22nd International Burkholderia cepacia Working Group Meeting

Dr. Silvia Cardona is a Professor and the Associate Head (Graduate Affairs) in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. After obtaining a bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Silvia moved to Chile for Ph.D. studies in Microbiology and later to the University of Western Ontario, where she conducted postdoctoral studies in pathogenomics of Burkholderia cepacia complex.

In 2006, Dr. Cardona became an independent researcher, working on the molecular mechanisms that control bacterial growth of Burkholderia in different settings, such as during infection or biotechnological processes. https://cardonalab.org/

As the Director of the Toronto Adult Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Clinic at St. Michael’s Hospital, Dr. Tullis is responsible for the care of 450 adults with CF. Dr. Tullis is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto, the Respirology Division Head at St. Michael’s Hospital, and an Associate Scientist in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute. She is the Cystic Fibrosis Canada Chair in Adult CF Research.

Dr. Tullis has published over 100 articles and book chapters and has lectured nationally and internationally on issues related to CF in adults. She has had 25 years of experience with CF clinical care. She was the Chair of the Clinic Subcommittee of the Medical/Scientific Advisory Board of Cystic Fibrosis Canada from 2005-2011 and in 2010 was a Coach for the Adult Quality Improvement Program run by the American Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Dr. Valerie Waters is a Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto and has been a full-time staff physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at SickKids since 2005. She is also a Senior Associate Scientist in Translational Medicine at SickKids Research Institute.

Dr. Waters received her MD from McGill University, Montreal, Canada and did her paediatric residency at SickKids. She then completed a paediatric infectious diseases fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre and obtained her Masters in Biostatistics at Columbia University, New York.

Waters' research program is focused on the investigation of the epidemiology and treatment of multi-drug resistant bacterial pathogens causing lung infections in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). She is particularly interested in the way these organisms grow as communities of bacteria known as biofilms, which are associated with increased antimicrobial resistance. In addition, the team also investigate the effects of antibiotic treatment of pulmonary exacerbations in CF and are conducting a clinical trial of oral prednisone as an adjuvant therapy in CF patients with pulmonary exacerbations.

Wafaa Antonious has been providing secretariat services for CCUBC since 1998 first through the Canadian Federation of Biological Socieites (CFBS). When CFBS folded at the end of 2008, Wafaa resumed providing secretariat services through her own company "Rofail Conference and Management Services (RCMS) as of January 2009. Wafaa's services for CCUBC includes providing support to CCUBC Executive (services and consultation), organizing the annual meeting, maintaining the website, book keeping, dealing with inquiries from members and others related to CCUBC activities. Through RCMS, Wafaa provides secretariat services to other organizations and organizes scientific workshops, meetings and conferences from 20 - 800 attendees.

Dr. John Lipuma is one of the funding members of the IBCWG. Dr. Lipuma has been engaged in biomedical research for nearly 30 years with a focus on bacterial infections of the airways in persons with cystic fibrosis. His laboratory has developed novel methods of bacterial genotyping to study the molecular epidemiology of CF related respiratory tract pathogens, as well as numerous genotype-based methods for bacterial species identification.

Dr Lipuma's laboratory serves as a national reference laboratory for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and maintains an extensive culture collection that includes approximately 35,000 strains of respiratory tract bacterial pathogens, including Burkholderia, Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomonas, Achromobacter, Haemophilus, Acinetobacter, and Staphylococcus spp.

During the past 5 years, research in Dr. Lipuma's laboratory has focused on culture-independent microbial community profiling, including use of microbiomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic platforms, to understand the lung microbiology in CF.

Dr. Lipuma has published several recent reports in this area, including a description of the decade-long dynamics of airway microbial communities in CF, which has been cited in excess of 120 times since being published in PNAS in 2012.