Professor Julian Rood holds a Personal Chair in the Department of Microbiology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research has focused on the genetics and pathogenesis of the pathogenic clostridia, especially Clostridium perfringens. He has used molecular genetics to determine the role of bacterial toxins in the pathogenesis of clostridial diseases of both humans and animals, to study the mechanisms by which the production of clostridial toxins is regulated and to analyse the conjugative plasmids responsible for the movement of toxin and antibiotic resistance genes both within and between these clostridial cells. He was one of initial instigators of the ClostPath meetings. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a Fellow and Life Member of the Australian Society for Microbiology. He previously served as President of the Australian Society for Microbiology.

Dr. Tamayo is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, USA. She earned her Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Texas Health Science Center, where she studied the regulation and function of lipopolysaccharide modifications in Salmonella enterica. She completed her postdoctoral training at Tufts University. Here, she focused on cyclic dinucleotide signaling in Vibrio cholerae, particularly on phosphodiesterases that degrade intracellular cyclic diguanylate (c-di-GMP) and their roles in pathogenesis. In 2009, Dr. Tamayo joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, USA, where she continued research on cyclic dinucleotide signaling in V. cholerae and C. difficile. Recent work in her laboratory focuses on c-di-GMP and phenotypic heterogeneity mediated by phase variation in C. difficile, with the goal of characterizing the underlying molecular mechanisms and the impact on the physiology and virulence of this bacterium.

After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in Biochemistry, Dr. Melnyk studied anthrax toxin structure and function as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Following this, he spent five years at Merck & Co. as a Senior Scientist leading small molecule drug discovery programs. In 2011, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Toronto at the Research Institute at The Hospital for Sick Children in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine. His research focuses on understanding the structure and function of bacterial toxins implicated in human disease, including the Large Clostridial Toxins. A major focus of his group is to study the interactions between naturally occurring and synthetic small molecules with bacterial toxins and use this information to better understand bacterial toxin pathogenesis and to develop novel therapeutics to block toxin action.

Dr. Skaar earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis and Master’s Degree in Public Health in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Northwestern University in 2002. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Microbiology at the University of Chicago, Dr. Skaar joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2005 as an Assistant Professor, and was named to the endowed Ernest W. Goodpasture Chair in Pathology in 2012. He is the Vice Chair for Basic Research in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, and the Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology, and Inflammation. The Skaar laboratory focuses on the impact of nutrition on the innate immune response to infectious diseases. They investigate this topic through a number of projects that seek to understand (i) nutrient acquisition by bacterial pathogens, (ii) how vertebrate immune proteins sequester nutrients during the pathogenesis of infection and cancer, and (iii) competition for nutrients between pathogens and the healthy microbiome, and (iv) the impact of diet on infection. His research has resulted in over 100 invited talks and over 200 published research articles. Dr. Skaar has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Pfizer Aspire Award, the Searle Scholars Award, the ICAAC/IDSA Young Investigator Award, the Chancellor’s Award for Research, the Stanley Cohen Award for Research, the Postdoctoral Mentor of the Year from Vanderbilt University, and he was named a Burroughs Wellcome Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases. Dr. Skaar is a Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology (ASM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS).

Dr. Bry directs the Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The Center supports >100 groups internationally, providing unique resources in anaerobic microbiology, microbial genomics, computational biology, and gnotobiotics to study causative effects of the microbiota on human health and disease. As a board-certified Pathologist with specialization in Clinical Microbiology and Molecular Pathology, she oversees a multi-institutional genomic surveillance program for drug-resistant pathogens that is an active node on the FDA's GenomeTrakr Network and works with the CDC and other international agencies. Her group continues to make contributions in the fields of bacterial genomics for genomic and statistical methods to evaluate resistance gene mobilization in bacterial populations, and in the manipulation of gut commensal species to define microbial genes and small molecules that modulate host phenotypes. In this latter area, her group's efforts have progressed multiple microbiota-informed applications to startup companies and new clinical programs in therapies for human food allergies, C. difficile surveillance, and defined bacteriotherapeutics to prevent and treat C. difficile infections.

