Eric D. Green, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is the third NHGRI director, having been appointed by NIH director Dr. Francis Collins in 2009.

Prof. Leon Mutesa is Director of Center for Human Genetics at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences-University of Rwanda. He obtained his MD from the university of Rwanda in 2003 and his PhD in 2009 from the university of Liege-Belgium where he also completed his post-doc in 2011. Throughout his career he has been immensely involved in clinical services, academics, research, capacity building, and management in the health sector. He served as the Director of Department of Clinical

Musa M. Mhlanga did his undergraduate studies in France & the US and obtained his PhD in New York at The Rockefeller University & NYU School of Medicine. There, he worked on the development of molecular beacons for in vitro diagnostics and for imaging of RNA in living cells with Fred R. Kramer & Sanjay Tyagi. Next, he did a Post Doctoral fellowship at the Institut

Penny Moore is a Reader and DST/NRF South African Research Chair of Virus-Host Dynamics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, and Research Associate at CAPRISA, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She obtained her MSc in Microbiology at Wits, studying gastroenteritis-associated

Thomas Kariuki is the Director of Programmes at The African Academy of Sciences where he leads the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa. He holds an honorary Professorship at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and a Ph.D. in immunology from the University of York.

Prof. Tulio de Oliveira is the director of KRISP. He has received his BSc at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil and MSc/PhD at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, UKZN, South Africa. He was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, U.K. from 2004 to 2006 and a Newton Advanced Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI)