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.
William is currently the Technical Operations Engineer. He joined the Vivli team in 2021.
He Holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from UMass Lowell and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminal Justice from Plymouth State University. Before joining Vivli, William worked for the State of New Hampshire at the Department of Information Technology (DoIT), providing technical support to state employees.
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.
Dr. Barbara Bierer is the faculty co-chair of the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (MRCT Center), a Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and a hematologist/oncologist. She is the Director of the Regulatory Foundations, Ethics and the Law Program of the Harvard clinical and translational sciences center. Previously she served as senior vice president, research at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital for 11 years, and was the institutional official for human subjects and animal research, for biosafety and for research integrity. She initiated the Brigham Research Institute and the Innovation Hub (iHub), a focus for entrepreneurship and innovation.
In addition, she was the Founding Director of the Center for Faculty Development and Diversity at the BWH. In addition to her academic responsibilities, she serves on the Board of Directors of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R), dedicated to promoting the ethical conduct of biomedical and behavioral research; Management Sciences for Health (MSH), an international organization working in partnership globally to strengthen health care, local capability, and access; and the Edward P Evans Foundation, a foundation supporting biomedical research. Previously she has served as the chair of the Board of Directors of the Association for Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP) and as chair of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, HHS. She has authored or co-authored over 180 publications and is on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Current Protocols of Immunology.
Dr. Bierer received a B.S. from Yale University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.
Liz Graham serves as Senior Clinical Research Data Manager for Vivli. She received a Master of Public Health (MPH) from the University of New England and a Master of Data Science and Analytics (MS) from the University of Maryland. Additionally, she completed the Cross Cultural Health Immersion to Ghana, West Africa as part of a multidisciplinary team that evaluated integration of western health approaches with local medicine to improve cultural competence awareness.
Prior to this role, Liz coordinated multi-disease clinical trials at Johns Hopkins. She developed experience in oncological trial management, clinical EDCs, regulatory and protocol compliance standards. Liz is a member of the American Public Health Association and American Health Information Management Association.
Bill O’Neil is a Principal Software Engineer at Vivli.
Prior to joining Vivli, Bill worked at Parexel International where he led teams developing and implementing applications for supporting clinical trials, including the management of documents for same. Prior to Parexel Bill was with various commercial ERP software companies developing critical applications for business, including material management for manufacturers, order management, and SharePoint administration.
Steven E. Kern, PhD, is Executive Director of Global Health Labs (www.ghlabs.org) whose mission is to develop innovative technologies to address unmet healthcare needs, especially in low and middle income countries. Global Health Labs helps to advance the strategic priorities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with technology innovations focused on diagnostics, reproductive, maternal and child health, and tools and equipment for primary care. It is created and funded by Gates Ventures, the private office of Bill Gates.
Previously he served as for nearly 10 years as Deputy Director of Quantitative Sciences at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Quantitative Sciences group is focused on data analysis to support program strategies for therapeutic projects that the foundation funds. This effort extends across all therapeutic areas in which the foundation is involved including maternal & child health, family planning, malaria, tuberculosis, neglected tropical diseases, HIV, and pandemic preparedness. He and his team are strong advocates of making research data “always FAIR and sometimes OPEN” to improve the impact data can have towards the problem it was collected to address, and beyond.
Prior to this, he was Global Head of Pharmacology Modeling at Novartis Pharma AG based in Basel Switzerland where he led a team focused on providing model-based drug development support to therapeutics across all stages of drug development. He joined Novartis in 2010 from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah where he was Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics, Anesthesiology, and Bioengineering, and served as co-investigator for their NIH funded Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit. He has designed, conducted, and served as a principal investigator for clinical pharmacology studies that spanned the population from preterm infants to elderly adults.
Seamus O’Brien is the R&D Director at the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), a non for profit organisation addressing the public health impact of antibiotic resistance by prioritizing the development of and access to treatments for bacterial infections in patients and populations for which there are limited or no options. Seamus leads an R&D team to develop and deliver a portfolio of treatments through an integrated development to access to model. In 2023 his team delivered the first pivotal phase 3 clinical trial to address a World Health Organisation priority pathogen sponsored and led by a non-profit organisation.
Previously, he was responsible, in AstraZeneca and then Pfizer, for building and leading public-private R&D collaborations to address the need to develop treatment options for drug resistant infections. He played a leading role in establishing and leading novel partnerships with the US government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and with the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) New Drugs 4 Bad Bugs programme in Europe. Seamus has a Ph.D. in Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and host immunity from the University of Leicester and first degree in Microbiology from Trinity College Dublin.
