS, a Danish biotechnology company developing vaccines against Group B Streptococcus (GBS). She is working in clinical development since more than 30 years. First at Boehringer Ingelheim, where she worked on drug development. Thereafter, since 2003, she focuses on the development of prophylactic vaccines against infectious diseases, across both biotech and pharmaceutical companies. She worked for GSK and Curevac, working on the development of paediatric vaccines (targeting meningococcus, rota virus or rabies), and vaccines for adults including older adults and immunocompromised patients (targeting influenza, herpes zoster, or COVID). Since end 2022, as CMO at MinervaX, she concentrates on prevention of GBS, both by vaccinating pregnant people to protect infants, as by vaccinating older adults or adults with certain comorbidities putting them at higher risk of invasive GBS disease.

She holds a medical degree from Ghent University in Belgium and has led multiple late-stage clinical development programs throughout her career.

Lisa Paranthoen obtained her Master’s degree in Vaccinology (EMJMD LIVE) in 2024. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the Centre for the Evaluation of Vaccination, University of Antwerp, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kirsten Maertens and Dr. Emilie Karafillakis.

Her research focuses spans the maternal vaccination landscape, from trials to policy implementation. With a particular focus on RSV, she investigates facilitators of trial participation during pregnancy and stakeholder preferences for RSV prevention strategies. She also examines how European NITAGs develop evidence-based recommendations for vaccination during pregnancy. Her work aims to generate evidence-based insights for stakeholders involved in maternal immunization.

Dr. Merijn W Bijlsma is a paediatrician and epidemiologist working at Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands. Dr. Bijlsma and his colleagues discovered that Group B Streptococcus (GBS) disease, the most common cause of sepsis and meningitis in infants, is increasing in the Netherlands and showed that current prevention guidelines are inadequate. The goal of his research is to develop effective and targeted prevention approaches for sepsis and meningitis in infants. Merijn therefore started the NOGBS prospective nationwide cohort study that investigates GBS colonization and GBS and E. coli invasive disease in infants. NOGBS has already collected clinical data, blood and bacterial isolates from >1500 cases and controls. 

In collaboration with the Wellcome Sanger Institute, they are identifying new diagnostic targets to improve GBS prevention in a unique dataset that combines clinical data, long-term surveillance and bacterial sequencing of invasive and colonizing GBS bacteria. Outcome data, essential for cost-effectiveness research, was lacking for GBS disease. Therefore, they established long-term outcomes for nearly 3000 Dutch and Danish infants with GBS disease. Vaccination against GBS during pregnancy is a promising new prevention strategy. NOGBS joined the international PREPARE consortium to establish immune correlates of protection against GBS disease.

Professor Pierrette Melin is an Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Liège, Belgium, where she has spent four decades advancing the understanding, diagnosis, and prevention of Group B Streptococcus (GBS) infections. She holds a pharmacy degree, a postgraduate specialization in clinical biology, and a PhD in Biomedical and Experimental Sciences from the University of Liège, with doctoral research focused on the epidemiology of GBS among pregnant women and infants.

For many years, she served as Head of the Clinical Microbiology Department at the University Hospital of Liège, and as founder and director of the National Reference Centre for Streptococcus agalactiae in Belgium — roles that positioned her at the forefront of national GBS surveillance, diagnostics, and guideline development. She has been an expert of the Belgian Superior Health Council since 2002, a Member of the College since 2013, and a Member of the Bureau of the College since 2024. Since 2018, she has served as an expert for QCMD (Quality Control for Molecular Diagnostics, Glasgow, UK) for Streptococcus agalactiae.

Her research spans GBS epidemiology, neonatal disease prevention, antimicrobial resistance, and the development and implementation of both conventional and advanced diagnostic technologies in clinical microbiology. She chairs the national working group that re-evaluates GBS prevention strategies and updates clinical guidelines, and has built international research collaborations on GBS epidemiology with partners in Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

She has led work packages in two European Commission-funded FP7 projects: DEVANI (2008–2011), focused on developing a maternal GBS vaccine, and C4L (2011–2014), which aimed to develop rapid diagnostic tests to support evidence-based antibiotic prescribing. She also led the Wallonie-Bruxelles Biowin-funded FRISBY project (2016–2020), developing fast and reliable ultra-sensitive identification of GBS at delivery.

A committed advocate for innovation in infectious disease management, she combines deep clinical expertise with a career-long dedication to improving outcomes for mothers and newborns through better science, diagnostics, and prevention.

Professor Schrag is an adjunct faculty in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Emory University School of Medicine, and an expert consultant on Group B Streptococcus and neonatal sepsis for the Gates Foundation.  Prior to this, she led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s program on group B streptococcal (GBS) disease and community-acquired neonatal sepsis for 25 years, and also served as the Team Lead of the Groups A and B Streptococcal epidemiology team.  In this role she served as subject matter lead for CDC’s active surveillance for group B streptococcal invasive infections in 10 states.  

During the COVID-19 pandemic she served as co-lead of CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness team for three years.  In the international context she served as co-Principal Investigator on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Aetiology of Neonatal Infections in South Asia (ANISA) study, as well as co-PI on a similar study in South Africa and has provided technical assistance to a range of neonatal sepsis and GBS-specific projects in Central America, Africa and Asia.  She also contributed to recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the global GBS disease burden and has served as a consultant for the World Health Organization regarding considerations for GBS vaccine development, licensure, and disease burden assessment.  

Before these roles, Dr. Schrag was an Epidemic Intelligence Service Fellow and an American Society for Microbiology fellow at the CDC and a post-doctoral fellow in population biology at Emory University. Dr. Schrag received her bachelor’s degree in biology in 1989 from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and her doctoral degree in zoology in 1993 from Balliol College, University of Oxford, where she was a British Marshall Scholar. Dr. Schrag is the author of over 180 publications, more than half of which relate to invasive streptococcal disease or neonatal sepsis.  

Dr. Theresa Lamagni is a Section Head in the Antimicrobial Resistance & Healthcare-Associated Infection Division of the UK Health Security Agency and designated epidemiologist for the WHO Collaborating Centre for Streptococcal Diseases. She has worked in public health for over 25 years. During this time, she completed an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a PhD at the University of Helsinki. 

Theresa has strategic responsibility for surveillance of streptococcal diseases in England, providing expert support to outbreak and incident response and contributing to the development of an evidence base to inform disease prevention programmes. 

She has authored over 200 peer-review papers, four clinical microbiology book chapters and four national public health guidelines and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. She was Co-Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the 22nd Lancefield International Symposium on Streptococci and Streptococcal Diseases (LISSSD) in Australia in 2025 and is Co-Chair for the 23rd LISSSD in Cyprus 2027.

Dr. Cooke has over thirty years of business leadership and public policy experience in the vaccine industry, working in small entrepreneurial and multinational biopharmaceutical companies. Omniose is developing preclinical-stage bioconjugate vaccines against Group B Streptococcus and Klebsiella pneumoniae and has an exclusive research collaboration with AstraZeneca.

Virginia Benassi is a Technical Officer in the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals at WHO headquarters in Geneva. She serves as the WHO focal point for Group B Streptococcus within the Defeating Meningitis by 2030 Global Road Map, and as Secretariat to the WHO GBS Technical Advisory Group and the SAGE Working Group on Meningococcal Vaccines and Vaccination. 

Trained in international law, global health, and clinical trials and research ethics, she works at the interface of vaccine science, policy, and equitable access, in close coordination with partners across the immunization landscape.