Joppe Hovius is Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Amsterdam UMC, Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Immunology & Infectious diseases, and a globally recognized expert in Lyme borreliosis and tick-borne diseases. For almost three decades, he has combined clinical care, translational research, and public health leadership to improve diagnostics, treatment, and prevention of tick-borne illnesses. He directs the Amsterdam Multidisciplinary Lyme Center and leads several national and European consortia, including initiatives on post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome and anti-tick vaccine development. His research spans from controlled human infection models to high-throughput immunoprofiling and mRNA vaccine strategies. Dr. Hovius is also committed to education, actively teaching students and healthcare providers, participating in a national e-learning program on Lyme borreliosis, and having co-authored a book on ticks and tick-borne diseases for the general public.

Liz serves as Principal Investigator of Lyme Disease Biobank, a program of the Bay Area Lyme Foundation. Lyme Disease Biobank is a resource that provides much-needed blood, urine, and tissue samples to researchers studying Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections. She has spent more than 2 decades working with non-profit organizations to build research initiatives and collaborations with academia, other non-profits, and industry. Since 2020, she has served as a scientific advisor for the LymeX Diagnostics Prize, a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation. Liz earned her doctorate in molecular pharmacology and cancer therapeutics from SUNY at Buffalo, was a National Library of Medicine fellow in biomedical informatics and received her MBI from Oregon Health & Science University. Liz is passionate about building resources to move research forward that help people, improve lives, and reduce suffering.

Dr. Lise Nigrovic’s research focus has been in the approach to diagnosis and management of children with infectious emergencies including Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections. She is the founding chair of the only pediatric Lyme disease clinical research network, Pedi Lyme Net with associated pediatric biorepository and more than 5000 children enrolled. Currently she is the PI for a NIAID funded 21-center comparative effectiveness study comparing doxycycline to ceftriaxone for children with Lyme meningitis which recently completed enrollment. Dr. Nigrovic is the Boston Children’s Hospital PI for the NCATS funded Harvard Catalyst grant to support local clinical research infrastructure and training.

Linda K. Bockenstedt, MD is the Harold W. Jockers Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine, Section of Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology at Yale School of Medicine. Her research program is devoted toward understanding the pathogenesis of Lyme disease and other Ixodes tick-borne infections in mouse models and humans. Her laboratory pioneered the use of two-photon intravital microscopy to study Lyme borreliosis in living mice and identified persistence of sterile inflammatory remnants of the Lyme bacteria in joint entheses after antibiotics. Her most recent work employs advanced systems (omics) technologies to define the initial host response to tick-borne disease in humans that may set the stage for diverse outcomes.

Alison Rebman is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Rheumatology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is also Co-Director for Clinical and Epidemiological Research at the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center. She has been involved in Lyme disease research for over 15 years and leads a variety of clinical, public health, and qualitative initiatives within the Center.
Alison recently moved back to the east coast with her family, after several years of living in Colorado. She’s happy to be back east- but not happy to be closer to ticks!