SAC Members
Biographies
Prof Mark Woolhouse
University of Edinburgh
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Mark Woolhouse is Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. He studied biology at the Universities of Oxford and York and Queen’s in Canada, then held Research Fellowships at the University of Zimbabwe, Imperial College London and Oxford, before moving to Edinburgh in 1997. His research interests concern the population dynamics of pathogens at the human-animal interface, especially those associated with antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and emerging infectious diseases, applying ecological and evolutionary approaches to combat threats to both human and animal health.
He is Director of TIBA, a partnership between health researchers in Edinburgh and in nine countries in Africa. He is a frequent invited speaker to audiences of academics, clinicians and the general public and makes regular contributions in the press and media. He advises governments and national and international agencies and was a member of two high-level UK advisory groups on the Covid-19 pandemic response.
He was awarded an OBE in 2002 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the African Academy of Sciences
Prof Mical Paul
Israel Institute of Technology
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Mical Paul is a clinician heading The Infectious Diseases division at Rambam Health Care Campus and a full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. Her research is clinical and epidemiological and she has led numerous Cochrane and other systematic reviews. Her research expertise involves multidrug resistant Gram-negative bacteria, hospital-acquired infections, phase IV antibiotic trials and her methodological expertise concerns study design, risk of bias assessment, meta-analysis and evidence grading.
She has participated in previous WHO guideline development groups on iron supplementation (nutritional action group), the advisory committee the clinical development pipeline of antibacterial treatments and the scientific group developing target product profiles for needed antibacterial treatments. She is an editor with Clinical Microbiology and Infection and the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, member of The Israeli National Academy of Science in Medicine, a European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) fellow, past chairperson of ESCMID’s study group on infections in the elderly, an ESCMID guidelines sub-committee member and a methodologist support WHO and ESCMID guidelines development.
Dr Alessandro Cassini
Swiss Public Health Department and Lausanne University Hospital
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Alessandro Cassini is a medical doctor specialized in public health, preventive medicine and epidemiology, with an MSc in Health Policy Planning and Financing from LSE & LSHTM. During his 10 years at ECDC he was responsible for estimating and expressing the health burden of infectious diseases, developing risk ranking methodologies, and exploring knowledge translation solutions between scientific research and decision-makers. He has also been responsible for country visits to evaluating the response to the increasing AMR threat and for managing the EUCAST project. In March 2019,
Cassini joined the World Health Organization in the Infection Prevention and Control Technical and Clinical Hub, which is also responsible for the coordination of activities related to sepsis. As part of this work, he led the first WHO report on sepsis epidemiology and burden and is finalising a study on the cost-effectiveness of IPC. He also worked in the WHO Antimicrobial Resistance Division on strategies to control and respond to AMR. In 2022 he joined the Swiss healthcare system as the Deputy Cantonal Doctor of Vaud as well as the Lausanne university Hospital. He has been deployed several times as a field epidemiologist as part of response teams during many outbreaks including Ebola and COVID-19.