Austin Swafford, PhD.

President

Austin D. Swafford, PhD, is a scientist whose expertise spans a wide range of fields critical to the advancement of science, technology and healthcare. He has led multiple private-public partnerships focused on automation, artificial intelligence, drug discovery, immunology, genetics, microbiology, and nanotechnology, as well as curriculum, business, and software development.

Dr. Swafford is a co-author on several patent applications and >50 publications with >17,000 combined citations on a wide range of subjects including basic and applied biology as well as novel diagnostics, data and sample processing methods and data analysis tools.

In 2023, Austin was selected as the next President of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, whose mission is to help alleviate human suffering and disease by supporting the training of promising students through the prestigious NIH-Oxford-Cambridge (OxCam) Scholars Program and its affiliates. This Program was created in 2001 to revolutionize the way in which the most talented biomedical PhD and MD/PhD students are trained and has since graduated over 200 of the world’s aspiring biomedical leaders.

Dr. Swafford was formerly CTO at InterOme, Inc. where he and his team developed end-to-end solutions for turning the vision of precision medicine and precision public health into a reality in collaboration with an international group of advisors, laboratories, and logistics providers.

Dr. Swafford was formerly the Director of Research- Innovations for the Center for Microbiome Innovation in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego where he and his team built numerous private-public partnerships examining the impact of microbes on the health of humans, animals, and the environment as well as developing state-of-the-art methods, technologies, software, and bioinformatics approaches to characterizing the microbiome.

He previously completed a postdoc in beta cell regeneration at Novartis and then spent several years in industry developing and implementing high-throughput workflows at leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Dr. Swafford earned his doctoral degree in Medical Genetics from the NIH-OxCam Program supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship in Bioengineering to study the etiology and early diagnosis of type 1 diabetes.

In 2022, Dr. Swafford founded the Swafford Consulting Group whose mission is to help businesses, organizations, and individuals navigate the biomedical research and innovation landscape and to bridge the gaps between conception and realization in science and technology.

Clare Bryant, MA, BSc, BVetMed, Ph.D., MRCVS

Professor of Innate Immunity
Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine
Director, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Programme (Cambridge, UK)

Prof. Clare Bryant graduated in biochemistry before training as a veterinary surgeon in London. She was funded by the Wellcome Trust for her Ph.D. (in London) before moving to work with Professor Sir John Vane at the William Harvey Research Institute for 4 years as a Wellcome postdoctoral fellow. She then moved to Cambridge as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow where she is now Professor of Innate Immunity with laboratories in the Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Her research group uses multidisciplinary approaches to understand how zoonotic bacteria are detected by the host (through Pattern Recognition Receptors (PRRs) including Toll-like receptors and inflammasomes), but also studies how PRR recognition of allergen proteins or toxic proteins produced by patients link to chronic inflammatory diseases such as Alzheimer’s and chronic allergic airway disease.

The Bryant lab has extensive collaborations with academia and industry which underpins all of their research. They collaborate closely with academics in the USA, Europe, and Australia to stay at the cutting edge of innate immunity research. A vital part of their work is to forge, and maintain, strong collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry to translate their research into medicines. This includes close links to Genentech (Dr. Bryant was a visiting professor there in 2016 and 2017) and she was seconded (part-time) to GSK in Stevenage as part of their Immunology Catalyst program for 3 years to forge stronger links with academia. Dr. Bryant and Prof. David Klenerman also have a drug discovery program with Apollo Therapeutics (a collaboration of Cambridge, UCL, Johnson and Johnson, Astra Zeneca, and GSK) looking for inhibitors of TLR4 as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and asthma. Dr. Bryant is the founder of two biotech companies, serves on the scientific advisory boards of biotech and big pharma companies in the UK and USA, and has collaborative grants with different pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Bryant has extensive experience in working with the media, particularly working with the BBC, regularly appearing on local and national radio and television shows. She was elected as a fellow of the British Pharmacology Society in 2020 for her research into inflammation. She became Director of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Program at the University of Cambridge in 2022.

Michael Dustin, Ph.D.

Professor, Immunology and Wellcome
Principal Research Fellow
Director of Research, The Kennedy Institute
Director, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars
Programme (Oxford, UK)

Prof. Dustin has a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Boston University (1984) and a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Harvard University (1990). He studied glucose transport in red blood cells for his undergraduate thesis with Scott W. Peterson and studied biochemistry and regulation of lymphocyte adhesion molecules during his Ph.D. with Timothy A. Springer. He completed post-doctoral training with Stuart Kornfeld on lysosome structure and function at Washington University School of Medicine (1993).

