Dr Leanse was born and raised in Gibraltar, where he received his formative education prior to attending University. In 2017, he received his PhD in Molecular Microbiology from Imperial College London. Following his graduation, he was appointed as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School (HMS), working through the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. In late 2021, in recognition of his accomplishments, he was promoted to the Harvard faculty. Alongside his University of Gibraltar appointment, He is currently appointed (part-time) as a researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA, USA, where he works to provide ongoing scientific consultation for the Dai Laboratory.

Dr. Carnell read Biology with Microbiology at Imperial College, then went on to take the Medical Microbiology (Virology) MSc at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine under the supervision of Prof. Nick Dorrell, Prof. John Kelly and Dr. Nick Johnson (APHA). He went on to the Viral Pseudotype Unit at the University of Kent for his PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Nigel Temperton and Dr. Simon Scott, through a collaboration with Prof. Sarah Gilbert (Jenner inst. Oxford). Work surrounded the production and use of influenza glycoprotein bearing lentiviral pseudotypes.  This involved various subtypes and strains of this virus, and in particular, the production of a chimeric haemagglutinin used for the detection of stalk-directed and neutralising antibodies – one of many goals for current ‘universal’ influenza vaccine approaches.

A Gibraltarian, Nick was born, raised and schooled in Gibraltar before reading medicine at the University of Sheffield, UK. After qualification in 1999, Nick has worked in the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, training in internal medicine in Sheffield, Surrey & Southampton. Nick then undertook specialist training in Medical Microbiology & Virology at St Thomas’ Hospital London & Southampton. Nick has been a Consultant Medical Microbiologist in the NHS since 2007. He currently works as a Consultant in Infection at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (Basingstoke / Winchester) where he is also the Director of Infection Prevention & Control for the organisation.

Dr. Dai is an Associate Professor at Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is a current world leader responsible for launching the new research area of antimicrobial blue light therapy for multidrug-resistant infections.

Dr. Dai’s past research has resulted in over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals with an h-factor of 55 and >12,000 citations (Google Scholar data), and over 20 invited, plenary and keynote presentations at national and international conferences. In addition, Dr. Dai has been the PI of independent grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (R01, R21, and R13), the Department of Defense, Consortia for Improving Medicine w/ Innovation & Technology (CIMIT), and various other funding agencies. Dr. Dai’s professional recognition is also evidenced by his service on the grant review panels (or study sections) at the US National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, Harvard Catalyst, French National Research Agency, Ministry of Education of Singapore, Leibniz Association of Germany, etc.

Pu-Ting graduated from University of Science and Technology of China on 2014 for her Bachelor’s degree, and Ph.D. degree on Chemistry at Boston University on 2020 under the mentorship of Professor Ji-Xin Cheng. She then came to Forsyth Institute for her postdoc study. Her postdoc advisors are the prominent microbiologists: Drs. Xuesong He, Wenyuan Shi and Gary Borisy. Currently she is a NIH T90 postdoctoral fellow. Her research interest lies in unraveling important host/microbe-microbe interaction problems through advanced imaging approaches. So far she has published 21 papers with 10 of them being the first or co-first authors.

Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering and the School for the Environment at University of Massachusetts Boston. She obtained her S.B. in Chemistry from MIT in 1994 and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. She was a faculty member at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Biological Engineering as a faculty member from 2002-2012. From 2012-2015 she was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Bioengineering Systems and Technologies Group. Since 2015 she has been a faculty member at UMass Boston. She received an ONR Young Investigator Award and was named a Fellow of the Foresight Institute in 2017. Her research is focused on using nanotechnology for biological applications, such as infectious disease, cancer therapy, and food safety. Projects in her research lab include the development of low-cost diagnostics for viral diseases such as dengue, zika, yellow fever, and Ebola, the bacterial pathogen Vibrio parahaemolyticus, and biomarkers that can distinguish between viral and bacterial infections.

Michael R Hamblin was a Principal Investigator at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, an Associate Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School for 25 years, and is now a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and affiliated faculty at Radiation Biology Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. He gained his PhD in organic chemistry from Nottingham Trent University in England. His research interests include photodynamic therapy, photobiomodulation, drug delivery, nanomedicine, and tissue engineering. His research program was supported by NIH, CDMRP, USAFOSR and CIMIT.

Beihang University

Dr. Weili Hong is currently an associate professor at the School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering at Beihang University in Beijing, China. He graduated from the department of Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China in 2008 and obtained his PhD from the department of Physics at the University of Utah in USA in 2014. After that, he switched his research interests to biomedical engineering and worked at the Purdue University as a postdoc from 2015 to 2017. Since then, he had been focused on the development and application of coherent Raman scattering imaging in microbiology field. He has over 20 publications in journals including PNAS, Advanced Science, and Analytical Chemistry, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation of China, the National key Research and Development Program of China, and the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing.

Frederic Leblond, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Engineering Physics at Polytechnique Montreal and Director of the Laboratory for Radiological Optics (LRO). He is also a research scientist at the CRCHUM medical research center and co-founder of the companies ODS Medical (now Reveal Surgical) founded in 2015, and Tridan-Exclaro, founded in 2022.

Prof. Leblond is a physicist and engineer with a Google H-index of 36, over 100 publications, more than a dozen patent applications and more than 200 conference proceedings to date. He is a Full Professor at Polytechnique Montreal and leads a research laboratory there and at CRCHUM. His lab is currently composed of 18 members, including graduate students, postdocs and research professionals.

