Plenaries at ESCAIDE 2026

Shingai Machingaidze is the Head of Africa Strategy and Engagement at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). She is an epidemiologist and public health specialist with over a decade of experience building the capacity of Africa-based scientists and institutions. She previously served as Acting Chief Science Officer for Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and led the Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA) Secretariat, following earlier roles at the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), South Africa's Medical Research Council, and the University of Cape Town. She has authored many publications in leading medical journals and serves on several global health advisory boards, including a role as Co-Chair of the International Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat’s Science and Technology Expert Group. Her expertise includes strategic engagement, planning and support of large public health programmes, and the management of strategic partnerships and engagements with national, regional and international agencies. 

Gianfranco Spiteri is the Head of the Global Epidemic Intelligence and Health Security Section at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Originally from Malta, he graduated as a medical doctor in 2003 and trained as an EPIET fellow before returning home to work in infectious disease surveillance and control. He joined ECDC in 2010, going on to coordinate surveillance of sexually transmitted infections (STI) for eight years while also supporting emergency responses to outbreaks including Zika, Ebola, COVID-19 and hantavirus. Gianfranco later became Group Lead of the Epidemic Intelligence team at ECDC, before stepping into his current role in 2025.

Helen Brown is the Director of Safinea and a highly experienced researcher, specialising in the use of AI methods in political decision-making, with a focus on accounting for uncertainty, reducing bias, and ensuring representation. Between 2017 and 2023, she worked as a mathematical modeller at ECDC and the European Commission, advising decision-makers on pandemic policy including social distancing, border closures and vaccine strategy. An applied mathematician, she has advanced the use of Bayesian methods for inferring the causes of health outcomes and is committed to promoting understanding of non-linearity and dynamic systems in policy decisions. She holds degrees in Physics and Biomolecular Science from Imperial College London and in the Control of Infectious Diseases from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. 

Magdalena Rosińska is a Professor at the National Institute of Public Health (NIH) – National Research Institute of Poland in Warsaw, where she has worked since 2002. She is a physician and epidemiologist specialising in public health data analysis, with research focused on HIV and viral hepatitis. Drawing on an interdisciplinary background in medicine, biostatistics and mathematics, she combines classical epidemiological approaches with modern statistical techniques, such as missing data imputation, reporting delay analysis, and Bayesian modelling. She collaborates with international institutions including ECDC, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cambridge on projects involving big data and digital tools for public health decision-making, making her one of the leading figures in data-driven epidemiology in Poland.

A Harvard DrPH (Doctor of Public Health) candidate (2027) and global health leader with two decades of experience at WHO and ECDC, Tina D. Purnat specialises in the intersection of technology, policy, and public health systems innovation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she led the development of WHO's global approach to infodemic management and health misinformation response, work which has been adopted by health authorities worldwide. Her doctoral research extends this work to the local level, examining how the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene can systematically learn from what its frontline community health workers observe about community trust, information gaps, and service barriers. 

Tina is Vice President of the European Public Health Association (EUPHA) Global Health Section and co-chair of the Global Health Equity and Digital Transformation working group of the World Federation of Public Health Associations.

She is Associate Editor of JMIR Infodemiology, editorial advisor for Health Promotion International, and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health.

She holds affiliated visiting researcher appointments at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Literacy at the Technical University of Munich and at the Laboratory for Infodemiology and Infodemic Management at the University of Belgrade School of Medicine.

She is committed to equipping public health institutions with the systems, policies, and digital tools needed to anticipate the next crisis, not just respond to the last one.

Steven Van Gucht is scientific director at the Belgian national public health institute, Sciensano, where he leads multidisciplinary activities in public health surveillance, microbiology and virology, with a strong focus on emerging infectious diseases and pandemic preparedness. His work is grounded in the One Health approach and translating science into actionable public health advice and communication. D, he served as a government advisor and national spokesperson and at present, he is the Belgian National Microbiology Focal Point for ECDC and a Visiting Professor at Ghent University, Belgium.

Anders Hviid is Head of the Department of Data Science and AI in Health at Statens Serum Institut and an affiliated professor at the PandemiX Center at Roskilde University in Denmark. He is an epidemiologist with a background in mathematics and physics. He has used Denmark’s nationwide health registers to answer questions about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Many of his large population-based vaccine safety studies are internationally recognised, and many of them have shaped public debate. In 2019, he led a nationwide cohort study of 657 461 children that found no increased risk of autism associated with MMR vaccination. In 2025, he led a study of 1.2 million children that found no increased risk of autoimmune, allergic or neurodevelopmental conditions associated with aluminium-adsorbed childhood vaccines.

Hviid is also an active public communicator on social and in traditional media. Here he promotes solid scientific evidence on vaccines and infectious diseases. He has engaged directly with controversies surrounding vaccines in the United States, including responding publicly to criticism of his group’s aluminium-in-vaccines study from the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He values scientific rigour, transparency and open engagement to help protect and rebuild public trust in science.

Nick Bundle completed specialty training in public health and a field epidemiology training programme in London and South-East England. In 2018, he moved to Stockholm to take up a position at ECDC, where he has focused primarily on vaccine-preventable diseases and respiratory viruses. From early 2020, he was assigned full-time to the COVID-19 response and developed many of ECDC's COVID-19 surveillance outputs. As a Principal Expert in ECDC’s Respiratory Viruses section, he coordinates weekly EU-level surveillance of acute respiratory infections, working closely with experts from 30 European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) Member States and WHO’s Regional Office for Europe. He serves as the ECDC project manager for the European mortality monitoring activity, EuroMOMO, co-developed the joint European Respiratory Virus Surveillance Summary and has recently led the production of updated respiratory virus surveillance technical guidance for the EU/EEA.

