Prof David Strain is an Associate Professor of Cardiometabolic Health at the University of Exeter Medical School, an honorary consultant in medicine for the older adult, Head of the academic department for healthcare for older adults and the chair of the British Medical Association’s Board of Science. Clinically, he runs a community diabetes service for the older adult, works as an in-patient stroke consultant, and participates in the chronic fatigue service. Prior to this, Dr Strain studied at Liverpool University before completing his Doctorate in Medicine on ‘Ethnic differences in the vascular responses to insulin resistance’ at the International Centre for Cardiovascular Health, Imperial College, London.

Gili Regev-Yochay, is a full Professor at the Tel-Aviv University, Faculty of Medicine. She is currently the Director of the Sheba Pandemic preparedness Research Institute (SPRI) and the Head of the Infection Prevention & Control Unit at the Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Israel. She received her MD at Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva (1994), an MSc in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot (1991), and MSc in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA. USA (2006). She has specialized in Internal Medicine (1998) and Infectious Diseases (2000) at the Sheba Medical Center. She is the author of over 130 scientific publications, among them many in the top medical and scientific journals. During the COVID-19 pandemic she was a local, national and global opinion leader in the field.