Plagues

Jonathan L. Heeney studied veterinary medicine at the Ontario Veterinary College, where he further specialised, receiving a doctorate in pathology. He earned his PhD in viral immunopathology at the National Institutes of Health, Maryland, and subsequently was a Fellow in molecular and comparative pathology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, California. In the 1990s he established the Laboratory of Viral Pathogenesis in the Netherlands, where he studied viral infections of immunocompromised hosts and pioneered a number of candidate vaccines for the prevention of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C, amongst others. He established an international series of meetings and think tanks focussed on vaccine design based on immune correlates. In 2007 he was elected Professor of Comparative Pathology at the University of Cambridge, where he established the Laboratory of Viral Zoonotics, a laboratory dedicated to the study of viral diseases transmitted from animals to humans. He has published widely on globally important human diseases, from AIDS to Ebola, and their zoonotic origins in animals.

Sven Friedemann is a former Schlumberger Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge and a research fellow at the University of Cambridge on a Feodor-Lynen fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is currently a lecturer in the School of Physics at the University of Bristol.