Dr. Dustin led his own group at the Department of Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine under Steve Teitelbaum and Emil Unanue from 1993 to 2000. While at Wash U, he led a collaborative group in discovering requirements for the T cell immunological synapse with Andrey Shaw, Paul Allen, Mark Davis (Stanford) and Emil Unanue. He moved his lab to the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University School of Medicine in 2001. He collaborated on new intravital microscopy projects with Wenbiao Gan, Dan Littman, Juan Lafaille, Michel Nussensweig, Dorian McGavern and Sandra Demaria among others. Continuation of work on the immunological synapse led to a basic description of the supramolecular assemblies that make up the mature immunological synapse. Specialized functions of the immunological synapse in cytotoxic T cells and regulatory T cells were also explored. This work includes the recent observation that the small vesicles enriched in T cell receptor, synaptic ectosomes, are directly budded into the immunological synapse, handing off T cell receptor and other cargo to the antigen presenting cell.

Dr. Dustin was director of the NIH funded Nanomedicine Center for Mechanobiology from 2009-2014 In order to further advance studies on the immunological synapse and translation to treatment of human diseases he moved to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford in 2013 supported by a Principal Research Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. He became Director of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Program at the University of Oxford in 2020.

Kristi Porter, Ph.D.

Executive Director and Director of Recruitment
NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program

Dr. Porter earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology from Clark Atlanta University. In 2012, she earned a Ph.D. in Molecular and Systems Pharmacology from Emory University, where she studied the contribution of HIV-1 proteins to the development and progression of HIV-associated pulmonary hypertension.

After completing her graduate studies, Kristi joined the Fellowships in Research and Science Teaching (FIRST) Postdoctoral Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Collaborating with researchers at Emory and Georgia Tech, Kristi investigated the role of cathepsin proteases in endometrial lesion formation.

In 2016, Kristi transitioned to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), serving as a Science Writer with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Division of Intramural Research. With aspirations to return to student mentoring and development, Kristi joined the NIH Oxford Cambridge (OxCam) Scholars Program in 2019 as Director of Recruitment and Student Affairs. In 2021, Kristi assumed the role of Program Executive Director and Director of Recruitment, and now oversees over 100 PhD and M.D./Ph.D. students across the NIH, University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge.

Frank Maldarelli, M.D., Ph.D.

Head, Clinical Retrovirology Section
Senior Investigator, CCR, NCI
Director – NIH MD/PhD Partnership Training Program

Dr. Frank Maldarelli is head of the Clinical Retrovirology Section in the NCI HIV Dynamics and Replication Program, where he leads translational studies of HIV pathogenesis with clinical protocols conducted at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda and laboratory studies at the NCI-Frederick campus. His laboratory studies HIV persistence during combination antiretroviral therapy, mechanisms of emergence of antiretroviral drug resistance in vivo, the genetics of HIV populations in individuals, and the spread of HIV in populations.

Dr. Maldarelli is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases, and is an Attending Physician in the NIAID/CCMD HIV service. He has served on numerous oversight committees, including the NIAID Institutional Review Board (as Chair and Vice-Chair), NIH Infectious Disease Advisory Board, the Scientific Advisory Committee of the American Federation for AIDS Research, the Review Panel for the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, and the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Food and Drug Administration. He currently chairs the NCI Center for Cancer Research Non Human Primate Scientific Review Committee. He is a faculty member of the Center for Bio-Medical Communications Infectious Disease Board Review Course and a lecturer in the Washington D.C. community outreach PACT Program. Dr. Maldarelli serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Pediatric Adolescent Virus Elimination Collaboratory (a Martin Delaney HIV Collaboratory based in Baltimore MD) and Qura Therapeutics, based in Chapel Hill, NC. His awards include the NCI leading Diversity Award in 2010 the NIH Director’s Group Award in 2015, Center for Cancer Research (CCR) Group Award in 2016, and multiple NIH Bench-to-Bedside and Intramural AIDS Targeted Antiviral Program (IATAP) awards. Dr. Maldarelli currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Virology, Pathogens, PLoS-Pathogens, Retrovirology, AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, AIDS Research and Therapy, and Frontiers in Microbiology.

Dr. Maldarelli was born in Brooklyn, NY and grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and from the Medical Scientist Training Program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where was a member of the AOA honor society. He trained in internal medicine at The Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, and subsequently joined the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) as a Medical Staff Fellow, where he worked with Klaus Strebel and Malcolm Martin studying HIV replication and pathogenesis. He completed a fellowship in Infectious Disease at NIAID before joining NCI.