Abdifatah Muktar is a researcher and epidemiologist working in rural Ethiopia. He has a background in Pharmacy and holds a MSc. in Epidemiology from the University of Basel, Switzerland. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. program at the University of Basel in close collaboration with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute and Jigjiga University.Since 2016, he has been studying WASH and diarrheal diseases, and since 2020, he has been studying antimicrobial resistance genes shared between humans, animals, and the environment. He is the former Director of the College of Medicine and Health Science and the One Health Initiative Coordinator at Jigjiga University.

His research focus is on understanding the AMR genes shared between humans, animals, and the environment, as well as health professionals and communities’ knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of AMR in Ethiopia. He is the lead researcher on the association of AMR carriage with the microbiota composition in Ethiopia. Additionally, he is a co-investigator in case-control research comparing the microbiota composition of stunted, wasted, and normally nourished children.
 

Adrian Egli leads the Applied Microbiology Research group at University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, to translate our understanding of the complex host-pathogen interactions into clinical applications, such as novel adjuvant development targeting specific signaling pathways or preventive measurements on a population level.

Dr. Alexander Kwarteng is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow with the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and KCCR. His lab seeks to understand the interaction between filarial infections and the microbiome. Dr. Kwarteng is currently working on skin microbiome among individuals with filarial lymphedema and how the shifts in the microbial population could be positively explored in managing the condition. 

Augustina Angelina Sylverken is a Senior Lecturer at KNUST and a Senior Research Scientist at KCCR. A Virologist by training, her research has focussed mainly on respiratory viral diseases especially those of zoonotic origin including Coronaviruses. She has been involved in One Health studies to gain more insight into the origins and reservoirs of zoonotic viruses transmission as a proxy to viral zoonosis. This has included water microbiome in the area of Environmental Microbiology.

Curtis Huttenhower is a Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics and Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he co-directs the Harvard Chan Microbiome in Public Health Center. He is an Associate Member at the Broad Institute. His lab focuses on methods for functional analysis of microbial communities, molecular epidemiology of the human microbiome, and its potential as a diagnostic tool and point of therapeutic intervention.

Deborah Delgado-Pugley is a Professor of Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She has a Ph.D. in International Development (Catholic University of Louvain) and Sociology (EHESS Paris School of Social Sciences Studies). She has researched on environmental and climate policies at the international and territorial level. She has field experience in the Amazon regions of Bolivia and Peru, where she has led research teams on climate change, indigenous movements, human rights, natural resource management, forestry development, and gender.

Prof. Dorcas Obiri-Yeboah is an associate professor of Clinical Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medical Sciences, College of Health and Allied Sciences, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Cape Coast, Ghana. She has a medical degree (MBChB), and PhD as her main academic qualifications and is currently the Deputy Director of the Directorate of Research, Innovation and Consultancy. As a clinician-scientist, her research area is infectious diseases and clinical microbiology. She is a co-investigator in a project on maternal microbiome and pregnancy outcome in her institution.

Elsa Fortes-Gabriel, is a Military, Veterinary doctor, Master in Public Health and Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences. Was focused on Leptospira spp research supported by lab groups located in Portugal and United States of America.
Actually is working in Centro de Investigação em Saúde de Angola – CISA in Bengo as a project Coordinator of a Malaria Clinical Trial and a Enteric Pathogens Surveillance, respectively.
Dr. Fortes remains enthusiastic about microbe cultures isolation for immune technology studies targeting point-of-care diagnosis or the development of an efficacy vaccine.

Forest Rohwer is a Fellow of the American Academy for Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology. He led the development of viromics, which involves isolating and sequencing the RNA/DNA from all of the viruses in a sample. From this data, it is possible to determine what types of viruses are present and what functions they are encoding. Dr. Rohwer uses viromics to study ecosystems ranging from the human body to coral reefs and has shown that most genomic diversity on the planet is viral. Dr. Rohwer has published >200 peer-reviewed articles, has won numerous national and international awards, and is listed as one of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds. He has also published two books: Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas and Life in Our Phage World. 

Inácio Mandomando, is a Senior Researcher, Coordinating the Bacterial, Viral and Neglected 
Tropical Disease at the Manhiça Health Research Centre (Centro de Investigação em Saúde de 
Manhiça) in Mozambique. He is leading among other the Child Health and Mortality 
Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) in Mozambique, aimed to track definitive cause of deaths 
in children and stillbirths. His Laboratory has been focusing in Molecular Epidemiology of 
enteric and invasive pathogens including assessing the role of gut microbiome on vaccines 
efficacy (e.g. rotavirus vaccine).

Dr. John de la Parra is an ethnobotanist and plant chemist with expertise in food crops and medicinal plants. He is currently the President of the Society for Economic Botany.  John is also Manager of the Global Food Portfolio at The Rockefeller Foundation where his work focuses on the management of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, a global effort to create a public database of the biochemical composition and function of the food we eat using the latest mass spectrometry technologies and bioinformatics. He also holds appointments as a researcher at Harvard University and a lecturer at Tufts University where his expertise encompasses ethnobotany, food system innovation, agriculture, and medicinal plants. He has held additional appointments as a Research Scientist at MIT and a Lecturer of Biotechnology at Northeastern University.

Karina B. Xavier is a Principal Investigator at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal. Her main research interest is inter-species cell-cell communication in bacteria and its role in beneficial and hostile interactions with the host. Bacteria use chemical molecules to communicate between species via a process called quorum sensing and her group showed that manipulation of quorum sensing signaling in the mammalian gut can influence the balance of the gut microbiota. Additionally, she is studying members of the microbiota that act as protective barrier against pathogens. In 2012 she received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Early Career Award and in 2021 was elected EMBO Member.

Kerina Duri (PhD, MSc, BSc. Hons) is an Associate Professor in the University of Zimbabwe, College of Health Sciences, Immunology Unit and the principle investigator of the University of Zimbabwe Birth Cohort study that recruited 1200 pregnant women of which 50% were HIV infected. The children are now at least 30 months old. Her interest is understanding how maternal comorbidities: HIV, Helicobacter pylori and intestinal helminthes including malnutrition and mental health affect pregnancy outcome, infant health, immune development and immune dysregulation through understanding gut microbiota profiles/composition from birth and hopefully into adolescence with a special focus on HIV exposed but uninfected (HEU) infants/children who, despite being HIV uninfected have been shown to have higher morbidity and mortality mainly from infectious diseases. In addition, future studies on interaction between various microbes from pregnancy, thus studies integrating bacterial microbiomes, fungal mycobiomes, viromes and parasites remain her interest. These cross-talks and interactions of microbes with host immunity ay shed more light in disease pathogenesis and with the aim of developing novel and safer treatment options.

Leo Katsidzira is a gastroenterologist with the University of Zimbabwe and Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare, Zimbabwe. His main research interests are in colorectal cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease in Africa, and on the interaction between diet, the gut microbiome, mucosal immunology and environmental enteropathy, colorectal cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease risk in these populations. 

Luís Teixeira is a Principal Investigator at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal. He is an EMBO member and the coordinator of SymbNET, an European network on Genomics and Metabolomics in a Host-Microbe Symbiosis. His lab focuses on how hosts interact with symbiotic microorganisms at the functional and evolutionary levels. The group studies Drosophila interaction with viruses, the intracellular bacteria Wolbachia, and the gut microbiota.

María Gloria Domínguez-Bello is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Microbiome and Health at Rutgers University, and is the Director of the New Jersey Institute for Food Nutrition and Health (IFNH). Her lab focuses on multidisciplinary approaches to study impacts of modern practices on the microbiome and strategies for restoration. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and of the Infectious Disease Society of America.

Martin Blaser holds the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and Professor of Medicine and Microbiology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School as well as Director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University. A physician and microbiologist, his research has centered on the relationship of humans and bacteria, both as foes and friends. His award-winning book for general audiences about our changing microbiota, Missing Microbes, has been translated into 20 languages.

Dr. Groussin’s research focuses on understanding how changes in host lifestyle associated to industrialization impact host-microbe interactions in health and disease. In 2016, he co-founded at MIT the Global Microbiome Conservancy initiative, whose mission is to biobank the global diversity of gut bacteria to create new knowledge on the microbiome, to disseminate this resource to the community, to promote capacity building, and to increase representation in science. Starting 2022, he will start his Professorship position at the University of Kiel, Germany.

Miguel Brito has a Basic Degree in Biology in Faculty of Sciences from Lisbon and a PhD in Genetics by the Lisbon University. Moreover, he has a Basic degree in Dietetics and Nutrition by the Lisbon School of Health Technology (ESTeSL/IPL). Miguel Brito is the research coordinator of the Genetics Lab at Health and Technology Research Center (H&TRC) where he have several research projects in the area of Genetics and more recently ibn the area of human microbiome using 16SRNA sequencing by NGS. Miguel Brito is also research coordinator at Health Research Center from Angola (CISA) where he conducts several research projects in the are of microbiology and microbiome and human genetics.

Nicholas Bokulich is an is Assistant Professor of Food Systems Biotechnology in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zürich. Before joining ETHZ, he completed postdoctoral training at New York University Medical Center and Northern Arizona University, and received his PhD at the University of California, Davis. He is a lead developer of the QIIME 2 multiomics analysis software platform (http://qiime2.org/) and other bioinformatics methods for microbiome and omics analysis. His laboratory studies the interconnection between microbial ecosystems, food, and human health and development.

Dr. Salifu is a Senior Lecturer in KNUST and a Research Fellow at KCCR. He is a Co-PI for West African Sustainable Leadership and Innovation Training in Bioinformatics Research and for the H3ABioNet – Human, Health and Heredity Africa Bioinformatics Network, comprising 32 bioinformatics research groups in 15 African countries and in USA. He has interest in genomics application to profiling species, sequencing serious pathogens, metagenonomics, microbiome and for studying diseases in humans. 

Pascale Vonaesch is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne and a Principal Investigator within the NCCR Microbiomes. Her lab focuses on fundamental and translational/clinical research about the human intestinal ecosystem and the contribution of the microbiota to health and disease. In her research, she is especially interested in the role of the intestinal microbiome in childhood malnutrition and in the development of microbiota-targeted interventions.

Rob Knight is the Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at University of California San Diego, where he is a Professor of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering. He has spoken at TED and written over 700 scientific articles. He was honored with the 2017 Massry Prize, often considered a predictor of the Nobel. His work combines microbiology, DNA sequencing, ecology and computer science to understand the vast numbers of microbes that inhabit our bodies and our planet.

Wendy Garrett is the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she co-directs the Harvard Chan Microbiome in Public Health Center and Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. She is an Associate Member at the Broad Institute. Her lab focuses on the gut microbiome and immunity in health and diseases including colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel diseases.