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.
Before joining Vivli, Swapna was the Staff QA automation Engineer at Ripple Science, where she led the automation of Quality proofing the developed/enhanced code resulting in saving of hours of testing. Before Ripple science, Swapna was with NDS (now Cisco) and Tata Elxsi systems in the area of software development.
Swapna holds a Masters degree in computer science from Bellevue University Nebraska.
Lori is a Clinical Trial Disclosure Specialist for Vivli.
She has 10 years of experience working in medicine and biotech supporting data management workflows, clinical trial data sharing strategies, and global privacy initiatives.
Lori holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Master of Arts in Political Science with a Public Policy emphasis.
Prior to joining the Vivli team, she served as a Data Sharing Consultant and Operations Lead in the gRED Computational Sciences group at Genentech where she managed exploratory biomarker collaborations with global partners, consulted on sharing and privacy processes, and led the biomarker sharing program for scientific publications.
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.
Dr. Hermsen is the Lead for Global Antimicrobial Resistance & Antimicrobial Stewardship Medical Affairs at Pfizer and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine, in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Hermsen received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Nebraska Medical Center followed by a pharmacy practice residency at The Nebraska Medical Center, a fellowship in Infectious Diseases Research at the University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy, and a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management. Following her fellowship, Dr. Hermsen developed and co-directed the antimicrobial stewardship program at The Nebraska Medical Center and then joined Cubist, where she held medical affairs and outcomes research roles and created and led the Antimicrobial Stewardship Outreach Group. Subsequently, Dr. Hermsen transitioned to Merck & Co., Inc. (known as MSD outside the US and Canada), where she was a Global Health Equity Director, responsible for integrating health equity across the enterprise and supporting efforts to improve equitable outcomes, primarily focused on vaccination equity, and the Head of Global Antimicrobial Stewardship, responsible for creating and executing a global strategy to advance antimicrobial stewardship through education, implementation, research, and advocacy, across human, animal, and environmental health. Now, in her role at Pfizer, she is responsible for leading the development and implementation of the antimicrobial stewardship medical strategy.
Dr. Hermsen is a Fellow of the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists (SIDP) and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). She currently serves on the SIDP Policy & Government Affairs Committee, the IDSA Leadership Development Committee, the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Antimicrobial Stewardship Project at the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy, and the Forum on Microbial Threats through the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM); and she Co-Chairs the Appropriate Use Working Group of the AMR Industry Alliance. She has contributed to the profession with numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and by serving as a reviewer for several professional journals. Dr. Hermsen has given over 100 invited presentations at state, regional, national, and international meetings, and she gave a TED talk regarding antimicrobial resistance and stewardship at TEDx Omaha 2019.
