London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

The Vaccine and AMR Centres present The Wellcome Trust Special Talks

12.30 -  Wellcome’s Strategic Priority for Vaccines, Charlie Weller, Head of Vaccines Programme Wellcome Trust  

Charlie Weller has been head of the vaccines priority platform and head of epidemics since the start of 2017. She led the development of the vaccines strategy at the Wellcome Trust during 2016, as part of the Trust’s new strategic framework. Charlie joined the Wellcome Trust in 2014 as a Senior Portfolio Developer, where she oversaw the Immunology portfolio, led the funding response to the Ebola epidemic of 2014-2015 and contributed to strategy development in preparedness for future epidemics, prior to taking the lead on vaccines and epidemics.

Charlie has over 16 years of research experience in both academic and pharmaceutical environments, ranging from host pathogen interactions to cellular and molecular immunology. Before joining the Wellcome Trust, Charlie was a laboratory head at Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research engaged in target identification and validation within the respiratory disease area, focusing on innate immune responses in respiratory exacerbations. Prior to this, Charlie investigated mast cell localization and function in health, respiratory disease and parasite infections as a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London. She holds a BSc in genetics at Birmingham University, and a PhD in Immunology at Imperial College London

13.00 - Wellcome’s Strategic Priority for AMR,  Tim Jinks, Head of Drug-resistant Infections Programme

Tim Jinks is Strategy Development Lead for drug resistant infections guiding the team developing the Wellcome trust’s strategic plan to address antimicrobial resistance.  In his preceding role in Wellcome’s Innovations Division he was responsible for a portfolio of over a dozen early stage product development projects covering therapeutics, diagnostic and devices spanning across therapeutic areas such as infectious diseases and oncology. He also serves as Wellcome Trust board observer at Sentinel Oncology and is Non-Executive Director of Reviral Ltd. 

Prior to joining the Trust in 2012 he has over a decade of industry experience, most recently as a consultant providing business development, licensing and commercial research services. Previously he was a Business Development executive at BTG International working on licensing and IP development. His industry experience started as senior scientist with Iclectus Ltd, a spin-out company from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge that developed an antibody engineering platform. He qualified as a professional chemist at the University of Georgia obtaining the ACS BS in Chemistry before gaining his MA and PhD in Molecular Biology at Princeton University with training at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He conducted postdoctoral research at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, London.