Our Team
Steering Committee
Providing management and oversight of our global work
Michael Marks
Chair
Michael Marks is a Associate Professor in Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Michael lived in the Solomon Islands between 2013-2015 and continues to work in the Pacific. His major research interests are in strategies for the control of neglected tropical diseases in particular the endemic treponematoses and scabies which are both major public health problems in the region. Michael has lead research on the clinical epidemiology of NTDs in the Pacific and West Africa. His other major interest is in integrated strategies for the control of NTDs and he is an investigator on a number of trials exploring integrated mass-drug administration in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea. Clinically, Michael practices Infectious Diseases in London, United Kingdom.
Cristina Galván Casas
Vice-Chair
Cristina Galván Casas is a dermatologist with an interest in skin neglected tropical diseases, specifically scabies. She is a researcher in the STI and Skin NTD Unit of the Fight Infections Foundation, where she works on research projects on COVID, MPOX and scabies. She has experience in attending a huge number of scabies cases in the Saharawi refugee territories and, in the last seven years, in rural Malawi as founder, and responsible for seven years, of the integrated dermatological health care project Dermalawi. She has developed her clinical activity as a dermatologist in public hospitals and in private practice in Madrid, Spain.
Myra Hardy
Treasurer and Secretary
Myra is a paediatric infectious diseases physician with a strong interest in global health that stems from her early research evaluating the burden of rheumatic heart disease in schoolchildren in Tonga. During her paediatric training she has worked in Melbourne, Darwin, Solomon Islands and Canada. She has recently completed her PhD based in Fiji investigating the safety and efficacy of ivermectin, diethylcarbamazine, and albendazole for lymphatic filariasis control and the non-inferiority of one-dose versus two-dose ivermectin-based MDA for the community control of scabies.
Olivier Chosidow
Olivier Chosidow, MD, PhD, works at the Department of Dermatology, University-based Hospital Henri-Mondor, Créteil, France. He earned his medical degree in 1987 and became board-certified in Dermatology-Venereology in 1988. He early dedicated his career to clinical research, obtaining his PhD thesis in Clinical Pharmacology in 1995 and was trained in Clinical Epidemiology in 1997. He became full Professor in 2000, was President of the French Society of Dermatology (FSD) in 2013-2015 and funded the FSD Foundation. He is chairing the FSD infectious and STDs working group and the FSD center of evidence. He has written around 520 publications and has a main interest in emergency dermatology and skin infectious diseases, including necrotizing fasciitis and scabies, and is leading or co-leading a numerous number of RCTs in the field.
Wendemagegn Enbiale
Wendemagegn is a Dermatovenerologist and Medical Doctor who received his Master in Public Health in 2013. He is an Associate Professor at Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia. Wendemagegn has been involved in prevention and management of NTDs and authored about 12 papers. He has coordinated the survey and response to a major drought-associated epidemic of scabies in Ethiopia since 2015, and supports the regional health bureau and Federal Ministry of Health, Ethiopia, with technical expertise for scabies and NTD management, and serves on the Ministry of Health research advisory committee.
Daniel Engelman
Daniel is a Consultant Paediatrician at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, and Team Leader / Clinician-Scienstist Fellow in Tropical Diseases at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and University of Melbourne, Australia. He has clinical experience in high scabies prevalence areas in northern Australia and the Pacific. Daniel’s current research and public health interests include the diagnosis, treatment and community control of scabies, integrated control of NTDs affecting the skin, and prevention of rheumatic heart disease.
Claire Fuller
Claire is a Board Member of the International League of Dermatological Societies and Chair of International Foundation for Dermatology. She is a Consultant Dermatologist and Head of Department at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, London. As a former Senior Lecturer at the Regional Dermatology Training Centre, Moshi Tanzania she has clinical experience of the practicalities of teaching and working in resource poor settings. Her research interests are in dermatological epidemiology in resource poor settings with a particular focus on neglected tropical diseases. In additional to her clinical expertise as a general and paediatric dermatologist for patients of darker skin types, she is also leads a genital dermatoses specialist skin service in the UK.
Patrick Lammie
Pat Lammie is Principal Investigator on the ‘Filling the Gaps’ grant to the Neglected Tropical Diseases Support Center at the Task Force for Global Health, where he provides technical guidance and strategic oversight to the projects. Pat is also a Senior Staff Scientist in the Disease Elimination and Control Group in the Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pat received his PhD from Tulane University in 1983 following doctoral research on the immunology of experimental filariasis. He has been at CDC for more than 20 years where his principal focus has been lymphatic filariasis. His laboratory is heavily invested in efforts to develop new tools and strategies to monitor and evaluate filariasis and other NTDs.