Dr. Dorner is a Director and Professor at the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin, Germany. She leads the Biological Toxins Division in the Center for Biological Threats and Special Pathogens and is the Head of the German Consultant Laboratory for Neurotoxin-producing Clostridia at the Institute. In addition, she is Head of the Consultant Laboratory for Clostridium botulinum in food from the German Veterinary Medical Society. Her background is in chemistry with a focus on biochemistry and immunology and she received postdoctoral training at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, USA. Dr. Dorner has served as Scientific Coordinator for a variety of multinational projects including the current EU-funded project “EuroBioTox” which is dedicated to establishing procedures for the detection and identification of biological toxins. She has more than 15 years of experience in the research area of biological toxins, among them ricin, abrin, and botulinum neurotoxins, and more than 60 publications in the field of toxinology and immunology. Her research has focused on the development of advanced detection techniques (lab-based and on-site) for biological toxins, variability and functionality of biological toxins, and the epidemiology and pathogenesis of toxin-induced diseases.

Dr. Hirota is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Host-Microbe Interactions in Chronic Disease at the University of Calgary in the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases. His team’s research interests are broad, spanning from understanding the role microbial metabolites in the regulation of intestinal mucosal homeostasis, elucidating the mechanism(s) driving intestinal fibrosis and pathogenic tissue remodelling in Crohn’s disease, to characterizing the interplay between various mucosal immune cells and IL-22 in the context of health and disease.

Dr. Hurdle is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, Texas A&M Health Science Center, located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston. He obtained his B.S. in biology and chemistry from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. His Ph.D. in microbiology (2005), from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom with Professor Ian Chopra, described how Staphylococcus aureus gained resistance to mupirocin, its associated fitness costs, and how horizontal gene exchange occurred in a patient with co-colonizing staphylococci. His postdoctoral research with Professor Richard E. Lee, at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, focused on drug discovery for S. aureus biofilms and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. He began his independent research, in 2010, combining his inter-disciplinary postdoctoral and graduate trainings to address unmet medical needs for C. difficile. Early research in his group developed therapeutic concepts around membrane-active antibiotics to mitigate persistent CDI. His lab now focusses on 1) mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in CDI patient isolates and how it affects treatment outcomes; 2) molecular validation of drug targets; 3) discovering molecules that can be applied as both chemical genetic probes of C. difficile pathophysiology and as starting points for narrow-spectrum CDI drugs.

Dr. Kamada is an Associate Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. Kamada earned his Ph.D. degree at the Keio University School of Medicine, Japan, in 2007. He joined the Department of Pathology at the University of Michigan in 2009. He was appointed as Assistant Professor at his current Department in 2013 and subsequently promoted to tenured Associate Professor. His research aims to answer a fundamental question: how does the gut microbiota interact with host immunity in the context of gastrointestinal health and disease, such as enteric infection and inflammatory bowel disease.

Dr. Knight completed his Ph.D. in 2018 under Professor Tom Riley at the University of Western Australia, investigating Clostridium difficile epidemiology in animals. He is currently an NHMRC Early Career Fellow at Murdoch University and an adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Dan is an emerging leader in the field of C. difficile evolution. Three years post-PhD, he has published over 50 papers in this area and leads an international program of research focusing on aspects of C. difficile molecular epidemiology, One Health, AMR, and taxonomy. Dan has also just been appointed as Associate Editor for Anaerobe.

Dr. Thomas Louie, infectious disease clinician and emeritus clinical professor of medicine at the University of Calgary, has been an FMT practitioner for recurrent CDI since 1996. Dr. Louie completed internal medicine and infectious diseases training at UCLA and Tufts University with Drs. Sherwood Gorbach and John Bartlett as mentors. Working within an integrated Canadian health care system advantageous for population-based research, his participation in clinical trials for new treatments for all phases of C. difficile infection has kept Dr. Louie at the forefront of progress in FMT therapies.

