Prof. Dr. Michael R. Yeaman is a Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the chief of the Division of Molecular Medicine, and the vice chair of the Department of Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. He is also the director of the Institute for Infection and Immunity at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation. His ground-breaking work has led to the design and development of novel agents to address antibiotic-resistant infections and autoimmune diseases. He pioneered convergent immunity to engineer the first cross-kingdom vaccines that protect against lethal healthcare-associated infections such as MRSA, Candida auris, and extensively drug-resistant Gram-negative pathogens. He founded NovaDigm Therapeutics, Inc. and Metacin, Inc. among other entrepreneurial ventures. Dr. Yeaman serves as the Guthy-Jackson Charitable Foundation Medical Chair, which drove successful Phase III clinical trials of the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments for the rare autoimmune disease neuromyelitis optica. He has earned continuous U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and U.S. Department of Defense research support for three decades. He holds 67 issued U.S. and international patents and has received the U.S. National Institutes of Health Innovation Award, the Weitzman Memorial Research Award, the Alexander Research Award, and the National Research Service Award.
Prof. Dr. José F Fierro is a Professor at the Department of Functional Biology (Microbiology), Faculty of Medicine, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain. He obtained his PhD in Medicine (1986) and completed a Specialism in Microbiology and Parasitology (vía M.I.R). Then, he served as a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA) between 1987 and 1989 in the immunology lab of Dr. Baruj Benacerraf (Nobel prize) Subsequently, he went on a short-term visit to the University of Cambridge (UK). He has been a Professor (full) at the University of Oviedo since 1990 and is the Head of Laboratorio de Microbiología Oral of the University of Oviedo. His research is focused on the mechanisms of action of lactoferrin, a protein involved in innate immunity.
