2024 Beckman Symposium - Pandemic Preparedness

Deborah L. Birx, M.D.

Deborah L. Birx, M.D., spent her first career serving the United States, as an Army Colonel and later, running some of the most high-profile and influential programs at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Department of State as a civil servant.  Dr. Birx is known for successful increasing overall effectiveness of programs through use of granular data and effective change management.  Dr. Birx is a medical expert and leader whose long career has focused on clinical and basic immunology, infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, vaccine research, and global and rural health. Dr. Birx served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator using complex data set integration to drive decision-making and working closely with state officials across the country to provide state-specific advice and guidance.

In her second career she is applying the lessons learned from 4 decades driving change management in the Federal government and using data to drive continuous program improvements to important private local public sector endeavors.  Dr. Birx completed her first book entitled Silent Invasion published by HarperCollins 2022.  She is a Bush Institute Senior Fellow and a Professor at Texas Tech University of Health Science Center and is dedicated to transforming healthcare access and quality in rural America. 

Catherine Blish, M.D., Ph.D.

Catherine Blish is the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She has a joint appointment in the Stanford Immunology Program, is the Associate Dean for Basic and Translational Research, the Co-Director of the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program, and an Investigator of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. As an undergraduate she studied Biochemistry at the University of California, Davis, before completing her MD and PhD in Immunology at the University of Washington, followed by residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship training in Infectious Diseases at the University of Washington. In August 2011, she joined the faculty at Stanford.

Her research is dedicated to learning how to harness the immune system to prevent and cure diseases. Her lab studies host-pathogen interactions, with a particular focus on innate immune responses to a diverse array of pathogens including HIV, dengue virus, influenza, tuberculosis, and SARS-CoV-2. She divides her time between research, clinical practice in infectious diseases, teaching, and her administrative roles. She has received numerous awards for research and mentoring, including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the NIDA Avant-Garde Award for HIV/AIDS Research, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award, and Stanford Immunology Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, among others. She is an elected a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians and a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.

Alexandria Boehm, Ph.D.

Alexandria Boehm is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor in Environmental Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Oceans at Stanford University; she is a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Her research focuses on understanding the fate of human pathogens in the environment, outside the human body, and the role of the environment in the transmission of infectious disease. She also works on problems related to coastal water quality, and conducts research to advance the use of environmental DNA and RNA for biodiversity assessments.

Mark Davis, Ph.D.

Mark M. Davis is the Director of the Stanford Center for Human Systems Immunology, the Avery Family Professor of Immunology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology with Leroy Hood. He later was a postdoctoral and staff fellow with William Paul at the Laboratory of Immunology at NIH before joining the Stanford faculty. He is well known for identifying many of the T-cell receptor genes, which govern specificity for T cells, and work characterizing their binding properties and behavior on cell surfaces, including the demonstration that T cells can detect and respond to even a single antigenic peptide-MHC complex. He and his colleagues also developed a novel way of labeling specific T lymphocytes (“peptide-MHC tetramers”), which is widely used in both clinical and basic immunology studies. His current research interests focus on human immunology, specifically a “systems level” understanding of an immune response to cancer, vaccination, infection and autoimmunity, as well as developing new tools to better understand human T cell responses. Most recent his group has developed human immune organoids, using tonsil and spleen cells, in order to recreate and study human immune responses in vitro. Professor Davis is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Gairdner Award, the Paul Ehrlich Award and the King Faisal Prize among others. He also has been elected to memberships in the US National Academy of Science, The National Institute of Medicine and The Royal Society.

Joe DeRisi, Ph.D.

Joe DeRisi is an interdisciplinary scientist whose work combines genomics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and bioengineering to study autoimmune, parasitic, and viral diseases in a wide range of organisms. One of the early pioneers of DNA microarray technology and whole-genome expression profiling, he was chosen for a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004 for his work with microarrays, particularly as a member of a team that identified and characterized the virus (now known as SARS-CoV-1) that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2003.

