W. Ian Lipkin
Director, Center for Infection and Immunity,
John Snow Professor of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University (USA)
Dr. Lipkin is internationally recognized for global health contributions through innovative methods he developed for infectious diseases diagnosis, surveillance, and discovery, and developed gene capture technologies including VirCapSeq-VERT and BacCapSeq as well as multiplexed serological assays to detect vector-borne diseases. These advances have been critical in replacing culture-dependent methods of global health management by creating new criteria for disease causation and de-linking spurious associations between putative agents and diseases. Such examples include refuting the MMR vaccine having a role in autism and XMRV in ME/CFS. Lipkin has been at the forefront of outbreak response to many of the world’s recent outbreaks, including West Nile Virus in NYC (1999), SARS in China (2003), MERS in Saudi Arabia (2012-16), Zika in the US (2016), encephalitis in India (2017), and COVID-19 (2020). He went to China in late January 2020 to consult with colleagues at the China CDC during the early assessment of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and contracted the virus via community transmission in March. During the summer of 2020, Lipkin consulted the Democratic National Convention Committee on testing protocols and site safety during the DNC event. He promotes public health awareness via print and broadcast media and also served as the scientific advisor for the Soderbergh film “Contagion”.