Ann Burchell

Canada

Dr. Ann Burchell is Research Director at the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Scientist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto. She is a Canada Research Chair in Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention. She holds degrees in epidemiology from the University of Toronto (MSc) and McGill University (PhD) and has academic appointments as Associate Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, and Division of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto; Adjunct Professor, Division of Cancer Epidemiology, McGill University; and Adjunct Scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Medicine, Toronto.

Dr. Burchell’s research program focuses on the epidemiology of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, human papillomavirus (HPV), syphilis, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Its goal is to generate evidence for effective and practical strategies to prevent STIs and STI-related cancers in high-risk populations, including people living with or at risk for HIV.

She has extensive methodological experience in the design and implementation of: observational longitudinal studies with primary and secondary data; sexual behaviour and health-access questionnaires; natural history studies using laboratory markers of infection; and pragmatic randomized trials for HPV prevention and improved screening for syphilis, cervical and anal cancer. She currently holds a Foundation Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Ann Burchell

Canada

Dr. Ann Burchell is Research Director at the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Scientist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto. She is a Canada Research Chair in Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention. She holds degrees in epidemiology from the University of Toronto (MSc) and McGill University (PhD) and has academic appointments as Associate Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, and Division of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto; Adjunct Professor, Division of Cancer Epidemiology, McGill University; and Adjunct Scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Medicine, Toronto.

Dr. Burchell’s research program focuses on the epidemiology of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, human papillomavirus (HPV), syphilis, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Its goal is to generate evidence for effective and practical strategies to prevent STIs and STI-related cancers in high-risk populations, including people living with or at risk for HIV.

She has extensive methodological experience in the design and implementation of: observational longitudinal studies with primary and secondary data; sexual behaviour and health-access questionnaires; natural history studies using laboratory markers of infection; and pragmatic randomized trials for HPV prevention and improved screening for syphilis, cervical and anal cancer. She currently holds a Foundation Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Gina Ogilvie

Canada

Gina Ogilvie, MD MSc FCFP DrPH is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Global Control of HPV related diseases and prevention, and Professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Population and Public Health. She is also Senior Public Health Scientist and Public Health Physician at BC Centre for Disease Control; Senior Research Advisor at the BC Women’s Hospital and Health Centre. She was previously Medical Director of Clinical Prevention Services at BC Centre for Disease Control where she provided both operational and scientific leadership to an integrated public health unit with over 100 staff. This unit focuses on providing public health leadership and service in STIs, HIV, Hepatitis and Tuberculosis provincially, nationally and globally. Dr. Ogilvie is currently principal investigator on over 10 million dollars in research grants and she has received funding from NIH, PHAC, CIHR, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, Canadian Foundation for Innovation and private foundations including BC Women’s Hospital Foundation among others. Her research is focused on both the public health and clinical aspects of reproductive health, sexually transmitted infections, HPV screening and the HPV vaccine, and her findings have been highly influential in setting and directing health policy both in Canada and globally. Among other research projects, she is principal investigator for the ASPIRE program, a global health initiative conducting research and providing women-centred, innovative solutions for cervical cancer prevention and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa. She also leads HPV FOCAL, which is a randomized trial of over 25,000 women comparing primary screening for cervical cancer, and QUEST, a pragmatic randomized trial defining the effectiveness of reduced dosing of the HPV vaccine.
She has published over 175 peer reviewed manuscripts and provides advice and consultation to national and global institutions, including the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, Public Health Agency of Canada, the World Health Organization and Pan American Health Organization and Ministries of Health globally on STI, HIV and HPV vaccine policy and programming. She speaks widely at international and national research and education conferences, and has supervised medical students, residents, and graduate students throughout her career. Dr. Ogilvie received her MD from McMaster University, and completed a specialty in Family Medicine and a fellowship in Population Health and Primary care. She received her Master of Science at UBC, and her Doctorate in Public Health from the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. Dr. Ogilvie is the recipient of many prestigious honours, including The American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association Achievement Award (2020); IUSTI Inaugural Lecture (2020), Michael S. O’Malley Alumni Award for Publication Excellence (2019); YWCA Woman of Distinction (2018); President’s Award, Children and women’s Health Centre of BC (2018); Options for Sexual health Sexual Health Champion of the Year (2018); Provincial Health Officer’s Award for Excellence in Public health (2015); Researcher of the Year, College of Family Physicians of Canada (2014); YWCA Women of Distinction Nominee (2014); Distinguished Achievement in Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia (2014). In 2019, she was part of the Governor General’s Official Delegation to the 25th Commemoration of the Rwandan Genocide. She is one of the inaugural recipients of the highly prestigious CIHR ‘Foundation Grant’ awards, given to leading scholars to pursue 7 years of research in a field.

