Category: Speaker

Southern Health & Social Care Trust

Dr Nizam Damani is a well-recognized international expert in the field of Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) both in high and low- to middle-income countries. He has won many excellence awards in his field. He was Associate Medical Director at the Southern Health & Social Services Trust and was a senior lecturer at the Queens University, Belfast, UK. He has proved consultancy services to various international organizations, including the World Health Organization and European Union IMPLEMENT project. He has served on various WHO guidelines development and advisory groups. He was a member of the WHO Core Group of the 1st Global Patient Safety Challenge and was the country coordinator for the WHO Hand hygiene pilot site in Pakistan.

He has published many scientific peer-reviewed papers, publications and contributed chapters in various books. As a sole author, he has written books in IPC, Information Resources in Infection control (8th edition) and Manual of Infection Prevention and Control (4th edition) which has been published by the Oxford University Press and his book has been translated in various languages. He also served as an editor of the International Journal of Infection Control. He was a member of the Education Committee of Healthcare Infection Society and the National Working Party of Antibiotic Sensitivity testing method of the British Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. He served as the treasurer of the International Federation of Infection Control.

University of Calgary and Foothills Medical Centre, Calgary, AB, Canada

John Conly MD is trained in internal medicine and infectious disease and is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Calgary. He was a past President of the Canadian Infectious Disease Society, a past Chairman of the Board for the Canadian Committee on Antibiotic Resistance and previous Vice-Chair for the Canadian Expert Drug Advisory Committee. He currently serves as a member of the WHO Advisory Group on Integrated Antimicrobial Surveillance and the Public Health Agency of Canada Expert Advisory Group on Antimicrobial Resistance. He has published over 300 papers and has received numerous career honours for clinical service, mentorship, research and innovation, including the Order of Canada. He continues as an active consultant in clinical infectious diseases with current interests which focus on antimicrobial resistance and stewardship, prevention of hospital-acquired infections and novel innovations in healthcare.

Imperial College London

Enrique Castro-Sánchez is the Lead Academic Research Nurse at the Health Protection Research Unit in AMR and HCAI at Imperial College London, researching on innovations in behaviour change, technology and patient safety to improve infection prevention and antimicrobial use. He is also an Honorary Consultant Nurse in Communication and Patient Engagement at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and an NIHR Academy Senior Nurse Research Leader.

Enrique research interests include health literacy in infectious diseases and healthcare-associated infections; health inequalities on infectious diseases; policy influence on management of infectious diseases; and novel infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship education and training tools for clinicians and citizens.

He was awarded a PhD cum laude in Nursing at the University of Alicante (Spain) in 2015, and has an MSc in Public Health by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical. His clinical experience includes tropical and infectious diseases, tuberculosis, HIV and sexually transmitted infections. Enrique is a Florence Nightingale Foundation Scholar, associate editor of BMC Public Health, PLOS ONE and JAC-AMR journals, a Fellow of the European Academy of Nursing Science, and was designated as Emerging Leader in International Infectious Diseases in 2016 by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

Stanford University

Ami Bhatt is a physician scientist with a strong interest in microbial genomics and metagenomics. She received her MD and PhD from the University of California, San Francisco. She then carried out her residency and fellowship training at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and served as Chief Medical Resident from 2010-2011. She joined the faculty of the Departments of Medicine (Divisions of Hematology and Blood & Marrow Transplantation) and Genetics at Stanford University in 2014 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship focused on genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Prof. Bhatt has received multiple awards for her academic scholarship including the Chen Award of Excellence from the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO).

Her team’s research program seeks to illuminate the interplay between the microbial environment and host/clinical factors in human diseases. Her translational laboratory develops and applies novel molecular and computational tools to study strain level dynamics of the microbiome, to understand how microbial genomes change over time and predict the functional output of microbiomes. These innovations facilitate much improved (1) measurement of the types and functions of microbes in patients with non-communicable diseases, (2) understanding of the interactions between microbial genes, gene products, and host cells and (3) testing of the impact of microbially targeted interventions in clinical trials.

University of São Paulo

Medical doctor and Infectious Diseases Specialist. Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health in Ribeirão Preto Medical School, University of São Paulo, Brazil.