Prof. Annelies Wilder-Smith 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 also serves as Consultant to the Initiative of Vaccine Research at the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. She is the... read morePast President of the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM), and Past-President of the Asia Pacific Society of Travel Medicine.

Her special research interests include travel health, vaccine preventable and emerging infectious diseases, in particular dengue, Zika, yellow fever, chikgununya, influenza and meningococcal disease. With a career spanning almost three decades, she has led and co-led various clinical trials, published more than 280 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,” and recently completed another 4 year research project on dengue, also funded by the European Commission.

Professor Wilder Smith obtained her MD from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1987, her Master in International Health from Curtin University in Australia, and her PhD from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2003. The topic of her PhD was on “W135 meningococcal disease in Hajj pilgrims”. Over the past 15 years she has developed and taught courses in global health, communicable diseases and travel medicine both in Singapore and beyond. She worked and lived in the Asia Pacific region for more than 18 years (China, Nepal, Papua New Guinea and since 1998 in Singapore). From 2011-2012, she was the Director of Master Programme in International Health at the Institute of Public Health, University of Heidelberg, Germany.