Aisha Lofters

Canada

Aisha is a scientist at the Women's College Research Institute (WCRI), adjunct scientist at IC/ES, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. She currently holds a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and holds the Chair in Implementation Science at the Peter Gilgan Centre for Women’s Cancers at Women’s College Hospital in partnership with the Canadian Cancer Society.

Aisha is also the Provincial Primary Care Lead, Cancer Screening at Cancer Care Ontario (Ontario Health). Her research program focusses on improving quality of care in cancer screening and prevention, particularly for populations that experience marginalization.

Troy Grennan

Canada

Dr. Troy Grennan is an infectious diseases physician and researcher in Vancouver, Canada. He is currently the Physician Lead for the Provincial HIV/STI Program at the BC Centre for Disease Control, as well as a Clinical Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of British Columbia. Following specialty training in infectious diseases and medical microbiology, he completed a CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network postdoctoral fellowship examining human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated anal cancer screening in HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM). He is currently Co-Principal Investigator on the CIHR Team Grant “HPV Screening and Vaccine Evaluation in HIV-Positive MSM” and the recently funded, “Predicting and Evaluating Anal Cancer in HIV (PEACH) using novel biomarkers”, as well as a number of other projects examining anal cancer screening and HPV vaccination in MSM. His other research and clinical work focuses on HIV and STI prevention with a focus on MSM, and he is Principal Investigator on the DISCO (Doxycycline as an Intervention for STI ChemOprophylaxis) study, a multicentre RCT examining the use of doxycycline for bacterial STI prevention.

Joel Palefsky

USA

Joel Palefsky, M.D., C.M., F.R.C.P.(C). Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Dr. Palefsky completed his undergraduate medical training and training in Internal Medicine at McGill University and completed his fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Stanford University in 1989. He then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, where he remains to this day. He is the founder and director of the world’s first clinic devoted to prevention of anal cancer, the Anal Neoplasia Clinic at the UCSF Cancer Center. He is the chair of the HPV Working Group of the U.S. National Cancer Institute-supported AIDS Malignancy Consortium. He is the immediate past president of the International Papillomavirus Society and is the founder and immediate past president of the International Anal Neoplasia Society. He is a member of the ASCI and AAP. His research interests include the molecular pathogenesis and natural history of HPV-related disease, including in the setting of HIV infection, HPV prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines, secondary prevention of anal cancer, and treatment of HPV-related disease.

Eduardo Franco

Canada

He is trained in public health microbiology at University of North Carolina and at the Centers for Disease Control, and as a cancer epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health, International Agency for Research on Cancer, and Louisiana State University. Since 1985, his research has focused on epidemiology and prevention of gynecologic, anogenital, oral, prostate, and childhood cancers. He mentored 130 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In addition to his regular McGill teaching, he has taught short courses on cancer epidemiology and scientific publishing throughout the world. He is Editor-in-Chief of Preventive Medicine and Preventive Medicine Reports, as well as Senior Editor of eLife. He is Officer of the Order of Canada and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He received the Canadian Cancer Research Alliance’s Distinguished Service to Cancer Research Award; Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology and from the International Papillomavirus Society; the Women in U.S. Government’s Leadership Award; the Canadian Cancer Society’s Warwick Prize; the Geoffrey Howe Outstanding Contribution Award from the Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics; University of British Columbia’s Chew Wei Memorial Prize in Cancer Research; and the McLaughlin-Gallie Award from the Royal College of Physicians of Canada. He is Foreign Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Suzanne Garland

Australia

Professor Garland is an internationally recognized clinical microbiologist and sexual health physician, with particular expertise in infectious diseases as they pertain to reproductive health and the neonate. With her team, Prof Garland, has been a leader in the role of patient self-collected genital sampling in the detection by molecular techniques (polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of reproductive tract infections, particularly those sexually transmitted (STI), such as Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Trichomonas vaginalis, herpes simplex virus and especially human papillomaviruses (HPV). She has published extensively on clinical epidemiology of STIs in Australia, with a focus on HPV. Her group has defined HPV in cervical dysplasia, cervical cancer, plus the healthy population within Australia. She was chief investigator of the study defining the prevalence of HPV genotypes in urban, rural, indigenous and non-indigenous Australian women (WHINURS project) pre-HPV vaccination program in Australia. She was chief investigator of two 4-year follow-up clinical trials of prophylactic HPV vaccines in young women, plus one in mid-age women. She leads an HPV vaccine effectiveness trial (VACCINE) in Australia which will be informative globally, particularly with the WHINURS data as baseline with which to compare outcomes post vaccination. She is a regular Advisor to the WHO, largely in the area of STI diagnosis, prophylactic HPV vaccines, as well as international standards for HPV DNA assays. She is invited to deliver keynote and plenary presentations at national and international meetings.

