Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA; Designated Representative: Padmini Srikantiah, MD, MPH

Guided by the belief t hat every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life.

Padmini Srikantiah is a Deputy Director in Global Health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Srikantiah serves as the lead for the foundation’s cross-cutting Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) strategy, which is focused on preventing mortality due to high AMR risk pathogens in low and middle-income country populations. During her time at the foundation, her work has included surveillance to support global burden of disease estimates for AMR associated and attributable mortality (the GRAM study), as well as key surveillance efforts in multiple low-and-middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that have significantly deepened global understanding of drug resistant pathogens as leading etiologies of neonatal sepsis and related deaths in these geographies. Her current work including efforts to prevent neonatal sepsis by developing a maternal vaccine against Klebsiella pneumoniae as well as investments and partnerships with the Combatting Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Accelerator (CARB-X) supporting preventive interventions (vaccines, prophylactic monoclonal antibodies, and microbiome-based approaches) to address AMR. She has led the foundation’s initiative on vaccines to address AMR, which includes work to quantify the impact of vaccines to reduce resistant pathogens and antibiotic use through modelling analyses as well as engagement with WHO to establish their framework on vaccines and AMR. Dr. Srikantiah was with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a Senior Medical Epidemiologist, and led CDC’s AMR platform in India, encompassing efforts to strengthen AMR surveillance and reduce key healthcare associated infections, and served as the CDC-India lead for infectious disease surveillance.