Expert International Judging Panel

Sujith Chandy

Dr. Sujith J Chandy, Head, ReAct Asia Pacific, collaborates with civil society, institutions, and policy makers in the region through research, advocacy, and activities towards conserving and enabling access to effective antibiotics. Dr. Chandy is a Professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology at Christian Medical College, Vellore, India, and has been involved for almost two decades with a number of global agencies on various aspects of AMR and antibiotic use.

Marc Mendelson

Dr. Marc Mendelson is Professor of Infectious Diseases and Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases & HIV Medicine at University of Cape Town. He combines antibiotic stewardship with work on national and international policy related to AMR. He is Chair of the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on AMR and co-Chair of the South African Antibiotic Stewardship Programme. In addition, he serves on multiple WHO technical advisory groups related to AMR.

Corey Forde

Dr. Corey A. Forde is Head of the Infection Prevention and Control/Infectious Diseases Programs at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the Barbados, West Indies. He is currently Chair of Infection Prevention and Control and Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program which he started as the first formal program in the English-speaking Caribbean. He also serves as associate lecturer in Medicine at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Barbados.

Iruka Okeke

Dr. Iruka N. Okeke is a Professor at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and a UK MRC/DfID-supported African Research Leader. She researches the molecular epidemiology, pathogenesis, and drug resistance of enteric bacteria, as well as laboratory practices in Africa. She currently serves as a drug resistance consultant to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Africa CDC, The Wellcome Trust’s Surveillance and Epidemiology of Drug Resistant Infections Consortium (SEDRIC) Board, WHO and other organizations. In addition, Dr. Okeke is a fellow of the Nigerian and African Academies of Science.

Caline Mattar

Dr. Caline Mattar is an Assistant Professor of medicine and Global Health in the division of Infectious Diseases at Washington University, St. Louis. She is interested in antimicrobial resistance and the prevention of hospital-acquired infections in resource-limited settings. She has collaborated with the World Health Organization on the implementation of the Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, specifically in the field of education of the health-care workforce on appropriate antibiotic prescribing, and communication and behavior change. She currently chairs the Expert Advisory Group for the Global AMR Research and Development Hub in Berlin. Dr. Mattar is the immediate past chair of the World Medical Association’s Junior Doctors Network (JDN) and has held leadership positions in the International Federation of Medical Students Association (IFMSA).

Mirfin Mpundu

Dr. Mirfin Mpundu is the Head of ReAct Africa and part of ReAct’s Global Leadership team. He provides countries with technical assistance on the development and implementation of National Action Plans, and is always on the look-out for new partnerships and collaborations towards putting antimicrobial resistance on the global and African agenda.

Esmita Charani

Dr. Esmita Charani is the research pharmacist at the National Institute of Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU), a partnership between Imperial College London, Public Health England, Cambridge University Veterinary School, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Imperial College Health Partners North West London Academic Health Science Network. She is a visiting researcher at Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, and Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences Kerala, India where she is involved in research on implementing antibiotic stewardship programmes. Dr. Charani completed her doctoral thesis investigating antimicrobial stewardship across India, Norway, France and England, from Imperial College in 2018, and is currently the co-developer of a Massive Open Online Course on antimicrobial stewardship with Imperial College London and the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

Nithima Sumpradit

Dr. Nithima Sumpradit is a senior pharmacist at the Food and Drug Administration, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand.  She serves in the Secretariat team for the National Policy Committeeon AMR and is a multi-sectoral coordinator for Thailand’s National Strategic Plan on AMR. She is also a program manager for the Royal Thai Government – WHO Country Cooperation Program on AMR. She started her career in this field via the Antibiotics Smart Use program that was first piloted in 2007, then scaled up and adopted into national policies to promote appropriate use of antibiotics in Thailand till today. She received bachelor’s degree is in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Mahidol University. Her Master’s Degree is in Health Promotion and Behavior from the University of Georgia, and her Ph.D. is in Pharmacy Social and Administrative Sciences at the University of Michigan.

Sabiha Essack

Dr. Sabiha Essack, Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is the South African Research Chair in Antibiotic Resistance and One Health. Professor Essack serves as expert consultant on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to the WHO in Geneva and the WHO Regional Office for Africa.  She is founder and co-chair of the South African Chapter of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA), member of the FIP Working Group on Antimicrobial Resistance and chairperson of the Global Respiratory Infections Partnership (GRIP).  She serves on the South African Chapter of the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership (GARP) and the South African Antibiotic Stewardship Programme and has just completed her term as Vice Chairperson of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on AMR in South Africa.

Alain Labrique

Dr. Alain Labrique is an infectious disease epidemiologist, community trialist, and a globally recognized leader in the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to strengthen health systems in resource-limited settings. He serves on the faculty of the Global Disease Epidemiology and Control Program of the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and serves as Director of the JHU Global mHealth Initiative and the Chair of the WHO Digital Health Guidelines committee.

Pilar Ramon-Pardo

Dr. Pilar Ramon-Pardo is the Team Lead of the Antimicrobial Resistance Special Program at PAHO, WHO’s Regional office for the Americas. She earned a MD and PhD from the University Complutense, Madrid, Spain. Since 2008, she joined the Communicable Diseases Department at PAHO, and is responsible for planning programming, and implementing regional strategies to support Latin American and Caribbean countries to carry out and scale up national antimicrobial resistance responses.

Bob Bolinger

Dr. Bob Bolinger is a Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and is the Founding Director of the Center for Clinical Global Health Education (CCGHE) and Associate Director for Medicine of the JH Center for Global Health. Dr. Bollinger has more than 40 years of experience in international public health, clinical research, and education dealing with such global health priorities as HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, dengue, antibiotic resistant infections and other emerging diseases, and has been invited to participate in public health training programs and expert committees in more than 15 countries. For the past 27 years, Dr. Bollinger has also been an active clinician and clinical teacher, providing patient care at Johns Hopkins as an attending physician on the Mann Infectious Diseases Consult Service and Polk HIV In-patient Unit.