Anne-Laure Bañuls received a PhD in Biology and Health from the University of Montpellier in 1998. She has been a researcher at IRD since 2000 and has been posted in Hanoi, Vietnam since 2014. Specialist in population biology of pathogens and in molecular epidemiology, she seeks to deduce the modes of transmission, the virulence factors and / or drug resistance from molecular data. Her research focuses on several infectious diseases such as leishmaniases and tuberculosis, the latter one being at the center of her projects in Southeast Asia. The projects she develops in southeast Asia involve several countries and her main partners are the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE), the University of Science and Technology of Hanoi (USTH), the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia, the CICML (Centre d’Infectiologie Christophe Mérieux du Laos) and Fondation Mérieux. She is co-director of the International Joint Laboratory DRISA (Drug Resistance in Southeast Asia) studying the mechanisms of bacterial drug resistance emergence and their transmission at different spatial and temporal scales.

Thierry de Meeûs received a PhD in population biology from the University of Montpellier (1991). He has been a researcher at CNRS in Montpellier, France, from 1993 to 2012 when he joined IRD as a director of research. He has been posted in Burkina Faso from 2009 to 2015. His research has focused on adaptive polymorphism and habitat preference evolution, as well as the use of population genetics tools for population biology inferences in host parasite systems. His current research is on hosts and parasites co-structure and the use of molecular markers in ecological inference, in particular in epidemiological systems. He’s also working on the theoretical and applied population genetics of clonal organisms. He current research is mostly on trypanosomiasis and leishmaniasis. He is the author of more than 150 scientific articles and of one text book on the population genetics of parasites and their vectors.

Modou Séré is a teacher and researcher at the Polytechnic University Center of Dédougou, Burkina Faso. He received an Engineer degree in rural development (2009) and a MSc (2011) and a PhD (2015) in tropical animal health from the Polytechnic University of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. During his engineer training, he performed a study on trypanosome resistance to trypanocidal drugs. His MSc and PhD research work was on the theoretical and applied population genetics of clonal and sexual organisms such as trypanosomes and their cyclical vectors, tsetse flies. He has collaborated with the Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology (University of Glasgow) on the genotyping of Trypanosoma brucei gambiense (from Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2013). He has also genotyped tsetse flies from Guinea and Ivory Cost at CIRAD in Montpellier, France (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017).