Chairs and Speakers – M

Paolo Marchetti
Main position/role: Full Professor of Medical Oncology, Sapienza University of Rome and Scientific Director IDI-IRCCS, Rome, Italy

Prof. Marchetti, past Full Professor of Medical Oncology at University of Rome La Sapienza, is the Scientific Director of Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata – IRCCS in Rome, a Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Healthcare, a legal entity of public law of national relevance, and Founder and President of the Italian Foundation of Personalized Medicine. The research activity of Prof. Marchetti, documented in more than 460 published papers, is focused on the personalization of treatments in medical oncology, from genomic profiling to microbiota studies, from immunoncology to drug-drug interactions  and supportive care in different cancer types.

Website: www.idi.it

Dr. Peter McGrath obtained his BSc (honours) in Agricultural Zoology from the University of Glasgow, UK, and followed this with a PhD from the University of Leeds, UK, in 1989. His 10-year research career focused on the insect transmission of plant viruses and included postdoctoral positions at the Scottish Crop Research Institute as well as Purdue University and the University of Arizona in the USA. Returning to the UK in 1997, he established his own business as a freelance journalist focusing on agricultural, environmental and scientific issues. The experience he gained in communicating scientific issues to non-specialist audiences made him an ideal fit for his first position at TWAS – as writer/editor in the Public Information Office. From 2006, Peter began overseeing the implementation of TWAS’s core programmes, including South-South fellowships and other exchange schemes, research grants and various prizes, as well as the activities of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD). During this time he has helped expand these programmes as well as developing new partnerships and activities, including the EU-funded EuroAfrica-ICT project (2009-2012), and acting as the liaison person for TWAS’s involvement in the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI), for example. In 2013, he switched to become Coordinator of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), overseeing the Trieste office of the IAP secretariat (IAP-Health and IAP-Science) and acting as liaison person for the IAP Science Education Programme and the IAP Biosecurity Working Group. He also retains his position as coordinator of the TWAS science and diplomacy initiative, including representing TWAS in the EU Horizon2020-funded S4D4C project.

Her professional live has been driven by the wish to analyse factors that make microorganisms to pathogens. She started her career investigating different types of porcine circoviruses, tiny single-stranded and circular DNA viruses. Interestingly, infection with type 1 leaves pigs perfectly fine while type 2 induces a severe wasting disease in young pigs (PMWS). Apparently, co-factors such as immune-stimulation or other infections seem necessary for development of this severe and multisystemic disease. Annette Mankertz is a professor for molecular virology at Free University Berlin. She became interested in measles, mumps and rubella and started to study molecular signatures of circulating wildtype viruses in comparison with the attenuated live vaccines. She was appointed as the head of the German National Reference Center (NRC) for Measles, Mumps and Rubella at the Robert Koch-Institute in Berlin. NRC focus on specialized diagnostic and molecular characterization of the etiological agent of interest. Globally, more than 100 NRC perform molecular surveillance of circulating measles and rubella strains to support the elimination program of the WHO. Sequences are submitted to international data repositories in order to follow transmission chains in real-time modus. These data provide important information to assess the progress of elimination in a certain region. Elimination may be verified when virus variants are no longer detected than 12 months. Since global vaccination campaigns resulted in a loss of more and more measles virus variants circulating, new tools must be applied to follow virus transmission in a more detailed fashion.

Carlo is a reporter covering health care in Europe. He has written for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, and previously worked at a media startup focused on financial technology. He began his career in journalism contributing to a local London paper. Carlo studied at University College London where he completed his bachelor’s in European Social and Political Studies, with a focus on Russian and Philosophy.

Teresa Massara started her career in publishing by making the most of her MA in Foreign Languages and Literatures and landing a job as Foreign Rights Manager in a small Italian medical publishing house. As her other great passion was the study of Medicine, she was lucky enough to combine these two passions in one job and never left the medical publishing sector since. She has been working for the past 24 years at McGraw Hill, starting as Junior Editor for Nursing and currently holding the role of Associate Publisher for EMEA and Australia. She also holds a diploma from a post graduate advanced course in eLearning in Medicine from the Medical School of Florence, Italy.

Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresa-massara-8141b98/

Professor  Stephen Matlin is a Visiting Professor in the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, Senior Fellow in the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva and Secretary of the International Organization for Chemical Sciences in Development. Educated at Imperial College London as an organic chemist, Stephen worked in academia for over 20 years, including as Professor of Biological Chemistry at City University London and at Warwick University, researching in areas including medicinal chemistry and collaborating with the WHO Special Programmes in human reproduction and tropical diseases. This was followed by periods as Director of the Health and Education Division in the Commonwealth Secretariat, as Chief Education Adviser at the UK Department for International Development and as Executive Director of the Global Forum for Health Research in Geneva. He was a co-founder and co-chair of Global Health Europe. In 2015-2020 he was co-principal investigator of a project on the European dimension in the global effort to eradicate polio, based at the Global Health Centre in Geneva and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has co-authored a number of reports on the health of migrants and refugees, including a major review in Public Health Reviews.