Team Member
Kim joined the Vivli team in 2021 as Administrative Coordinator and currently works as Manager of Administration, where she is responsible for supporting members in their day-to-day operations.
Prior to joining Vivli, Kim worked with a commercial real estate firm as an Executive Assistant, supporting a team of brokers and developing standard operating procedures. Kim holds an Associate of Science degree in Public Health.
Rebecca Li, PhD, is the CEO of Vivli and on faculty at the Center for Bioethics at the Harvard Medical School. Previous to her current role she was the Executive Director of the MRCT Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard for over 5 years and remains a Senior Advisor at the Center. She has over 25 years of experience spanning the entire drug development process with experience in Biotech, Pharma and CRO environments. She completed a Fellowship in 2013 in the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. She earned her PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
Director of Microbiology at Paratek Pharmaceuticals with over 20 years of experience in antibacterial research and development.
I received a B.S. in Medical Technology from Northeastern University and began my career as a Medical Technologist working in the clinical microbiology laboratory for several years before transitioning to the pharmaceutical industry. Prior to joining Paratek, I spent 13 years with Cubist Pharmaceuticals, developing Cubicin and Zerbaxa.
My primary areas of responsibility include, leading the Paratek Keystone Surveillance Program, managing antimicrobial susceptibility testing development, clinical trial development and writing support of regulatory submissions.
I am a member of the American Society of Microbiology and Infectious Disease Society of America.
Patricia A. Bradford is the owner of Antimicrobial Development Specialists LLC, a consulting company that focuses on the late-stage development of antibiotics. Prior to this she was at AstraZeneca and was responsible for the microbiology support contributing to the successful development and approval of ceftazidime-avibactam. Before joining AstraZeneca, Dr. Bradford worked in antibiotic research for Novartis, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and Lederle Laboratories. During her tenure at Wyeth she worked on a number of antibiotic projects and was instrumental in the team that wrote the dossier for the registration and approval of tigecycline. She was also heavily involved in the studies for several sNDA applications for piperacillin-tazobactam.
Dr. Bradford is fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology, has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has written several review articles and book chapters. She served as an editor for Antimicrobial Agents Chemotherapy 2001-2011 and is currently a Senior Editor for ASM’s newest journal, mSphere. She is also an active participant with the subcommittee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing of the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute.
Prior to working industry, she worked as a clinical microbiologist at Nebraska Methodist Hospital in Omaha. Dr. Bradford received a B.S. in Medical Technology from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology from Creighton University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in β-lactamase research.
Ana Cristina Gales is a Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Escola Paulista de Medicina, Universidade Federal de São Paulo (EPM-UNIFESP). She also serves as the Director of the Laboratory Alerta in São Paulo, Brazil.
Dr. Gales earned her medical degree from the Faculdade de Medicina (FMABC) in 1991 and completed her residency in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at EPM-UNIFESP from 1992 to 1995. She obtained a PhD in health sciences from EPM-UNIFESP in 2001, following a research fellowship in medical microbiology at the University of Iowa’s Department of Pathology in Iowa City, USA (1998-2000).
Her research focuses on the molecular epidemiology of multidrug-resistant bacteria and the in vitro activity of new antimicrobials. Dr. Gales is a full member of the Technical Chamber on Microbial Resistance in Health Services (CATREM), advising the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) on standards and measures for monitoring, controlling, and preventing antimicrobial resistance in Brazilian health services. She is also the Vice-Coordinator of the newly established Antimicrobial Resistance Institute of São Paulo (Aries).
She has collaborated on several global programs monitoring antimicrobial resistance rates and phenotypes among clinically relevant pathogens. She served as Chair of the Brazilian Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility (BrCAST) from 2017 to 2018. Additionally, she is an editor for The Brazilian Journal of Infectious Diseases and the Journal of Global Antimicrobial Resistance and has been a distinguished member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Global Antibiotic R&D Partnership (GARDP) since July 2021.
Direk is the Head of Microbiology at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), Thailand. He is a research physician with an MSc in Medical Statistics and a PhD in Life and Biomolecular Sciences. He holds the positions of Professor of Epidemiology at the Mahidol University, Thailand, and Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, UK.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a central focus of Direk’s research. He has led numerous clinical and epidemiological studies on AMR in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Notably, he developed an offline, user-friendly application called AMASS (www.amass.website), which enables hospitals to perform data analysis and generate AMR surveillance reports independently. The Ministry of Public Health in Thailand has adopted this application, allowing over 127 public hospitals to contribute summary data to the new open-access national AMR dashboard. This dashboard provides up-to-date information on the total number of patients who have died from bloodstream infections caused by AMR in each hospital and across the country.
Direk also initiated the AMR dictionary (www.amrdictionary.net) to address the jargon surrounding AMR in local languages. He advocates the concept of the ‘antibiotic footprint’ (www.antibioticfootprint.net) as a tool to communicate to the public the magnitude of antibiotic use in humans, animals and industry. He serves as a board member of the Surveillance and Epidemiology of Drug-resistant Infections Consortium (SEDRIC) (https://sedric.org.uk)
Dr. Anand Manoharan is a medical microbiologist and public health scientist. He completed his MSc and PhD from Christian Medical College, Vellore India and subsequently trained as a post doctoral fellow at New York Medical College. Dr. Manoharan was selected as a Fogarty International Fellow (2007-2009) and completed his MPH (Global Health) from Tufts University, Boston in 2009. In 2020 he completed his Executive Masters in Business Management (EMBA) program from Indian Institute of Technology- Madras.
