Prof Peter Le Souëf is a paediatric respiratory physician whose research is in children’s respiratory and infectious disease and global child health. He has established new techniques for measuring infant lung function, improved aerosol delivery to children, established a long-standing asthma birth cohort, and investigated infectious diseases globally. His more recent respiratory research has focused on the role of viral respiratory infections in acute wheeze/asthma in young children. Over the last 8 years, he has established the Future Child Health research group which investigates and assesses the effects of environmental deterioration, including climate change, and population dynamics on the health of past, current and future children, particularly in low- and middle- income countries. This research uses geo-temporal-spatial modelling and multiple large datasets. His group has recently shown that major institutions’ current projections for future child health are substantially over-optimistic. He and his researchers have been invited to present their findings at a side-event of the 2025 meeting of the United Nations Commission on Population and Development in New York.

Medical doctor, specialized in Pediatrics; Tropical Medicine and Epidemiology. ICREA Research Professor and Director General at ISGlobal As a paediatrician, Prof. Bassat’s research has always relied on the premise that there is no greater public health intervention than that which can reduce child mortality, particularly in poor contexts. To do these, he has worked in low and middle-income countries to understand and prevent infectious diseases that most impact child survival. His work on P. falciparum malaria has contributed to better characterize the disease, and to assess treatment and prevention strategies, including vaccines and new antimalarial drugs. He has investigated in Mozambique, Morocco and the Kingdom of Bhutan the epidemiology, aetiology and clinical characteristics of pneumonia, diarrhea, Meningitis and neonatal sepsis, all major causes of premature mortality. He has participated in the validation of a radically innovative minimally invasive autopsy sampling protocol (MITS, minimally invasive tissue sampling), now widely used globally for a less invasive (and thus more acceptable) way to investigate cause of death in LMIC. He is also very interested in the validation and evaluation of technological devices for Global health purposes.