Gary P. Kobinger is the Director of the Galveston National Laboratory, one of the largest active biocontainment facilities on an academic campus. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Montreal and is currently an Assistant Professor at The University of Texas Medical Branch. He has co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and accumulated more than 20 years of experience working in or managing high-containment laboratories. His research presently focuses on developing and testing new vaccine platforms and immune treatments against pathogens of high consequences to global public health. His scientific output includes 315 publications, corresponding to 15,074 citations (h-index 64) (Scopus, 13 November 2023).
Nariman Shahhosseini is the head of the Center for Vector-Borne Diseases at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. In the past, he worked at several cutting-edge research centers (e.g., National Reference Laboratory and World Health Organization Collaborating Center) responsible for surveillance, diagnosis, and response orchestration to infectious disease outbreaks of international public health concern, beginning in 2011. He obtained his Ph.D. in Arbovirology focusing on the discovery of novel/emerging viruses at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (Germany). His experience in three different academic fields, bioinformatics, virology and entomology, has given him a unique opportunity to bridge these three fields, resulting in the development of state-of-the-art approaches. His research projects have been featured on CBC radio in 2020 and the Lefil journal in 2019. So far, he has contributed to several research projects and has published over 50 research articles in highly-ranked peer-reviewed journals. Further, he has published three books/chapters in the field of infectious diseases.