Currently Dr. Manoharan is the Scientific and Antibiotic Susceptibility Program Lead at GSK, Brentford, UK and based out of Worli, Mumbai. He leads the multicountry Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance (SOAR) program at GSK. Previously, Dr. Manoharan was a scientist with the Department of Medicine Unit I and Infectious Diseases, CMC, Vellore.
Dr. Manoharan’s areas of research interest include surveillance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) including characterizing mechanisms of resistance, invasive pneumococcal disease and understanding etiology of undifferentiated fevers Dr. Manoharan has led many multicentric surveillance studies including the Alliance for Surveillance of Invasive Pneumococci (ASIP) which to date is among the largest pediatric invasive pneumococcal disease surveillance effort in India, results of which were published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases in 2017.
Dr. Manoharan has evaluated several new antibiotics prior to market launch and published these findings, this include netilmicin, isepamicin, ertapenem, tigecycline and cefepime-tazobactam. He has undertaken laboratory studies to understand the in vitro activity of these antibiotics, mechanisms of resistance and set interpretative microbiological breakpoints.
Dr. Manoharan has been the recipient of research grants from Government agencies, International foundations and pharmaceutical industry. He has presented his research findings in various international and national conferences and to date has 84 publications, majority of which are in the area of AMR surveillance. He serves on the Editorial Board of Clinical Epidemiology and Global Health (Elsevier). He is closely associated with School of Biosciences and Technology, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) having been a Research Advisor/ Co -Guide to 4 PhD students working on AMR and Bioinformatics.
Dr Mendelson studied Medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, and specialised in Infectious Diseases at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where he also attained his PhD. He moved to The Rockefeller University, New York in 2001 and subsequently to University of Cape Town to work on tuberculosis and innate immunity. In 2007 he started the first accredited Infectious Diseases Training Centre at University of Cape Town, and in 2011, he co-founded the South African Antibiotic Stewardship Programme, a grass roots advocacy and implementation collective. He co-authored the resulting South African Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Strategic Framework and chaired the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Resistance from its inception in 2014 until 2023.
Dr Mendelson is involved with multiple international partners on AMR and his focus is now on developing international policy to mitigate AMR.
Amrutha Baskaran serves as the Product Director at Vivli. She received a MD from Tbilisi State Medical University, Republic of Georgia and a master’s degree in Clinical Research from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). In addition, she completed a Fellowship in Clinical Research Ethics from the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Institute at MUSC.
Prior to the current position Amrutha worked as a Clinical Trial Lead for a medical device company running clinical trials on aortic stent grafts. She has 6 years of clinical trials experience in both academia and industry setting. She has experience in various roles as the study lead, data manager and regulatory specialist which gave her the exposure of working on both national and global clinical trials. In the past, Amrutha served as an Institutional Review Board member at the University of California, San Diego and as an external reviewer for Clinical Research Ethics Consultation Services at MUSC.
Michael Stebbins is the President of Science Advisors, a science and health consulting firm he founded in 2018 to provide science, technology, and public policy guidance to private companies, philanthropies, and non-profit organizations. He previously served as the Vice President of Science and Technology for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation where he was responsible for identifying and pursuing opportunities for philanthropic investment in Science and Technology. While at the Arnold Foundation he led initiatives that opened public access to data and publications created in the course of federally funded scientific research, and championed efforts in scientific reproducibility. His work at the Foundation addressed a broad set of critical issues including FDA policy on transparency, improving organ donation rates, leveraging the intellectual property sitting on shelves of universities and Federal agencies as well as opening access to scientific research publications and data.
Dr. Stebbins served as the Assistant Director for Biotechnology in the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. At the White House, he developed eight Executive Orders and other directives addressing issues ranging from the antibiotic resistance crisis to restoring pollinator health. His work led to broad changes in practice across the Federal government regarding the purchasing of bio-based products, improving veterans’ mental health, increasing access to federally funded scientific research publications and data, improving scientific reproducibility, evaluating and addressing the preferential purchasing of antibiotic free meats, reforming the regulatory system for biotechnology products, and improving the management of scientific collections.
Dr. Stebbins previously served as a science advisor to the Obama Presidential Campaign and on the Obama White House Transition Team. He is the former director of biology policy for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) where he led their biosecurity project. His work at FAS led to changes in how agents are trained to interact with scientists at the FBI Training Academy at Quantico. His team developed the first tools to train scientists on dual-use research of concern. He co-founded, and served on the board of directors for, Scientists and Engineers for America, and served as President of Scientists and Engineers for America Action Fund. In addition, Dr. Stebbins worked as a legislative fellow for U.S. Senator Harry Reid and a public policy fellow for the National Human Genome Research Institute. He is a former adjunct professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Washington, he was a senior editor at Nature Genetics.
Dr. Stebbins serves on the National Academies of Science Board of Research Data and Infrastructure. He received his B.S. in biology at SUNY Stony Brook and his Ph.D. in genetics while working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.