Andrew Steer
Andrew Steer is a consultant paediatrician and paediatric infectious diseases physician at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. He is the director of Infection and Immunity and Group Leader of Tropical Diseases at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for International Child Health in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne. Andrew has worked on scabies epidemiology and control since 1997 and is led several trials demonstrating the benefit of ivermectin-based mass drug administration for scabies control in the Pacific. Andrew’s other research interests are group A streptococcal clinical and molecular epidemiology; group A streptococcal vaccine research; rheumatic heart disease pathogenesis, epidemiology and control; and epidemiology and control of tropical childhood bacterial skin diseases.
IACS is supported by the Secretariat of the International League of Dermatological Societies, with Undraa Bayasgalan being the assigned Project Coordinator.
Advisory Group
Providing research, political and educational support to IACS
Dirk Engels
Dirk Engels graduated as a medical doctor in 1979. He further holds diplomas in tropical medicine and hygiene, epidemiology, a Master’s degree in health services research, and a PhD in parasitology. During the first 16 years of his professional career he successively worked in clinical tropical medicine, public health and tropical disease control, in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Rwanda and Senegal, mostly serving people in poor rural settings. In 1998 he joined WHO where he was instrumental in developing norms and standards for the implementation of integrated large-scale preventive treatment interventions for the control or elimination of multiple tropical diseases. As Director of the Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases, he steered the global expansion of interventions for the control and elimination of tropical diseases. Dr Engels retired from WHO in 2017.
Charles Mackenzie
Charles Mackenzie is a pathologist with expertise in tropical diseases. He has over 30 years experience of working closely with a number of countries in Africa and Latin America on onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis, as well as a long career at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Michigan State University researching the pathogenesis of filarial and other infectious diseases. His current work at the Task Force for Global Health involves the development of a laboratory support system to aid countries as they move to the elimination and control of NTDs, as well as catalyzing the global efforts to eliminate onchocerciasis. Charles is also the current Chair of the Global Alliance to Eliminate of Lymphatic Filariasis (GAELF), as well as other committees that focus on patient care for NTDs.
Toby Maurer
Toby Maurer is a dermatologist at the University of California San Fransisco. She is an expert in HIV dermatology and infectious diseases and an international lecturer and researcher in this field. Toby earned a medical degree at the University of Calgary in 1987. She completed residencies in family practice and dermatology and two fellowships in HIV medicine at UCSF. In her research, she is studying Kaposis sarcoma and teledermatology, which uses computer and video technology to diagnosis dermatologic conditions. She also has set up HIV dermatologic services and research in Uganda and Kenya. She is a professor at UCSF in Dermatology and chief of Dermatology at San Francisco General Hospital.
James McCarthy
Secretary
James McCarthy leads a multidisciplinary research team at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research undertaking research in human parasitology and translational research in tropical medicine. He holds a senior leadership position at QIMR, as Head of the Programme of Infectious Diseases, and serves as the QIMR representative in the Australian Infectious Diseases Research Centre. He is a Senior Consultant Physician in Infectious Diseases at the Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital, and a Conjoint Professor of Medicine at The University of Queensland. His research areas include using experimental human malaria infection to improve the understanding of the pathogenesis of malaria and to develop new diagnostics, drugs and vaccines, improving the diagnosis and treatment of scabies and intestinal helminth infections and clinical trials of new drugs and vaccines for infectious diseases.
Paul Cantey
Paul Cantey is a medical epidemiologist and the acting chief of Parasitic Disease Branch in the Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria. Dr. Cantey began at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer in the Parasitic Diseases Branch (PDB). After completing EIS, he joined the Immigrant, Migrant and Refugee Health Branch for one year and then returned to PDB. While in PDB he has been involved in research, investigations, or programmatic work involving a number of parasitic diseases. His major focus has been onchocerciasis, implementing studies in Uganda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania, and Togo in collaboration with CDC colleagues, the African Field Epidemiology Network, and partners in national Neglected Tropical Disease programs. For three years he served as the medical officer for onchocerciasis and scabies at the World Health Organization. Dr. Cantey earned his BS in Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his MD from Emory University, and his MPH in Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Emory University and then joined the Emory Faculty for 6 years, where he taught medical students and residents at Grady Hospital. He left Emory in 2007 to begin working at CDC.