Eurosurveillance seminar: Three decades of serving infectious disease prevention and control in Europe

Shingai Machingaidze is an epidemiologist and global health leader. She has developed and led global health and research programs that build institutional capacity in Africa and beyond. Her expertise includes: leading and managing strategic partnerships and engagements with national, regional and international agencies, planning and supporting large public health programmes; conducting and managing clinical trials and clinical research; and managing research grants and finances. She is an established thought leader who has published in leading scientific journals and is a member of several institutional, regional and global advisory boards, including the Advisory Committee for the Clinical Trials Community in Africa, Co-Chair of the 100 Days Mission Science Technology Expert Group and Advisor to the Accra Reset Secretariat. She was previously the Ag. Chief Science Officer for Africa CDC.

Professor Kevin Fenton is one of the United Kingdom’s most influential public health leaders, whose career has been defined by a singular commitment to improving health, advancing equity, and strengthening systems that serve the most vulnerable in society. An internationally recognised epidemiologist and senior public health physician, he has shaped policy and practice at local, national and global levels, combining scientific rigour with moral clarity and decisive leadership.

As Regional Director of Public Health for London, Professor Fenton has led health improvement for one of the world’s most complex and diverse cities. In this role, he serves as the statutory public health advisor to the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority, guiding strategies that affect the lives of over nine million people. His leadership has been instrumental in tackling some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including cardiovascular disease, mental health, infectious diseases, air quality and the wider determinants of health. His work has positioned London as a global exemplar for urban public health innovation, partnership and delivery.

Ana Marušić is Professor of Anatomy, Chair of the Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health, and Head of the Center for Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Split School of Medicine in Split, Croatia. Her research interests include evidence-based medicine and research integrity. She has published over 400 articles in peer-reviewed journals and was heavily involved with creating the policy of mandatory registration of clinical trials in public registries which helped change the legal regulation of clinical trials worldwide. She has participated in several EU projects related to medicine, research integrity, ethics and reproducibility. She is currently the coordinator of the Horizon Europe EU4MEDTECH, which works on a regulatory framework for high-risk and innovative medical devices. Prof. Marušić is the founder of Cochrane Croatia and also serves on the Advisory Board of the EQUATOR Network. She was the editor in chief of the Croatian Medical Journal and the Journal of Global Health. She is currently the Senior Editor-in-Chief of ST-OPEN, an overlay journal of the University of Split. She was the president of several editorial organizations: EASE, CSE, and WAME. She serves on the Council of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and as the president of The Embassy Foundation. She is also the founding member of the Croatian Reproducibility and Integrity Network, CroRIN.

Roberto Croci is an infectious disease epidemiologist currently working at the Statens Serum Institut (SSI) in Copenhagen, Denmark. A medical doctor by background, he completed a postgraduate residency program in public health in Italy, during which he did research and training periods at the Italian Istituto Superiore di Sanita, at the ECDC and at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. He has started at the SSI in 2023 as an EPIET fellow. During the fellowship, he contributed to outbreak investigations, surveillance and register-based studies, and was deployed for fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan. His research interest include: clinical epidemiology, register-based and modelling studies.