Presenters' biography


Speaker 1 - Prof. Sylvain Brisse (Institut Pasteur, France)

I combine public health surveillance and research activities. My lab is in charge of the microbiological surveillance of diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough) under mandates of the French Public Health Agency (Santé publique France); we provide diagnostics, expertise, and clinical advice. Our research focuses on the microbial population biology and emergence of pathogenic microbial strains, vaccine escape, and antimicrobial resistance. We also develop applications in diagnostics and public health, including universal strain subtype genotyping systems and nomenclatures that facilitate international epidemiological tracking and micro-evolutionary studies


Speaker 2 - Dr. Keith Jolley (Oxford University, Oxford, UK) 


Keith studied biochemistry at the University of Bath and continued to complete a PhD studying halophilic proteins from Archaea, graduating in 1996. He then moved to the University of Southampton to work on meningococcal surface proteins that elicit immune responses. Continuing this interest in meningococcal biology, he joined Prof. Martin Maiden’s group at the University of Oxford in 1998, where he has worked on the genetic characterization of bacterial carrier populations. Since then, Keith has gained bioinformatics experience and now develops software and databases, including the BIGSdb bacterial genomics platform that underpins the PubMLST website.


Speaker 3 -  Dr. Nigel Dyer (Warwick University, Coventry, UK)

After working for 25 years in the telecommunication industry, Nigel completed a PhD in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick.  He then worked in Systems Biology group and then the Bioinformatics and Digital Health group at the University of Warwick helping to provide bioinformatics support to a wide range of research activities within and outside the University.  For the last five years he has been primarily involved in the support and development of the Enterobase platform 

Speaker 4 -  Dr. Danielle Ingle (Doherty Institute, Melbourne, Australia)

Dr Danielle Ingle is an emerging international leader in the field of microbial genomics of enteric bacterial pathogens. Danielle is a National Health and Medical Research Council Emerging Leadership Fellow and is based in Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Her research program is currently centred upon high priority bacterial pathogens including serovars of Salmonella enterica, pathotypes of Escherichia coli and the Shigella species. Danielle’s research explores the evolutionary dynamics and genomic epidemiology of these pathogens, which her research efforts also informing public health surveillance efforts in Australia and internationally.


Speaker 5 -  Prof. Mário Ramirez (University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal)
Prof. Mário Ramirez

Mário Ramirez  is Professor of Microbiology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon and currently serves as vice-president of the Scientific Council and coordinator of the Scientific Committee of the PhD program at the same faculty. He treasurer of the "ESCMID Study Group for Genomics and Molecular Diagnostics" and  of the "Immunizations and Vaccines" study group of the International Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapeutics. He has worked on bacterial molecular epidemiology and been involved in the development of bioinformatic tools for genomic epidemiology.



Speaker 6 - Rafael Mestre Mamede (University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal)

Rafael Mamede
Rafael Mamede is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (FMUL) and the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM). His doctoral project, coordinated by Prof. Mário Ramirez, focuses on applying and improving current methodologies used for bacterial typing based on whole genome sequencing, such as whole- and core-genome multilocus sequence typing (wg/cgMLST). He is actively developing the chewBBACA suite for wg/cgMLST and Chewie-NS, a nomenclature server to store and distribute wg/cgMLST schemas, with the aim of increasing the interoperability, efficiency, and accuracy of wg/cgMLST analysis and to provide functionalities that enable a comprehensive analysis of the results.


Speakers 7 - Dra. Verónica Mixão (Instituto Nacional de Saúde Doutor Ricardo Jorge, Lisbon, Portugal)
Researcher at the Genomics and Bioinformatics Unit (GBU) of the Department of Infectious Diseases of the National Institute of Health Doutor Ricardo Jorge (INSA), Portugal. She has vast experience in the analysis of NGS data, and a particular interest in the integration of clinical and environmental data towards a sustainable and efficient "One Health" genomic surveillance. Currently, her research is mainly focus on the design and implementation of bioinformatics workflows for genomic surveillance of bacterial pathogens, being also actively involved in the development of novel solutions tackling some of the existing gaps in the field, such as ReporTree.


Speakers 8 - Dr. John Lees (Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK)
Research group leader at EMBL-EBI, where I run the Pathogen Informatics and Modelling Group.
I work on bioinformatics and software, statistical genetics, genomic epidemiology, GPU programming, and mathematical modelling – mostly on bacterial pathogens but sometimes on other microbes too.


Last modified: Tuesday, 21 October 2025, 9:28 PM