Annelies Wilder-Smith
Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK)
Annelies Wilder-Smith is Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and visiting Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Singapore. She serves as Consultant to the Initiative of Vaccine Research at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, and is Past President of the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM). Annelies specializes in emerging viral diseases such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, SARS, influenza and now COVID. In 2003, she was at the forefront of the SARS epidemic in Singapore. Now she is the Focal Point at WHO for the SAGE Working Group on policy recommendations with regards to COVID-19 vaccines.
With a career spanning almost three decades, she has led and co-led various clinical trials, published more than 350 scientific papers, edited and co-edited textbooks and travel medicine books, served on various editorial boards and scientific committees, including being editorial consultant to The Lancet. Her awards include the Myrone Levine Vaccinology Prize, the Honor Group Award for exemplary leadership and coordination in determining and communicating global yellow fever risk presented at the CDC Award Ceremony, the Mercator Professorship award by the German Research Foundation and the Ashdown Oration Award by the Australian College of Travel Medicine. She is the Principal Investigator of an EU funded international consortium called “ZikaPLAN” (https://zikaplan.tghn.org/), and recently completed another 4 year research project on dengue, also funded by the European Commission.