John Brownstein, Ph.D is a Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School as well as Senior Vice-President and Chief Innovation Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital. He directs both the Computational Epidemiology Laboratory and the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator. Trained as an epidemiologist at Yale University, his research has been instrumental in facilitating the control and prevention of disease, improving public health practice, and engaging the public in health issues. As a pioneer in computational epidemiology, Dr. Brownstein's research is recognised for its translational impact, particularly through the development and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), data mining, and citizen science. His innovative platforms, such as Vaccines.gov, Global.health, and HealthMap, serve millions annually and have received recognition from the National Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute in the US. His research was pivotal in the early detection and response to major disease outbreaks, including H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2015 and COVID in 2019. 

Dr. Brownstein's contributions extend beyond academia into advisory roles for agencies including the US Department of Health and Human Sciences (HHS), the Demographic and Health Surveys Program (DHS), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Defense (DOD), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC), WHO, and the White House. As Chief Innovation Officer, his efforts have catalysed the launch of dozens of new start-ups and unique partnerships with companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Uber, Instacart, Microsoft, and OpenAI. He also plays a leading role in shaping the hospital’s comprehensive digital strategy, including the integration of AI to improve patient care.

Dr Brownstein has been honoured with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honour bestowed on outstanding scientists by the US government, the Lagrange Prize for international achievements in complexity sciences and an Emmy for his contributions to medical reporting for ABC News during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Brownstein is co-founder of digital health companies Epidemico and Circulation and an ABC Medical News contributor. He has authored over 300 peer-reviewed articles on epidemiology and public health.

Trine is a medical doctor and specialist in public health medicine who has been working as a Senior Medical Adviser at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) since 2018. 

In the last few years, she has worked with a wide range of respiratory infection surveillance systems across the disease pyramid, using different data sources, more recently with a particular focus on health register data. She serves as public health lead for several respiratory infections and frequently contributes to public health communication as a media spokesperson and editor of NIHP’s respiratory disease bulletin. 

She currently coordinates the epidemiological surveillance of respiratory infections in Norway and serves as the ECDC National Focal Point for Viral Respiratory Diseases and Operational Contact Point for influenza. She will enter ECDC’s EPIET Fellowship Programme in autumn 2026. 

Ron Fouchier (1966) is professor of Molecular Virology at the Viroscience Department of Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam. He obtained a PhD in 1995 for HIV/AIDS research at the University of Amsterdam and then continued HIV work at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in the US. In 1998, he started a molecular virology research line on respiratory viruses, in particular influenza, at the Erasmus University Medical Centre. His team contributed substantially to the identification and characterisation of various ‘new’ viruses, such as human metapneumovirus, human coronavirus NL63, SARS coronavirus, MERS coronavirus, and influenza A virus subtype H16. His current research is focused on respiratory viruses in humans and animals, antigenic drift, and influenza virus zoonoses, transmission and pandemics. Ron is an elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW). In 2006, he received the Heine-Medin award of the European Society for Clinical Virology, in 2013, the Huibregtsen award for top innovative science with societal impact, and in 2023, the KNAW Beijerinck Virology Prize. Fouchier coordinates the consortium that will act as the EU Reference Laboratory in Public Health in the field of Respiratory Viruses that is expected to commence operations s in 2027.

Moritz Kraemer is a Professor of Epidemiology and Data Science at the University of Oxford, co-director of Pandemic Genomics at the Oxford Martin School, and co-founder of Global.health, an open-access platform for outbreak data and analytics. His interdisciplinary lab combines mathematical modelling, AI and machine learning, and phylodynamics for the study of infectious disease dynamics, focusing on climate-sensitive diseases such as dengue and Zika, as well as SARS-CoV-2, mpox and Ebola outbreaks. He frequently advises governments and organisations on disease surveillance, outbreak response, and biosecurity, and has been recognised with awards including a Branco Weiss Fellowship. Prior to taking up his position at Oxford, he held a fellowship in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School. He also holds a DPhil in Statistical Epidemiology from the University of Oxford.

Professor Julian Savulescu is the Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and Head of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an award-winning ethicist and moral philosopher, trained in neuroscience, medicine, and philosophy and has held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002. 

He is a Visiting Professorial Fellow in Biomedical Ethics at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Distinguished International Visiting Professor in Law at the University of Melbourne where he leads the Biomedical Ethics Research Group. Professor Savulescu is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest. In 2026, he was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. 

Professor Sheetal Silal is an internationally recognised leader in the field of infectious disease modelling, with a particular focus on vector-borne and vaccine-preventable diseases and pandemic preparedness in Africa and globally. She is Director of the Modelling and Simulation Hub, Africa (MASHA) at the University of Cape Town and an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow in Tropical Disease Modelling at Oxford University. Her research focuses on developing and applying mathematical transmission models to understand disease dynamics, assess public health interventions, and support evidence-based decision-making. Her work spans African and global contexts, with a strong emphasis on translating complex modelling outputs into actionable insights for public health decision-making. She chairs WHO’s Immunization and Vaccines-related Implementation Research Advisory Committee and is a Gates Foundation Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellow. Through these roles, she contributes to global immunisation strategy and advances the use of modelling to inform health system planning, endemic disease control, and pandemic preparedness efforts. Professor Silal is deeply committed to building capacity in Africa by training the next generation of African modellers, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and strengthening networks across the continent to ensure that African countries are equipped to respond to both endemic diseases and emerging public health threats.