Professor Garland is the Director of the Centre for Women’s Infectious Diseases (WCID) at the Royal Women’s Hospital, the first clinical group to be centred in Bio 21 Institute, with affiliations to University of Melbourne Faculty of Medicine Dentistry and Health Sciences and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. WCID conducts clinical research, cutting edge molecular diagnostics as well as STI genosurveillance. Whilst key research areas of focus include cervical cancer, sexual health and mother-to-baby infections, it has an emphasis on providing evidence for changes that may translate into clinical practice, affecting patient health.

Joel Palefsky

USA

Joel Palefsky, M.D., C.M., F.R.C.P.(C). Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Dr. Palefsky completed his undergraduate medical training and training in Internal Medicine at McGill University and completed his fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Stanford University in 1989. He then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, where he remains to this day. He is the founder and director of the world’s first clinic devoted to prevention of anal cancer, the Anal Neoplasia Clinic at the UCSF Cancer Center. He is the chair of the HPV Working Group of the U.S. National Cancer Institute-supported AIDS Malignancy Consortium. He is the immediate past president of the International Papillomavirus Society and is the founder and immediate past president of the International Anal Neoplasia Society. He is a member of the ASCI and AAP. His research interests include the molecular pathogenesis and natural history of HPV-related disease, including in the setting of HIV infection, HPV prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines, secondary prevention of anal cancer, and treatment of HPV-related disease.

Ann Burchell

Canada

Dr. Ann Burchell is Research Director at the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Scientist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto. She is a Canada Research Chair in Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention. She holds degrees in epidemiology from the University of Toronto (MSc) and McGill University (PhD) and has academic appointments as Associate Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, and Division of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto; Adjunct Professor, Division of Cancer Epidemiology, McGill University; and Adjunct Scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Medicine, Toronto.

Dr. Burchell’s research program focuses on the epidemiology of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, human papillomavirus (HPV), syphilis, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Its goal is to generate evidence for effective and practical strategies to prevent STIs and STI-related cancers in high-risk populations, including people living with or at risk for HIV.

She has extensive methodological experience in the design and implementation of: observational longitudinal studies with primary and secondary data; sexual behaviour and health-access questionnaires; natural history studies using laboratory markers of infection; and pragmatic randomized trials for HPV prevention and improved screening for syphilis, cervical and anal cancer. She currently holds a Foundation Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Eduardo Franco

Canada

He is trained in public health microbiology at University of North Carolina and at the Centers for Disease Control, and as a cancer epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health, International Agency for Research on Cancer, and Louisiana State University. Since 1985, his research has focused on epidemiology and prevention of gynecologic, anogenital, oral, prostate, and childhood cancers. He mentored 130 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In addition to his regular McGill teaching, he has taught short courses on cancer epidemiology and scientific publishing throughout the world. He is Editor-in-Chief of Preventive Medicine and Preventive Medicine Reports, as well as Senior Editor of eLife. He is Officer of the Order of Canada and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He received the Canadian Cancer Research Alliance’s Distinguished Service to Cancer Research Award; Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology and from the International Papillomavirus Society; the Women in U.S. Government’s Leadership Award; the Canadian Cancer Society’s Warwick Prize; the Geoffrey Howe Outstanding Contribution Award from the Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics; University of British Columbia’s Chew Wei Memorial Prize in Cancer Research; and the McLaughlin-Gallie Award from the Royal College of Physicians of Canada. He is Foreign Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Jennifer Gillis

Canada

Dr. Gillis is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the BC Children’s and Women’s Hospitals in Canada. Dr. Gillis received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Toronto in Canada. Her PhD dissertation focused on the acceptability and suitability of anal cancer screening by anal Pap cytology and HPV DNA type testing among men living with HIV. In her post-doctoral work with Drs. Gina Ogilvie and Manish Sadarangani, Dr. Gillis is examining the long-term effectiveness and immunogenicity of reduced dosing schedules of the HPV vaccine. In all her work, Dr. Gillis places emphasis on meaningful engagement of community and research partners. Her work has been recognized by numerous national awards in Canada and funded by Canadian national partners such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Ontario HIV Treatment Network.

