Dr. Kristy Murray is the newly named Chief Research Officer at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Professor and Executive Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University. Prior to her new appointment, she served as the Vice-Chair for Research for the Department of Pediatrics and Professor of Pediatrics in the section of Pediatric Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. She also served as the Assistant Dean for Faculty and Academic Development for the National School of Tropical Medicine and Director of the Center for Human Immunobiology at Texas Children’s Hospital.

 Dr. Murray received her doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from Texas A&M University and her PhD in Preventative Medicine and Community Health, Clinical Investigations track at the University of Texas Medical Branch. She spent the first five years of her career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including two years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer conducting outbreak investigations, including the initial outbreak of West Nile virus in New York City in 1999, bubonic plague in Wyoming, and unexplained illness and deaths in injection drug users in Ireland. She also had the opportunity to work on the polio eradication campaign in Bangladesh and research lyssaviruses in the Philippines. She received several awards at CDC including the Secretary’s Award for Distinguished Service for her work on the West Nile virus Encephalitis Investigation Team and for the Anthrax Investigation Emergency Response Team.

 In 2002, Dr. Murray returned to Texas and joined the faculty in the Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Public Health (2002-2012). In 2012, she was recruited to Baylor College of Medicine as a founding faculty member of the National School of Tropical Medicine. Her research over the past 20+ years has been focused on both laboratory- and clinically-based studies related to emerging infectious diseases, including West Nile virus, dengue, rickettsia, Chagas disease, Zika virus, COVID-19, and rabies. Her field studies are predominately based in global health settings, including Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, and the Philippines. She teaches graduate-level courses on epidemiology and infectious diseases and advises master’s and PhD-level students. Dr. Murray has received several awards for her work in academia, including the Innovation in Health Science Education Award from the UT Academy of Health Science Education, Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, the UT Health Science Center Young Investigator Award, and the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine’s Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2013, she received the Bailey Ashford Medal from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene for her work in tropical medicine, and she was elected to the American Pediatric Society. Dr. Murray is an Associate Editor for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and serves on the editorial board of the journal Epidemiology and Infection and has authored more than 160 scientific and technical papers.

Dr Susan Hills is a Medical Epidemiologist in the Arboviral Diseases Branch, Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colorado. She has worked for almost 30 years on epidemiology, prevention, and control of arboviral diseases. While at CDC, her roles have included responding to chikungunya outbreaks in South America and the Pacific and leading the ACIP Work Group developing recommendations for use of chikungunya vaccines. 

- Researcher of the Ramón y Cajal Institute for Health Research (IRyCIS), Madrid, Spain.

- Member of the WHO Expert Panel Committee on Parasitic Diseases.

- Director of the NGO “Salud Entre Culturas” (Health among Cultures).

- Past Head of the National Referral Centre for Tropical Diseases. Infectious Diseases Department. Ramón y Cajal University Hospital, Madrid, Spain.

- Emeritus Professor of Medicine, Alcala University, Madrid.

Davidson Hamer, MD is a Professor of Global Health and Medicine at the Boston University Schools of Public Health and Medicine, the co-lead of the climate change and emerging infectious diseases research core at the BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, and an attending physician in infectious diseases and Director of the Travel Clinic at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Hamer is a board-certified infectious disease specialist and medical epidemiologist with particular interests in maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition (MNCH&N) in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), emerging arboviral diseases, tropical medicine, travel medicine, infection control, and antimicrobial resistance.

Dr. Hamer has been involved in travel medicine for thirty years and from 2014 to 2021, Dr. Hamer served as the principal investigator and, since September 2021, as the Surveillance Lead, of GeoSentinel, a global surveillance network of 70 sites in 30 countries that uses returning travelers, immigrants, and refugees as sentinels of disease emergence and transmission patterns throughout the world. At Boston Medical Center, he is the PI for several studies of enhanced screening, diagnosis, and management of migrants with Chagas disease and he is part of two national US Chagas disease consortia.

Dr. Hamer is currently the Scientific Program Chair for the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Section Editor for the Journal of Travel Medicine (sentinel surveillance in travelers) and the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (global health and Chagas disease). He also serves as the Secretary-Treasurer for the GeoSentinel Foundation. He has nearly 500 publications that cover a range of topics within the fields of global health (MNCH&N), travel medicine, COVID-19, and the epidemiology of disease in returning travelers.