Dr. Beatriz Grinstejn is a physician-scientist with over three decades of experience in HIV research. She is the Head of the STD/AIDS Clinical Research Laboratory at the Instituto Nacional de Infectologia Evandro Chagas (INI)/Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz) and has served as the Fiocruz Clinical Trials Unit PI since 2005. She graduated in Medicine from Fluminense Federal University. Beatriz holds a Master's and PhD in Infectious and Parasitic Diseases from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She dedicated her career to Clinical Research on Infectious and Parasitic Diseases, mainly to study the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, co-infections, and associated comorbidities. In addition to heading the Laboratory of Clinical Research on Aids and STDs at the Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectious Diseases, she also works as a professor of the Stricto Sensu postgraduate course at the Institute. She is a leader of the Group of Clinical and Epidemiological Research on HIV/AIDS (CNPq Directory of Research Groups) and a consultant to the Ministry of Health, where she is a member of the Advisory Commission on the Management of HIV Infection in Adults (CAA).
Dr. Ana Maria Bispo de Filippis has an MSc in Molecular and Cellular Biology and a PhD in Virology. She has been a researcher in the Virology Department of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil since 1983. She has worked on various research topics within the areas of surveillance and molecular epidemiology of viruses, such as poliovirus and other enteroviruses, yellow fever virus, dengue, Zika, and other arboviruses. From 2004 to 2010, she worked as the Regional Advisor of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) in Washington DC, coordinating the network of regional laboratories that support the immunization programs in the American region, specifically, measles/rubella, polio, rotavirus, and the HPV laboratory network. In March 2010, she returned to the Flavivirus Laboratory at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, where, once again, she worked with virologic surveillance, pathogenesis, and atypical clinical presentation of dengue and other arboviruses with epidemiological importance in Brazil. In November 2015, she led the team that detected, for the first time in the world, the presence of Zika virus in the amniotic fluid of a pregnant woman whose fetus had developed microcephaly, representing the first strong evidence of the causal association between Zika virus infection and microcephaly.
