Associate Professor Amy Hartman’s lab mission is to conduct both basic and applied research to further understanding of the pathogenesis of emerging bunyaviruses. Dr Hartman’s team seeks to understand the basic mechanisms contributing to disease outcomes after infection and then to translate this knowledge to the evaluation of antiviral therapeutics and vaccines. As a post-doctoral fellow at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), she studied the pathogenesis of Ebola virus and showed that viral inhibition of the cellular interferon regulatory factor (IRF)-3 was critical for the high virulence of Ebola virus in the mouse model. Also, while at CDC, she was deployed to Angola in 2005 as part of an international response team for a Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever outbreak. Since 2008, Dr Hartman has been at the University of Pittsburgh, now as an Associate Professor in the Center for Vaccine Research (School of Medicine) and the Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology (School of Public Health). The focus of her research program is on dissecting the mechanisms of understudied disease outcomes of emerging bunyaviruses such as Rift Valley fever virus.  Dr Hartman is particularly interested in how bunyaviruses cause vertical transmission during pregnancy and dissecting host factors responsible for tropism and pathogenesis.

Professor Christian Happi is a Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Genomics and the Director of the Institute of Genomics and Global Health (IGH), Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria. He earned his PhD from the University of Ibadan in 2000 and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Prof. Happi has served as a Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as well as a Visiting Professor at Harvard University.

His research focuses on the genomics of infectious diseases—including Malaria, Lassa fever, Ebola, COVID-19, HIV and human genomics. Prof. Happi founded IGH, supporting genomic surveillance in 42 African countries and training over 3,000 scientists. He is a 2025 TIME100 and 2025 TIME100 in Health. He is a Fellow of several prestigious academies worldwide, including Nigeria Academy of Science, Africa Academy of Science and the US National Academy of Medicine.

Dr Elisabeth Fichet-Calvet has devoted over 35 years to the study of wild and commensal rodents. She began her career in France, working on agricultural challenges related to rodent population dynamics and crop damage, before transitioning to public health research on rodent-borne zoonotic diseases, including cutaneous leishmaniasis and Lassa fever.

Dr. Fichet-Calvet is an expert in disease ecology and eco-epidemiology, with research focusing on the spatial, temporal, and behavioral drivers of disease transmission. She has led extensive field studies across Africa, including work in Tunisia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, and Zambia.

For the past 15 years, she has been based at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, where she heads the Zoonoses Control unit within the Department of Implementation Research. Her work integrates virology, ecology, and interdisciplinary approaches to rodent control in Lassa fever endemic settings. Since 2017, she has also served on the World Health Organization’s Lassa Fever Task Force.