Dr. Trish Simner is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Medical Bacteriology and Parasitology Laboratories at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at University of Manitoba in Canada, and a Clinical Microbiology Fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Dr. Simner’s research interests include understanding the molecular mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance, applications of sequencing for surveillance and hospital outbreak detection, and use of sequencing for clinical diagnostics.

Dr. Hooper is Chief of the Infection Control Unit and Associate Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the former Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at MGH.

Dr. Hooper’s research has focused on mechanisms of antimicrobial action and resistance with a particular emphasis on fluoroquinolones. His laboratory has received continuous funding from the NIH for the past 30 years, and he is a recipient of an NIH Merit Award. He is author of over 200 peer-reviewed articles on mechanisms and epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance and 76 book chapters and other articles.

Dr. Hooper is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a Member of the Association of American Physicians. He has served as Chair of the Drug Discovery and Antimicrobial Resistance Study Section of the NIH and Chair of the Scientific Program Committee of the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy of the ASM. He is past President and past Meetings Board Chair of the ASM, has served on the editorial board of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, and is Deputy Editor of The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Calderwood is Emeritus Chief of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Morton N. Swartz MD Academy Professor of Medicine (Microbiology and Immunobiology) at Harvard Medical School. During his 27 year tenure as the Chief of Infectious Diseases, he oversaw the clinical and research training of over 200 fellows training in Infectious Diseases and also ran a research lab that was continuously funded by the NIH. Dr. Calderwood also served as president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2014-2015. Dr. Calderwood graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1975.

Dr. Patel is the Elizabeth P. and Robert E. Allen Professor of Individualized Medicine, Professor of Medicine, Professor of Microbiology, Director of the Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory, and Co-Director of the Clinical Bacteriology Laboratory at the Mayo Clinic. She is board certified in Infectious Diseases, as well as Medical and Public Health Microbiology. Dr. Patel is the immediate Past-President of the American Society for Microbiology and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Dr. Patel’s research, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), focuses on bacterial resistance, development and utilization of diagnostic tests, and biofilms. She has published over 400 peer-reviewed manuscripts.

In addition to her positions at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Patel is a member of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Council, Director of the NIH Laboratory Center for the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG), an advisor to the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) Subcommittee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing, a member of the American Board of Pathology Medical Microbiology and Clinical Pathology for ABPath CertLink^TM Test Development and Advisory Committees, and an associate editor of Clinical Infectious Diseases. She is also a past chair of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination Microbiology and Immunology Test Material Development Committee and a current member of a U.S. Medical Licensing Examination Item Review Group.

Dr. Mathers is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pathology at the University of Virginia. She is the Clinical Director of the Adult Antimicrobial Stewardship Program and Director for Clinical Microbiology Sequencing and Associate Director of Clinical Microbiology for the University of Virginia Medical Center.

Dr. Mather’s research has focused on antimicrobial resistance in gram-negative pathogens over the last decade. She has utilized whole genome sequencing applications to understand hospital pathogen transmission including the hospital environment. Her clinical research has focused on molecular detection of resistance in clinical microbiology and mechanisms for turning results into change for patients via antimicrobial stewardship paired interventions. With additional interest in antimicrobial susceptibility testing and its relation to antimicrobial use and stewardship.

Dr. Mathers is a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, current voting member of the Clinical Laboratory and Standards Institute (CLSI) Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Committee and co-chair of the breakpoint working group. She is the Infectious Diseases Society of America liaison for the CLSI. She is a reviewer for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) including the Antimicrobial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG) Diagnostics Committee. She has received funding from both Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as NIH.

Dr. Grad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School. He earned his MD and PhD degrees at Harvard Medical School with his doctoral research in bioinformatics and genomics, and completed his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and clinical infectious diseases fellowship in the MGH/BWH combined program. Prior to joining the faculty at HSPH, he was a research fellow with Marc Lipsitch in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at HSPH. Dr. Grad’s research investigates how pathogens evolve and spread using a combination of genomics, mathematical modeling, and epidemiological tools, and includes projects investigating the population genomics and emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the causative agent of gonorrhea.

Since Jan. 2018, Dr. Listgarten is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Center for Computational Biology, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a member of the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and a Chan Zuckerberg investigator. From 2007 to 2017 she was at Microsoft Research, through Cambridge, MA (2014-2017), Los Angeles (2008-2014), and Redmond, WA (2007-2008). She completed her Ph.D. in the machine learning group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, located in her home town. She has two undergraduate degrees, one in Physics and one in Computer Science, from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Dr. Listgarten’s research interests are broadly at the intersection of machine learning, applied statistics, molecular biology and science.

Dr. Robison spent 10 years at Millennium Pharmaceuticals working with various genomics & proteomics technologies & working on multiple teams attempting to apply these throughout the drug discovery process. He spent 2 years at Codon Devices working on a variety of protein & metabolic engineering projects as well as monitoring a high-throughput gene synthesis facility. After a brief bit of consulting, he rejoined the cancer drug discovery field at Infinity Pharmaceuticals in May 2009. In September 2011 he joined Warp Drive Bio, a startup applying genomics to natural product drug discovery. Blogger at Omics! Omics!

Dr. Simpson with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, develops algorithms and software for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. He works primarily on de novo genome assembly, the detection of somatic mutations in cancer and, most recently, the development of algorithms for nanopore-based sequencers. Dr. Simpson and his research group have developed the ABYSS, SGA and nanopolish software packages.

Dr. Hojvat is currently an advisor for Partners in Diagnostics, LLC, the WHO and their IVD pre-qualification team and is consulting on the global regulation pre-and post-market introduction of in vitro diagnostics both for emergency and non-emergency use for procurement organizations, in-vitro diagnostic test developers, governmental bodies and for philanthropic foundations. She was for 12 years the Director of the CDRH Division of Microbiology Devices in the Office of In-vitro Diagnostic Device and Radiological Health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, (FDA) and prior to that spent 19 years in the international diagnostic device industry in various capacities ranging from R & D, On-Market Product Support, Scientific Affairs, Quality and Clinical Research. She represented FDA on the President’s Committee for anti-microbial resistance, served on several U.S Health and Human Services Emerging Pathogen Preparedness Committees, as well as a U.S. Academy of Science Committee related to microbial diagnostic issues. Dr. Hojvat has participated in IVD regulation training workshops in Europe, Africa and Asia and worked with international non-profit agency grant proposal review teams. She was also a member from 2017-2019 of the 1st WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on in Vitro Diagnostics responsible for the selection and use of  “Essential IVDs”. She is author and co-author of several major publications.

Dr. Crisp is the VP of Research and Development at Molecular Designs and focused on developing diagnostic products for the physician office laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of California at Irvine in 2002 and did a post-doctoral fellowship in the Pathology department at the University of Utah.

Prior to his current role, Dr. Crisp was VP of Microbiology at Biomerieux, where he was responsible for lifecycle development for five IVD systems accounting for $1B in revenue. His team was set across 3 sites in the USA and 5 sites in France, including approximately 350 employees (software developers, data scientists, hardware/firmware engineers, microbiologists, molecular biologists, program directors, project managers). Management of $110M annual R&D budget spanning 90+ projects. Rob joined Biomerieux following the acquisition of BioFire Diagnostics, where he played a key role in building an IVD development program, and was a key contributor to the FilmArray system design. Rob led the development for all panels and is an inventor on 7 patents.