Prof. Jacob Moran-Gilad, MD MPH FESCMID

    Prof. Jacob Moran-Gilad earned his medical degree and Master’s degree in public health at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel to which he is currently affiliated as Associate Professor at the School of Public Health (Physician-Researcher tenure track). As a Medical Doctor he specialised as both a consultant clinical microbiologist and a consultant in public health medicine, being the only physician in Israel to pursue such training. He worked at a tertiary-care metropolitan hospital as a microbiologist for several years followed by a unique Fellowship in Public Health Microbiology Strategy at the Directorate of the Centre for Infections, UK Health Protection Agency (now Public Health England), where he was involved in key UK national and international projects such as preparedness to 2012 Olympic Games, harmonisation of surveillance and microbiology strategy for the EU.

    Prof. Moran-Gilad is the PI of the MAGICAL group (Microbiology, Advanced Genomics and Infection Control Application Laboratory) and the Co-Chair of the BGU Research Hub for Infectious Diseases and One Health. His current research involves the development and validation of laboratory methods for rapid diagnosis of infectious diseases as well as the study of the molecular epidemiology of various pathogens of public health interest (e.g. Legionella pneumophila, multi-resistant Acinetobacter spp., Campylobacter spp. and Brucella melitensis) and the integration and application of such methods in health protection, using advanced genomics. Specifically, his research spans setting up genomic typing approaches, bioinformatics pipelines for applied next-generation sequencing and harnessing of 16S and shotgun metagenomics for analysis of clinical and environmental microbiological samples. He is also involved in research on public health microbiology policy and planning, and in exploring contemporary approaches for linking up medical epidemiology and cutting-edge microbiology to inform public health strategy and precision microbiology. He has published in many high-quality journals in the microbiology / infectious disease discipline.

    Prof. Moran-Gilad has held several positions in the Israeli Government Sector in medical administration and in R&D as a Chief Scientist. As a senior consultant to Israeli Ministry of Health’s Directorate, he is focusing on national strategy and policy-making in public health microbiology. Under this capacity he is the Chair of several national infectious disease programmes (e.g. Legionella infections, zoonoses and One Health) and Chair of the National Advisory Committee for Microbiology. He is also involved in emergency preparedness and response, as member of the National Advisory Committee for Outbreak Management and during public health emergencies such as the 2013 Wild poliovirus incident and 2018 leptospirosis incidents in Israel. Prof. Moran-Gilad recently joined SUMC, a 1,200-bed tertiary-care busy regional medical centre in Southern Israel as the Chief Consultant Clinical Microbiologist and advisor to the hospital’s management and oversees the entire range of microbiological activities at that institution. Prof. Moran-Gilad is the Director of the Negev Bio-Bank for SUMC and BGU.

     At the international level, Prof. Moran-Gilad is the immediate-past Chairperson of the ESCMID Study Group for Genomic and Molecular Diagnostics (ESGMD), member of the board of the ESCMID Study Group for Legionella Infections (ESGLI) for microbiology and NGS and Chair of the International Working Group for whole genome sequencing of Legionella, a member of Working Group 4 (proficiency testing for NGS) of the Global Microbial Identifier (GMI) initiative and an Associate Editor with the EU peer-reviewed Q1 journal Eurosurveillance. He is collaborating with leading groups and institutions across Europe. Recently, he was appointed as the Deputy Programme Director (2018-2020) and the designate Programme Director (2021-2024) of ECCMID, the world’s leading conference on microbiology and infection.