Danjuma Adda is a Hepatitis B patient, advocate and a voice for poor populations. He was infected with Hep B while in clinical rotations and then lost his own mother to the disease several years later. He has a background in microbiology, and an MPH, with over 15 years-experience in public health and advocacy. Danjuma in 2021 assumed the role of President, World Hepatitis Alliance (WHA), UK. His local charity in Nigeria also works in the area of HIV/AIDS prevention and care, patient safety and antimicrobial resistance and stewardship in Nigeria, working to raise awareness and health care worker’s education to reduce the burden of antimicrobial resistance in Nigeria. Danjuma is a Senior Fellow with ASPEN Institute, US; Technical Advisor/Member of the World Health Organizations (WHO) Strategic and Advisory Committee on HIV, Viral Hepatitis and STIs (STAC-HHS); Executive Board Member Coalition for Global Hepatitis Elimination (CGHE) at the Global Task Force for Hepatitis US CDC; Member AMR Advisory Group of the AMR Patient Alliance; and member of several global networking groups and an accomplished Public Speaker. Danjuma is a leading voice for Hepatitis patients in Nigeria and uses his platform to advocate for the most vulnerable populations across Africa. Danjuma wants to change the narrative about Hepatitis and raise awareness about the deadliness of the disease, while also promoting other health outcomes such as antimicrobial stewardship and patient safety.

Dr Chari Cohen is President of the Hepatitis B Foundation. For the past 22 years, she has planned, implemented and evaluated community programs and research projects focusing on reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes associated with hepatitis B and liver cancer. Dr. Cohen is co-chair of the national Hep B United coalition, co-founder and chair of Hep B United Philadelphia, co-founder and chair of CHIPO: Coalition Against Hepatitis for People of African Origin; co-chair of the Hep Free PA coalition; and chair of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center Community Advisory Board. She is a member of the ICE-HBV steering committee, the HepVu advisory committee, and is a member of the HBV Forum for Collaborative Research and the Patient Advocacy Group of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). Dr. Cohen is Professor at the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute, and adjunct faculty for Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. She received her DrPH in Community Health and Prevention from Drexel University and her MPH from Temple University.

Dr Ahmed El Sharkawy has been a consultant transplant hepatologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham since 2012. He is also honorary senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London. His clinical interests include viral hepatitis, liver transplantation, polycystic liver disease, drug induced liver injury, primary biliary cholangitis, acute liver failure, acute on chronic liver failure, NAFLD (especially in the context of hepatitis B) and cirrhotic sarcopaenia. He has pioneered novel approaches to the management of hepatitis C in the community. He was awarded his PhD from Newcastle University on the role of NF-kB in the hepatic inflammation-fibrosis-cancer axis. He is a research active NHS clinician and is PI on a number of trials including a NIHR Liver Research Partnership on HBV Patient Engagement. He is the EASL Internal Affairs Councillor, Treasurer of BASL and Clinical Lead of the BASL HBV SiG. He is keen on promoting the role of social media, in particular Twitter, in medical education.

Professor Victor de Lédinghen MD PhD is Professor of Hepatology and is currently Head of the Hepatology and Liver Transplantation Unit, Haut Lévêque Hospital, University Hospital of Bordeaux, Pessac, France. Victor de Lédinghen graduated at Bordeaux University, and Cornell University (New York, USA) with a Hepato-Gastroenterology Degree and Medical Degree in 1993, and PhD in 2001. In 2003, he became Professor in Hepatology at the University Hospital of Bordeaux, France. Professor de Lédinghen has a long-standing interest in the non-invasive diagnosis of liver fibrosis and chronic liver diseases, and runs a clinical research programme studying the natural history of liver fibrosis, its impact upon patients and novel therapies for chronic liver diseases associated with liver fibrosis. His hepatology unit is the reference centre for all rare chronic liver diseases (PBC, PSC, Wilson’s disease…) in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (France). He supervises the clinical research programme of new drugs for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and HBV/HDV infection. His research has included participation in national and international HBV, HCV and NAFLD clinical trials, and had led to the publication of more than 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He supervises HBV HCV elimination in a large project “Bordeaux Metropolis without viral hepatitis”. He is a member of the European Association for the Study of the Liver, and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. He is former Secretary General of the French Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AFEF)

Associate Professor Thomas Tu is a molecular biologist and leads a research group at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research in the Storr Liver Centre (Sydney, Australia), where his team focuses on persistent forms of the Hepatitis B virus (covalently closed circular DNA and integrated HBV DNA) and develops methods to measure and eliminate them. He is particularly passionate about developing an HBV cure and mitigating the associated liver cancer, as he himself lives with chronic Hepatitis B. This provides him with unique perspectives on the disease as a researcher, patient, and advocate. He has won multiple awards for his research and outreach, most recently the 2022 Young Tall Poppy Science award. A/Prof Tu is President of the Australian Centre for Hepatitis Virology, the premier Australian society for hepatitis virus researchers. He is also the founder and Director of HepBCommunity.org (a global support network for people affected with HBV), guiding people through their HBV diagnosis, and linking them with trustworthy scientific and medical information. Recently he has established Hepatitis B Voices Australia, an advocacy group run by the affected community.