COVID-19 Vaccine development and deployment: The Cuban case

Date: 

Thursday, September 9, 2021, 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Speaker: Dr. Vicente Vérez Bencomo, Director of the Finlay Institute of Vaccines
Moderated by: Marcia Castro, Chair, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Dr. Vicente Verez Bencomo is a scientist with a nationally and internationally recognized trajectory. He is a Chemical Engineer from the “Lomonosov” Institute in Moscow, State Doctor from the University of Orleans (France, 1983), Doctor Honoris causa from the Canadian University of Quebec in Montreal and Member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He was the Director of the Carbohydrate Laboratory of the Faculty of Chemistry (1984), which changed its name to the Laboratory of Synthetic Antigens of the University of Havana (1990); Director of the Center for Biomolecular Chemistry (2008); and currently, he is the General Director of the Finlay Institute of Vaccines.

Marcia Castro is Andelot Professor of Demography, and chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, associate faculty of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and faculty member of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches, combining data from different sources, to identify the determinants of malaria transmission in different ecological settings, and to provide evidence for the improvement of current control policies, and the development of new ones. She has more than 20 years of research experience in the Brazilian Amazon, and is assessing the role of extreme weather events on malaria. She has projects on dengue, Zika virus, chikungunya, tuberculosis, congenital syphilis, and infant and child mortality and development. Professor Castro received the 2018 Roger L. Nichols Award for Excellence in Teaching. She earned her doctoral degree in Demography from Princeton University.

Presented in collaboration with Finlay Institute of Vaccines and Thursday Brown Bag Series, Department of Global Health and Population