ESCMID Study Group for Staphylococci and Staphylococcal Diseases (ESGS) 

Annelies Zinkernagel, MD PhD, trained in infectious diseases and internal medicine as well as experimental microbiology. She is the chair and professor of the department of Infectious Diseases and Hospital Hygiene at the University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on exploring bacterial pathogen host interactions aiming to understand virulence mechanisms for identification of novel targets for anti-infective therapy and the pathogenesis of chronic infections associated with biofilms and persisters as well as studying the potential of boosting the host’s innate immune system by increasing the microcidal capacity of phagocytes aiming to prevent bacterial relapse. She is the immediate past president of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

Dr Stefano Giulieri (MD, PhD) is a clinician researcher with a special interest in staphylococcal genomics and orthopaedic infections, based at the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne. He is passionate about using evolutionary biology, statistical genomics and machine learning approaches to answer clinical questions in infectious diseases. He has pioneered large-scale investigations of Staphylococcus aureus evolution during severe infections, which have revealed key mechanisms that lead to treatment failure through persistence and recurrence. His work was published in Genome Medicine, Cell Reports, eLife, mBio and Nature Reviews Microbiology. He is an Infectious Diseases Physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital where he has a clinic specialised in orthopaedics infections. Before moving to Melbourne, he was the Head of the Infectious Diseases Consultation in the Orthopaedics Department at the Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland.