New RSV vaccine and antibody to prevent disease in infants

Kristine Macartney is a paediatrician and infectious disease specialist. She is a medical graduate of the University of NSW and has over 20 years of experience in vaccinology.

She has experience working in the US at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was a founding member of the US Vaccine Education Center. Her Doctorate of Medicine was on rotavirus infection, in particular the mucosal immune response to novel vaccine candidates. She is interested in all aspects of vaccine preventable disease research, particularly policy development, vaccine safety and prevention of viral diseases. She is the Senior Editor of the Australian Immunisation Handbook. Kristine is a Staff Specialist in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead and has a conjoint academic appointment as Professor in the Discipline of Child and Adolescent Health at the University of Sydney.

Dr Britton is a paediatrician and infectious diseases physician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, and a senior lecturer in child and adolescent health with the University of Sydney. He is an early-mid career clinician researcher with expertise in surveillance of severe childhood infectious disease especially neurological infections. He co-leads the Paediatric Active Enhanced Disease Surveillance (PAEDS) network in which he is lead investigator for surveillance of childhood encephalitis, Acute Flaccid Paralysis and from 2020 COVID-19 in children and the newly described Paediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome Temporally associated with SARS-COV-2 (PIMS-TS).

Flor M. Muñoz, MD, MSc, is an associate professor of pediatrics, infectious diseases, molecular virology, and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine. She is a physician-scientist with research activities focusing on the evaluation of vaccine safety and efficacy in pregnant women, children, and people with compromised immune systems, as well as the epidemiology and treatment of infectious diseases in these special populations. She is a chair of the institutional review board at Baylor College of Medicine. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she served as co-chair of the maternal immunization working group of COVAX-Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and chair of the maternal immunization working group of the National Institutes of Health Infectious Disease Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC). She currently leads the special populations workstream of the CEPI-Safety Platform for Emergency vACcines (SPEAC) project, and contributes to various projects supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and World Health Organization to address infectious disease prevention through immunization to improve the health of women and children.

Professor Peter Richmond is a Consultant Paediatric Immunologist and Paediatrician at Perth Children’s Hospital, and is Head of the Immunology Department at the Child and Adolescent Health Service in WA. He also heads the Vaccine Trials Group within the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at the Telethon Kids Institute, and is Head of the Discipline of Paediatrics at the UWA Medical School. His major research interests are in the prevention of meningitis, pneumonia, respiratory infections and otitis media. He has authored over 300 scientific publications in these areas and has worked in vaccine research for over 25 years.

Professor Michelle Giles is a lead of the Clinical and Health Systems Research cross-cutting discipline at the Doherty Institute. She is an infectious diseases physician and clinician scientist, with clinical appointments at Alfred Health, The Royal Women’s Hospital, Monash Health and Western Health. She also has academic appointments at the Department of Infectious Diseases, University of Melbourne and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Monash University. Michelle specialises in infections in pregnancy and maternal immunisation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Michelle has supported the Government’s responses with a focus on control of community transmission of infection, and in leading policy advice for the COVID-19 vaccination program.