Each month, the IHU SEPSIS hosts a one-hour webinar featuring an international expert presenting their latest research on sepsis. All webinars are also available to watch on the IHU’s dedicated YouTube playlist.
Margaret Herridge is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, a Senior Scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, and a member of the University of Toronto Interdepartmental Division of Critical Care Medicine. She serves as the Director of the national RECOVER ICU Care Continuum Program, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), as well as the Grace RECOVER Program for chronic critical illness. Additionally, she is the co-Lead of CANCOV (a Canadian multicenter 5-year follow-up study of COVID-19 patients and their caregivers) and is internationally recognized as an expert on long-term clinical outcomes for critical illness survivors and their family caregivers. She holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Critical Illness Outcomes and the Recovery Continuum.
Julian Knight is a Professor of Genomic Medicine at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Consultant Physician within the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UK). He is a Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, where he leads research on the genomics of the immune system and how our genetic traits influence individual responses to infection, particularly sepsis. Alongside his research activities, he practices internal medicine and is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. His work aims to integrate genomic medicine into clinical practice by combining research, education, and the development of novel medical approaches.
Tom van der Poll is a Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Amsterdam University Medical Center (Netherlands). He is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases. His research focuses primarily on pneumonia and sepsis, particularly on disease pathogenesis, the host response to infection, immunotherapy, and biomarkers. He has published over 1,000 scientific papers in this field. He is a former chair of the International Sepsis Forum and served on the international committee that established the current sepsis definitions, published in JAMA in 2016. He was elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and of Academia Europaea in 2023.
Manu Shankar-Hari is a Professor of Translational Critical Care Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and practices as a Consultant Physician in Critical Care Medicine. His academic and scientific background combines two core disciplines: a Master's degree in Epidemiology and a PhD in Immunology. His research in translational immunology spans the entire spectrum from bench to bedside, aiming to better understand immune system dysfunction and to develop immunomodulation strategies for critically ill patients. He leads a research laboratory dedicated to addressing one of the greatest challenges in global medicine: sepsis.
Jean-Marc Cavaillon is an Honorary Professor at the Institut Pasteur, where he spent his entire career following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto (Canada). He has served as the Director of both the "Cytokines & Inflammation" research unit and the "Infection and Epidemiology" department. Furthermore, he is the former President of the International Endotoxin and Innate Immunity Society as well as the European Shock Society, and has held the position of Associate Editor for the scientific journals Cytokine and Shock.
His research focuses on inflammation, sepsis, and innate immunity, with a particular emphasis on cytokines, macrophages, and bacterial endotoxins. He has been deeply involved in translational research, studying the immune status of patients suffering from sepsis and other severe inflammatory conditions.