Committee

Dr. Theresa Gyorkos

Dr. Theresa Gyorkos is a Canadian-based researcher in global health and infectious (parasite) disease epidemiology. She has over 25 years of experience conducting population-based primary epidemiological field research in Canada and abroad. Her research interests center around deworming control programs for high-risk populations such as those living in extreme poverty in parasitic disease-endemic areas of low- and middle-income countries, malnourished children, and pregnant women.

Dr. Gyorkos is currently a professor at McGill University’s Infectious Diseases and Immunity in Global Health Program.

Dr. Ajay Khera

Dr. Ajay Khera is Commissioner at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Government of India. He is responsible for planning, implementing, and monitoring child health immunization-related interventions at the national level. Prior to his current position, he served as the Assistant Director General at the National AIDS Control Organization, where he monitored and evaluated integrated disease surveillance programs. He also served as the Joint Director of Epidemiology at the National Center of Disease Control.

Dr. Khera has a Doctor of Medicine degree, specializing in preventive and social medicine from Lady Hardinge Medicine College and holds a Diploma in Gynecology and Obstetrics and Bachelor’s in Medicine and Surgery from Maulana Azad Medical College.

Dr. Alejandro Krolewiecki

Dr. Alejandro Krolewiecki is the National Director for Diseases and Risk Prevention in Argentina’s Ministry of Health. He also works as a researcher at the Tropical Diseases Research Institute at the National University of Salta, Argentina. Previously, Dr. Krolewiecki served as the Director of Clinical Research at Guest Foundation, a Buenos Aires-based public health organization that has been working to secure rights to health since 1989.

Ms. Seung Lee

Ms. Seung Lee is the Senior Director of School Health and Nutrition (SHN) at Save the Children. She has over 25 years of experience in international development specializing in health and education, including WASH in schools. She has a strong background in partnership building among governments and international agencies and working cross-sectorally in health and education. Ms. Lee joined Save the Children (SC) in January 2004 as the SHN Advisor for Africa, based in Ethiopia. She returned to Washington, DC in March 2006 and is now the Sr. Director for SHN. Through her work with Save the Children, Ms. Lee has provided strategic direction and technical assistance to SC’s SHN programs and leads a team of SHN specialists and project managers to ensure quality programming globally. She supports the FRESH (Focusing on Resources on Effective School Health) partnership and was a steering committee member of the UNAIDS Inter-Agency Task Team on Education (IATT). Previously, she worked for the World Bank supporting national-level SHN efforts in Africa and assisted in the World Bank’s support for HIV/AIDS and education programming. Seung has a BA from Dartmouth College and an MA from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Dr. Bruno Levecke

Dr. Bruno Levecke is the coordinator of Starworms, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project that aims to develop and validate tools to strengthen monitoring and surveillance of drug efficacy and anthelmintic resistance in soil-transmitted control programs based on preventive chemotherapy. Dr. Levecke is also a trained veterinarian and holds both a PhD degree in Veterinary Sciences and an MSc degree in Statistical Data Analysis of Ghent University.

Dr. Levecke has been working extensively in the STH arena in areas such as diagnosis and drug efficacy. He is currently the head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Monitoring Drug Efficacy against soil-transmitted helminths.

Dr. Hadley Matendechero Sultani

Dr. Hadley Matendechero Sultani is a consultant psychiatric pharmacist with a master’s degree in clinical pharmacy from the University of Nairobi. He currently serves as the Head, Division of Vector Borne and Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Kenya Ministry of Health. With encouragement from colleagues and stakeholders, he took up the role of national NTD program pharmacist in January 2014 and rapidly rose through the ranks to the position of national NTD program manager in late 2015. This appointment completed his shift of focus from mental health to NTD control. His goal is to achieve elimination of at least five NTDs in Kenya by 2025. Dr. Sultani currently serves as a member of the National Executive Committee of the Pharmaceutical Society of Kenya. He is a member of the Soil-Transmitted Helminthiasis (STH) Coalition, STH Advisory Committee, and the External Advisory Committee of the Scientific Research Partnership for Neglected Tropical Snakebite (SRPNTS). He is the current chairman of the Leishmaniasis East Africa Platform (LEAP) Advisory Committee, where his main objective is to establish a common regional strategy towards elimination of Kala Azar.

Dr. Rachel Pullan

Dr. Rachel Pullan is an Assistant Professor in Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Department of Disease Control at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).. She leads the London Applied & Spatial Epidemiology Research (LASER) group which specializes in GIS, spatial analysis, and field-based research, including large-cluster randomized trials of public health interventions. She also serves as Associate Director of the London Centre for NTD Research, and Associate Editor with PLOS NTDs.

Dr. Pullan received a BSc from Imperial College and an MSc and PhD from LSHTM.

Ms. Lisa Rotondo

Ms. Lisa Rotondo is a leading global expert in the control and elimination of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), having worked extensively with ministries of health, the World Health Organization (WHO), the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations to lead, implement, and advocate for NTD programs around the world. She is currently the Director of USAID’s Act to End NTDs | East Program. She also served as Director for USAID’s ENVISION project—a global flagship project aiming to control and eliminate seven NTDs by the year 2020.

In addition to providing leadership and technical and operations oversight for RTI NTD project activities, Ms. Rotondo serves as a member of the Trachoma Expert Committee and the STH Advisory Committee, provided four years’ executive leadership to the NTD Non-Government Organization Network (NNN), and is a former member of the Uniting to Combat NTDs Stakeholder Working Group. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso and is fluent in English and French.

Dr. Jürg Utzinger

Dr. Jürg Utzinger is the Director of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), an associated institute of the University of Basel and Professor of Epidemiology at the Faculty of Science of the University of Basel. He was trained in environmental sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, holds a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Basel, and pursued four years of postdoctoral research in demography and epidemiology at Princeton University in the U.S. Before his appointment as Director of Swiss TPH, Dr. Utzinger headed the Ecosystem Health Sciences Unit at Swiss TPH. His research, teaching, and training interests pertain to epidemiology, diagnosis, and integrated control of neglected tropical disease and malaria and health impact assessment of large footprint projects in low- and middle-income countries. He is engaged in transnational global health projects in Africa and Asia.