Anna Yeung

Canada

Eric Chow

Australia

Associate Professor Eric Chow is an epidemiologist and biostatistician based at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre (MSHC) at The Alfred Hospital. He heads the Health Data Management and Biostatistics Unit at MSHC and is an Associate Professor at Central Clinical School, Monash University. He is also an Honorary Principal Fellow at the Melbourne School of Population & Global Health, The University of Melbourne.

A/Prof Chow’s research program aims to improve treatment, prevention and control of sexually transmitted infections (STI), with a particular focus on gonorrhoea and human papillomavirus (HPV). His work focuses on the evaluation of the national school-based HPV vaccination program. He has led several studies looking at the impact of the implementation of the gender-neutral HPV vaccination program (e.g. epidemiology of genital warts and HPV prevalence) and the implementation of time-limited catch-up programme for men who have sex with men (e.g. vaccination uptake). His work on HPV has helped to inform HPV guidelines abroad.

Troy Grennan

Canada

Dr. Troy Grennan is an infectious diseases physician and researcher in Vancouver, Canada. He is currently the Physician Lead for the Provincial HIV/STI Program at the BC Centre for Disease Control, as well as a Clinical Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of British Columbia. Following specialty training in infectious diseases and medical microbiology, he completed a CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network postdoctoral fellowship examining human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated anal cancer screening in HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM). He is currently Co-Principal Investigator on the CIHR Team Grant “HPV Screening and Vaccine Evaluation in HIV-Positive MSM” and the recently funded, “Predicting and Evaluating Anal Cancer in HIV (PEACH) using novel biomarkers”, as well as a number of other projects examining anal cancer screening and HPV vaccination in MSM. His other research and clinical work focuses on HIV and STI prevention with a focus on MSM, and he is Principal Investigator on the DISCO (Doxycycline as an Intervention for STI ChemOprophylaxis) study, a multicentre RCT examining the use of doxycycline for bacterial STI prevention.

Michelle Ozbun

USA

Professor Ozbun is the Maralyn S. Budke Endowed Professor in Viral Oncology at the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center of The University of New Mexico School of Medicine. She holds academic appointments in the Departments of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology (primary) and Obstetrics & Gynecology at The UNM School of Medicine. She is also the Co-leader of the Head and Neck Cancer Clinical Working Group at The UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is the PI of the American Cancer Society’s Institutional Research Grant to UNM and the Program Director of the NIH NIAID NRSA-Funded “Infectious Disease and Inflammation Program” (IDIP) T32 Training Program.

Dr. Ozbun received a bachelor of science degree in Microbiology, with a minor in Chemistry, from Colorado State University in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Molecular Virology (with Janet S. Butel, Ph.D.) from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, in 1994. She completed US-NIH-funded postdoctoral training with Dr. Craig Meyers at the Penn State University College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania from 1994-1998. Dr. Ozbun joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in 1998.

Research in Dr. Ozbun’s lab spans from the basic science molecular virology of human papillomavirus infections and cancer progression to efforts aimed at HPV lesion treatments and improving clinical outcomes. In 16 years of continuous US-NIH funding as a PI, Dr. Ozbun and her research group have striven to improve our understanding of HPV infections and carcinogenesis by challenging the status quo and dogma in the HPV field using all available methods for virion production and replication, and insisting upon biologically relevant cell, tissue, and animal models for the study of infection and pathogenesis. In 2018 she was elected as the treasurer of the International Papillomavirus Society.

Cary Moody

USA

Sam Campos

USA

Aisha Lofters

Canada

Aisha is a scientist at the Women's College Research Institute (WCRI), adjunct scientist at IC/ES, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. She currently holds a New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and holds the Chair in Implementation Science at the Peter Gilgan Centre for Women’s Cancers at Women’s College Hospital in partnership with the Canadian Cancer Society.

Aisha is also the Provincial Primary Care Lead, Cancer Screening at Cancer Care Ontario (Ontario Health). Her research program focusses on improving quality of care in cancer screening and prevention, particularly for populations that experience marginalization.

Barbara Moscicki

USA

Greg Zimet

USA

Dr. Zimet is Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry in the Division of Adolescent Medicine, Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine in the U.S. In addition, he is the founder and Co-Director of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Center for HPV Research. Dr. Zimet started investigating attitudes about vaccines for adolescents in the mid-1990s. Much of his research has involved the study of vaccine acceptance and refusal, with a primary focus over the past 20 years on HPV vaccine. Dr. Zimet’s research has encompassed behavioral, social, and policy-based determinants of HPV vaccination. His studies, which have included collaborations across the United States and globally, have focused on adolescents, adults, parents, and health care providers and include evaluations of vaccine communication intervention strategies.