About the speaker

Ruth Karron, M.D., is a Professor of International Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health with a joint appointment in the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.  Dr. Karron is a pediatric infectious diseases physician, virologist, and vaccinologist, and is Director of the Center for Immunization Research and the Johns Hopkins Vaccine Initiative.  Dr. Karron has substantial experience in the evaluation of respiratory virus vaccines in adult and pediatric populations.  Dr. Karron’s research interests also include the development of immune responses to respiratory viral infections in early life, the epidemiology of RSV and other respiratory viral diseases in low resource settings, and public policy and ethical issues related to vaccine development and distribution. Dr. Karron has served on a number of national and international vaccine advisory committees and panels, including the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), and the FDA Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which she chaired from 2006-2008. She is currently a member of the WHO Product Development for Vaccines Advisory Committee (PDVAC), the Gavi Vaccine Innovation Prioritisation Steering Committee (VIPS), the COVAX ACT-acclerator COVID vaccine Maternal Immunization Working Group, and chaired the Vaccines Advisory Panel for the Wellcome Trust.  In 2016, Dr. Karron received the Robert M. Chanock award for outstanding contributions to RSV research.