Dr Eline van der Hoek is trained in life sciences and has years of experience as a policy officer at various ministries. In various roles, she has promoted cooperation between knowledge institutions, companies and government. Recent years have focused specifically on innovations on infectious diseases and in particular pandemic preparedness. As managing director of InFECT-NL, she wants to further accelerate innovation for product development against infectious diseases and further connect the growing ecosystem.

Professor in Vaccinology, Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) Meta Roestenberg is a pioneer in research on vaccines and infectious diseases. Her team of researchers is helping to develop a vaccine against malaria, an infectious disease that afflicts 200 million people every year, resulting in thousands of deaths. Malaria is caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes. It is difficult to develop vaccines against parasites; they are biologically complex and have evolved to evade detection by the human immune system. In her research, Roestenberg utilises living malaria parasites that have been artificially weakened. This approach has shown great promise in initial clinical trials. Roestenberg has also pioneered the development of controlled human infection models (CHIMs), a method that involves the controlled infection of human volunteers, allowing researchers to study the immune system response and the effect of vaccines and drugs. Roestenberg has developed CHIMs for schistosomiasis and hookworm, parasitic tropical diseases that affect millions of people. Roestenberg has an extensive network of vaccine researchers, not only in Europe and the US but also in Africa and Asia. She drew on this network to establish the non-profit organisations InFECT-NL and INFECTA, which aim to connect expertise in the Netherlands and accelerate early-stage clinical trials of new vaccines and medicines.

Prof. dr. Debbie van Baarle is professor in Immunology of Vaccinations at the University Medical Center Groningen since September 2020 and Director of the research Institute Precision since July 2023. She is an immunologist with specific expertise in immune responses to viral infections. Identification of protective immune responses as well as insight in biomarkers of vaccination response will provide leads to improve vaccination strategies in (older) risk groups. Debbie van Baarle is (co-)author of over 250 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed, international journals (H-index: 57), which have been cited ≈ 12000 times. She successfully supervised 25 PhD students and currently has 5 PhD students in training, 3 postdocs and 2 technicians. Since September 2025 she is the Scientific Director of LifeLines, a large, multigenerational cohort study that includes over 167,000 participants (10%) from the northern population of the Netherlands. Participants are followed with a lifespan perspective, to obtain insight into healthy ageing.

Dr. Dimitri Diavatopoulos is Associate Professor of Experimental and Translational Vaccinology at the Laboratory of Medical Immunology at Radboudumc in Nijmegen. His research focuses on the formation and function of immunological memory after infection and vaccination, with an emphasis on the mucosa of the respiratory tract, using controlled human infection models (CHIMs) for whooping cough and pneumococcus, among others. As coordinator of the European PERISCOPE consortium, he was involved in various vaccine studies, the design of the pertussis challenge model and the development of an immunological biomarker platform. He is co-spokesperson for the Radboudumc research program Human Challenge Models and chairman of the KNVM Vaccinology section. He has been involved with InFECT-NL from the start as an academic partner on behalf of Radboudumc.

Prof. dr. Joppe Hovius is an internist-infectiologist with expertise in the field of vector-borne infectious diseases and in particular tick-borne diseases. His research ranges from basic scientific research on tick-host-pathogen interactions, to translational research in human tick challenge models to large-scale phase 3 vaccination studies. He is also the head of the department of infectious diseases at the Amsterdam UMC, director of the Amsterdam Institute for Immunology & Infectious Diseases, and founder of the Amsterdam UMC Multidisciplinary Lyme Disease Center. He has been involved with InFECT-NL from the start.

Dr. Marie-Astrid Hoogerwerf is an internist-infectiologist at the LUMC and head of the Clinical Research Unit of the Leiden University Centre for Infectious Diseases. She leads a group of researchers on ethical aspects of controlled infections. Her expertise in conducting controlled infections is broad, with a special focus on parasitic infections and pandemic preparedness models. Previously, she is involved in the European Vaccines Hub as workpackage lead "Controlled Human Infections" and co-pillar lead for Clinical Trials.

Natalie Mazur, MD, PhD is a pediatrician and translational infectious diseases researcher with expertise in early-phase clinical development of vaccines and therapeutics. She graduated cum laude in Biology from Harvard University before pursuing medical training and subsequently completing a PhD in translational science focused on accelerating the development of a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine. Following her PhD, Dr. Mazur was awarded a prestigious personal grant from the Dutch Lung Foundation to establish the first RSV Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) in the Netherlands and the first outpatient. Dr. Mazur is committed to improving global vaccine access and affordability. She collaborates with partners in more than 80 countries to strengthen research capacity, support equitable clinical development, and advance sustainable infectious disease research infrastructures worldwide. Dr. Mazur currently combines clinical practice in Pediatrics with leading a translational infectious diseases research group.