

Dr George R Thompson completed his medical degree at the University of Missouri and his internal medicine residency and infectious disease fellowship at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, Texas and is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha. He is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine with a joint appointment in the Departments of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, and Internal Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases. He is Clinical Consultant for the UC-Davis Center for Coccidioidomycosis. Dr Thompson specializes in the care of patients with invasive fungal infections and has research interest in fungal diagnostics and host immunogenetics. His current research focuses on the host-pathogen interaction of humans and both Coccidioides spp. (the agent of “Valley Fever”), and Cryptococcus spp. Dr Thompson has substantial expertise in the care of patients with fungal diseases and co-chairs the Mycoses Study Group Education and Research Consortium Education Committee which is responsible for the dissemination of materials and knowledge to clinicians across the country to improve the care of patients with fungal infections. He has also been appointed to the Coccidioidomycosis Study Group and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Journal Club, providing editorials in the monthly internationally disseminated IDSA Newsletter.
Dr Dimitrios Kontoyiannis is the Texas 4000 Distinguished Endowed Professor for Cancer Research and Deputy Head in the Division of Internal Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is also an adjunct professor at Baylor College of Medicine and University of Houston College of Pharmacy in Houston Texas. He received his medical degree Summa Cum Laude from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. Dr. Kontoyiannis also completed a post-doctoral clinical research fellowship in the Section of Infectious Diseases at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX, followed by training in Internal Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, where he served as a Chief Medical Resident. He was subsequently trained as a clinical fellow in Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and obtained a Master in Clinical Sciences from Harvard Medical School in Boston. He spent 3 years at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Sciences/Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a fellow in the Harvard MIT Clinical Investigators Training Program.
He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He is the recipient of many awards, such as the 2004 American Society for Microbiology Award for Outstanding Research in the Pathogenesis of Microbial Diseases (mentor); The America's Top Physicians from Consumer’s Research Council of America; The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center: 2004 Faculty E. N. Cobb Scholar Award; Faculty Achievement Award, MD Anderson Cancer Center, 2007; The Distinguished Clinical Faculty Mentoring Award at MD Anderson Cancer Center, 2012; The Billy Cooper Memorial Award from The Medical Mycology Society of Americas, 2013; and the Drouhet Medal from the European Confederation of Medical Mycology, 2015. He was president of the Immunocompromised Host Society (2016-2018).
Dr Minh-Hong Thi Nguyen is a Professor of Medicine, and the Director of the Transplant Infectious Diseases Unit and Antimicrobial Management Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She directs Quality Improvement and research projects related to infectious complications after organ transplantation & their association with specific induction therapy. Her laboratory has focuses on the non-culture diagnostics of fungal infections, as well as identifying fungal genes that contribute to the pathogenesis of invasive infections. The underlying hypothesis of her laboratory is that selected in vivo expressed genes are important virulence factors for Candida and other fungi and can serve as targets for diagnostics and/or vaccine against fungal infection.