DeRisi has been a leading advocate of unbiased methods for pathogen discovery, disease tracking, and clinical diagnosis using metagenomic sequencing. Over the past two decades his work has increased the power, versatility, and clinical utility of metagenomic tools, laying the groundwork for the CZ ID platform now used for pathogen surveillance and diagnostics in low- and middle-income countries around the world. More recently, together with colleagues at UC San Francisco (UCSF), he has increasingly focused on the use of programmable phage display technologies for investigating previously unknown autoimmune diseases.

DeRisi graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, before earning his Ph.D. in Biochemistry with Patrick O. Brown at Stanford University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine, DeRisi is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF. He was previously a Searle Scholar, a Packard Fellow, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute before launching the CZ Biohub in San Francisco in 2016 along with Steve Quake. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, DeRisi and his team at the Biohub and at UCSF worked together to rapidly launch a clinically certified testing facility, which ultimately offered free clinical tests and SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing to all 58 California Departments of Public Health, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s 2021 book, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story.

Jeffrey Glenn, M.D., Ph.D.

Jeffrey Glenn is the Joseph D. Grant Professor of Medicine (Division of Gastroenterology & Hepatology) and Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University, and Director of ViRx@Stanford, the Stanford Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness Initiative.  He also heads a research laboratory focused on studying molecular virology and the translation of that knowledge into novel antiviral strategies, as well as the development of new treatments for liver diseases and cancer. He is the founder of Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, Inc., co-founder of Riboscience LLC, founder of I-Cubed Therapeutics, co-cofounder of 4J Therapeutics, Inc., and founder of Eiger InnoTherapeutics, Inc., biotechnology companies developing several new classes of antiviral and anti-cancer drugs.

Glenn received his A.B. degree, summa cum laude with a double major in biochemistry and French civilization from U.C. Berkeley. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from the U.C.S.F. MSTP program. He then trained in internal medicine, followed by a gastroenterology and hepatology fellowship at Stanford University. He then joined the faculty of Stanford University’s medical school.  He has served on the FDA Antiviral Advisory Committee, and is committed to training the next generation of researchers in translational medicine and pandemic preparedness. He also currently leads the Stanford University U19 Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center, SyneRx.

Peter Kim, Ph.D.

Peter S. Kim is the Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine and an Institute Scholar of Sarafan ChEM-H at Stanford.  He is also a Senior Investigator at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco.  He is known for discovering a salient feature (the “spring-loaded mechanism”) of how proteins cause viral membranes to fuse with cells.  This discovery laid the foundation for a critical aspect of protein engineering that led to effective Covid-19 vaccines.  His current research is focused on devising new strategies to enable vaccine development.  He also aims to create vaccines against important infectious agents that have eluded efforts to date.  He was President of Merck Research Laboratories from 2003–2013 and oversaw the development of more than 20 new medicines and vaccines, including JANUVIA, the first DPP-4 inhibitor for type 2 diabetes; GARDASIL, the first vaccine for prevention of cervical cancer; ISENTRESS, the first HIV integrase inhibitor; ZOSTAVAX, the first vaccine for the prevention of shingles; and KEYTRUDA, the first FDA-approved PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor for the treatment of cancer.  Earlier, he was Professor of Biology at MIT, a Member of the Whitehead Institute, and an HHMI Investigator.  He received his A.B. in Chemistry from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford University, working with Robert L. “Buzz” Baldwin, after which he was a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute.  He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Engineering.

Kanta Subbarao, MBBS, MPH

Professor Subbarao holds a Canada Excellence Research Chair position on Biology and Control of Zoonotic and Pandemic Respiratory Viruses at Laval University in Quebec and is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, The University of Melbourne. She was previously Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne, Australia, Chief of the Emerging Respiratory Viruses Section of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, NIAID, NIH and chief of the Molecular Genetics Section of the Influenza Branch at the US CDC. Professor Subbarao is a virologist and a physician with specialty training in paediatrics and paediatric infectious diseases. She has worked on molecular virology and vaccine development for emerging viruses that pose a potential pandemic threat, including influenza viruses, SARS and MERS and now SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses in a career spanning 30 years. She is an internationally recognized leader in the field of influenza and received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement award from the International Society for Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses. She serves on the Editorial Boards of PLoS Pathogens, Cell Host and Microbe, Journal of Virology, Med and Cell. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, American Academy of Microbiology and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.