ISAR's President’s December 2023 MESSAGE
As we approach the six-month mark and start the countdown to the next ICAR, it is exciting to see the truly impressive list of award winners, plenary, and invited speakers we have lined up for ICAR 2024! This year’s program committee, led by our President-Elect Luis M. Schang, has selected a very diverse set of speakers - six different countries are represented, including the USA, UK, Singapore, China, Belgium, and of course, Australia. The speakers represent academia, industry, hospitals, and government, and are not only “virally” diverse in terms of their research focus, but also in their approaches, ranging from clinical research, medicinal chemistry, virology, vaccines, and small molecules.
Our award winners include the Diversity in Science and Excellence awardee Dr. Nancie Archin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose work aims to study HIV latency; former ICAR President Professor Johan Neyts, our Elion awardee, who leads the charge against many pathogens at the Rega Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium; the Prusoff awardee, Dr. Jessica Spengler from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, who works on numerous high hazard viral diseases including Ebola and other deadly viruses; and Professor Judith Breuer from the University College London, our Women in Science and Excellence awardee. Unfortunately, the 2024 Holy award winner, Dr. Nicholas Meanwell will not be able to join us. Rest assured, however, that he will give his award talk at ICAR 2025, and we look forward to congratulating him then.
Our plenary speakers this year will be Professor Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, who will tell us about increasing issues with the emergence of viral zoonotic diseases, and Dr. Jenny Low, from Duke NUS Medical School in Singapore, who will discuss the development of platforms to aid in the development of therapeutics for acute viral infections.
The list of invited speakers is also quite exciting, with talks scheduled from a number of outstanding Australian speakers, including Professor Sharon Lewin, who is the inaugural Director at both the Doherty Institute as well as the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics, in addition to her other job as a Professor at the University of Melbourne. She’ll be joined by Professor Peter Revill, head of the Regional and Global Health at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory, which is part of the Doherty Institute. Another representative from the Doherty Institute will be Dr. Sarah Londrigan, who is the Co-Lead of the Viral Infectious Diseases theme there. Rounding out the Australian contingency are Dr. Daniel Watterson, from the University of Queensland and Larissa Dirr, Griffith University. Their talks will cover looking for a cure for HIV, strategies towards a cure for HBV, and controlling influenza and parainfluenza virus, respectively.
Our second speaker from Singapore is Professor Lisa Ng, who is the executive director at the A*STAR Infectious Diseases Labs and will discuss her work on immune responses and with tropical diseases. In addition, our second speaker from the UK will be Dr. Alpha Lee from the University of Cambridge and co-founder of PostEra, who will talk about using machine learning and crowdsourcing to help develop better drugs.
Rounding out our exceptional list are our US colleagues including Professor Jennifer Golden, from the University of Wisconsin, a medicinal chemist who is targeting a variety of pathogens of pandemic concern as part of the UNC READDI AViDD consortium, Dr. Xuping Xie, from the University of Texas Medical Branch, who works on flaviviruses; Dr. Tobias Lanz from Stanford, who will focus on the roles of EBV on multiple sclerosis; and Dr. Sonia Best, the Chief of the Laboratory of Neurological Infections and Immunity at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of NIH, who targets yellow fever; and Professor Haitao Guo, from the University of Pittsburgh, whose research tackles the molecular biology of HBV.
Finally, our program committee will soon be selecting in the next couple of months a number of short talks from submitted abstracts, so stay tuned for even more exciting additions to the program.
As we count down to ICAR 2024 in the beautiful city of Gold Coast, Australia, I want to encourage you to join us – it promises to be a fantastic meeting! In the meantime, I want to wish everyone safe and happy holidays with your friends and families on behalf of the Society and myself, and of course, mark your calendar for May 20-24 in Australia – see you there!
Kathie Seley-Radtke
President, ISAR
December 11, 2023