Dr. Martin-Verstraete is Professor at the Université de Paris. She carried out her Ph.D. at the Pasteur Institute in Paris where she studied the regulatory role of the phosphotransferase system and the carbon catabolite repression in the physiology of Bacillus subtilis. She further developed projects on sulfur metabolism and its regulation in firmicutes. Since 2010, she has worked on the nosocomial enteropathogen Clostridioides difficile mainly on the regulatory network controlling toxin synthesis, sporulation, and more recently on the stress response and the role of phosphorylation in cell wall homeostasis. During all the steps of its infectious cycle, C. difficile encounters stressors and develops specific adaptive strategies. Her lab recently showed that Sigma B plays a crucial role in these adaptive strategies during gut colonization. A sigB mutant is more sensitive to CAMPS, NO, and ROS and had reduced tolerance to O₂. Among the Sigma B targets, they identified the O₂ reductases reverse Rubrerythrins and flavodiiron proteins as pivotal actors in the ability of C. difficile to tolerate and survive to physiological O₂ tensions encountered in the colon.

Dr. McBride is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. McBride received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 2005 and her Bachelor of Science degree from McNeese State University in 1999. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the field of bacterial pathogenesis at the Schepens Eye Research Institute of Harvard Medical School from 2005 to 2008 and at the Tufts University School of Medicine from 2008 to 2012. Research in Dr. McBride’s lab focuses on identifying the genetic mechanisms that control sporulation and antimicrobial resistance in the gastrointestinal pathogen, Clostridioides difficile.

Dr. Sabine Pellett received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Environmental Toxicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, after completing a Master’s degree in Biology at Portland State University, Oregon in 1997. Sabine grew up in Heidelberg, Germany, and studied Biology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, for three years, receiving an equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree in 1995. Currently, Sabine works in the bacteriology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she leads the lab studying botulinum neurotoxins and Clostridium botulinum. Sabine has authored or coauthored over 50 peer-reviewed publications and two book chapters on botulinum neurotoxins and has received several NIH research grants. Research in the Pellett lab currently focuses on determining molecular mechanisms of neuronal cell intoxication by the various botulinum neurotoxins, botulinum neurotoxin expression in C. botulinum, food safety studies, and the development of recombinant protein vaccines.

Dr. Smits has studied C. difficile since 2010. His current research focuses on identifying novel targets of antimicrobials, antimicrobial resistance, and the role of plasmids in C. difficile physiology. He has been studying DNA replication as a target for antimicrobials and performed an extensive characterization of the DNA replication proteins. He has shown that the phase 2 drug ibezapolstat, developed for the treatment of CDI and targeting the replication protein PolC, is active against a broad range of C. difficile isolates at clinically relevant concentrations, and has studied the transcriptional response to sub-MIC levels of the drug. His group described the first plasmid associated with antimicrobial resistance of C. difficile that was identified using strains cultured from longitudinal fecal samples from a patient with recurrent CDI and showed that PCR can reliably identify strains with stable metronidazole resistance. Further work has demonstrated that plasmids are common among clinical isolates and encode functions that are potentially relevant for pathogenesis. A very recent project identified haem as an important determinant for metronidazole MIC determinations.

Dr. Uzal, DVM, MSc, PhD, Dipl. ACVP, is a Professor of Diagnostic Pathology and Branch Chief of the San Bernardino Laboratory of the California Animal Health and Food Safety, UC Davis. He specializes on clostridial diseases of animals with emphasis on enteric diseases and animal models for human disease. He has a special interest in gastrointestinal diseases of horses, ruminants and other farm animals. Dr. Uzal has published ~ 280 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is the senior author of the chapter on “Alimentary Diseases”, for the 6^th edition of “Jubb, Kennedy and Palmer’s Pathology of Domestic Animals” (2016, Elsevier) and the first author of the recently published textbook on Clostridial diseases of animals (2016, Wiley and Blackwell). He has also authored chapters on clostridial diseases in several traditional veterinary textbooks such as Diseases of Poultry, Diseases of Pigs and Textbook of Internal Medicine. He has an active NIH research program on clostridial diseases with special emphasis on enteric diseases produced by Clostridium perfringens. He is a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Pathologists and a member of the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Davis-Thompson Foundation. Dr Uzal is an Associated and Photo Editor of the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation and Anaerobe and member of the editorial board of several other journals.