Dr Sanjay Marasini is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. With a keen interest in infectious ocular surface diseases and novel treatment methods of targeting microorganisms in an infection, his current research investigates the safety and efficacy of UVC as a potential treatment option for microbial keratitis. Sanjay has published 20+ papers in diverse aspects of Ophthalmology and Vision Science. His most recent publications appear in the most reputed Ophthalmology journals, such as The Ocular Surface. He is also an invited author of the British Contact Lens Associations’ international Contact Lens Evidence-based Academic Reports, published in 2021. Having practised as an Optometrist in different countries and observing the gaps in the affordability of treatments, Sanjay believes it is not only about how effective a treatment is but also how accessible it is. He is looking to develop UVC technology as an empiric treatment method for microbial keratitis.

Ronan gained his Bachelor of Science in Genetics with first class honours from University College Cork, Ireland in 2010 and was awarded the title of College Scholar. In autumn 2010, Ronan was awarded an Irish Research Council PhD Scholarship to study novel biofilm inhibition strategies against the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa in the lab of Professor Fergal O’Gara. In 2014, Ronan joined the research group of Professor Alain Filloux at the MRC Centre for Bacteriology and Infection at Imperial College London. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate, Ronan interrogated the second messenger signalling cascades that govern the biofilm mode of growth in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Following on from his time at Imperial College Ronan joined the Microbiology Department at the Animal and Plant Health Agency where he used host transcriptomics and pathway analysis to profile the host response to infection.

Frank Sams-Dodd has a M.Sc. degree from Copenhagen University in biology and a Ph.D. degree from Cornell University, USA in integrative neurobiology and physiology. In 2001, he received the doctoral degree (Dr.med.) in medicine from Copenhagen University.

He is Managing Director of Willingsford Ltd, a UK healthcare company with a marketed wound treatment. Previous positions include Research Fellow at the Danish pharmaceutical company H. Lundbeck A/S where he particularly was involved in schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease research; VP & CSO at Sams-Dodd, S.L., a company offering contract research, licensing and consulting services to the pharmaceutical industry; Director of Physiology at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in San Diego the area of metabolic disorders; Head of Psychopharmacology at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma, Germany focusing on drug discovery in Alzheimer’s disease and psychiatry; and Vice President of Pre-Clinical Research at Bionomics Ltd., an Australian biotech company; and CEO of Neurofit SAS, a pre-clinical CRO located in Strasbourg, France, which is fully owned by Bionomics.

Yanfang Feng received her Ph.D. in molecular microbiology at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Professor Stanley Brul. She then came to Harvard Medical School for Postdoc training under the mentorship of Professor Tayyaba Hasan, who has more than three decades of passion and experience in the development of optical methods for the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases and cancers. Dr. Feng is now an instructor in Professor Hasan’s research group. She is the recipient of multiple competitive awards for young scientists, including the Eleanor and Miles Shore Faculty Development Award from Harvard Medical School, the Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellow Award from the International Photodynamic Association, and the Rubicon Postdoc Award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Her current research focuses on bacterial infection diagnostics and novel antimicrobial therapy and susceptibility test development by using a variety of wet and dry lab approaches.

Dr. Alessandra Nara de Souza Rastelli is a DDS, graduated at the State University of Ponta Grossa-UEPG, School of Dentistry, Parana, Brazil (1996) and completed her Master’s (2002) and Ph.D. Degree (2004) at the São Paulo State University – UNESP, School of Dentistry, Araraquara, SP, Brazil. She already worked as a Visiting Scientist at different Universities around the world, such as: University of Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany; Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam – ACTA, Amsterdam, Netherlands; University of Birmingham, Dental School, Birmingham, UK and Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, University of Harvard, Boston, MA, USA. Since 2009. 

Dr. Schooley is a Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. He completed medical school and an internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins and infectious disease fellowships at the NIH and Massachusetts General Hospital.  He joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1981. His longer-term research efforts are directed at the pathogenesis and therapy of RNA virus infections. He has been heavily involved in the development of antiviral chemotherapy directed at HIV, HCV and the herpesgroup viruses as well as in research, teaching and infrastructure building efforts in sub-Saharan Africa.  Following his successful treatment of a multidrug resistant A. baumannii infection in a fellow faculty member at UC San Diego, he has become interested in the use of viruses as therapeutic agents – namely the use of bacteriophages to treat multidrug resistant bacterial infections.

I am a professor in the School of Systems Biology at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. The van Hoek lab is focused on the study of antibiotic-resistant and biothreat bacteria, especially gram-negative bacteria.

Antimicrobial Approaches: We are exploring novel antimicrobial approaches including antimicrobial peptides, and an approach involving peptide-nucleic acids against bacteria.

Antimicrobial Peptides: We have projects to discover and invent antimicrobial peptides against the multi-drug resistant ESKAPE (wound-infecting) pathogens as well as biothreat bacteria. We study cell-to-cell communication and biofilm formation in these dangerous bacteria, including ways to disperse biofilms (peptides, DSF, chitinase) and regulate biofilm formation (quorum sensing via small molecules). We have discovered powerful antimicrobial peptides naturally expressed by alligators, crocodiles, and Komodo dragons, and continue to develop novel synthetic antimicrobial peptides for in vivo studies.