The Lancet Commission on Sepsis

Manu Shankar-Hari is Professor of Critical Care Medicine. Manu's research training involved two disparate sciences (MSc in Epidemiology, and PhD in Immunology). Manu’s translational immunology research spans bench to bedside focussed on dissecting clues from malfunctioning immune system to enable successful immunomodulation for critically ill patients. Manu's health services research spans cohort studies, clinical trials to evidence synthesis for clinical practice guidelines. Manu leads a research group focused on addressing one of the major global challenges in medicine: Sepsis.

Neill Adhikari is an intensivist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, research director for the trauma programme at Sunnybrook Research Institute, and associate professor at University of Toronto. His interests include clinical trials and critical care delivery in under-resourced settings. He has engaged in collaborations in clinical education at Addis Ababa University, research methods (ATS MECOR programme), and with WHO in areas of outbreak response, development of training materials and guidelines, and research. 

Abi a Reader in Critical Care Medicine and Health Systems Development at the University of Edinburgh. She currently co-PI Wellcome and NIHR research programmes which leverage data driven health improvement tools to support context specific evidence generation through platform enabled clinical trials and quality improvement initiatives. Her work has informed national and regional data for health infrastructure, international health policy- specifically during the COVID-19 response, and informed UK, and international funding priorities. Her research portfolio increasingly focuses on how diseases interact with socio-economic, and behavioural factors, and how these together influence population health and health service delivery. Her current clinical research areas address priorities for improving management of diseases (specifically in relation to infection, AMR, sepsis and multiple long term conditions), and how we can reduce disparities in outcomes by addressing organisational, behavioural and socio-economic barriers to access and delivery of care. She Is motivated by team science and how together they may solve real world problems by blending together data, social and implementation sciences research within the learning health system ecosystem.

Emma is interested in why there can be such variability between individuals with a particular disease or in response to treatment and specifically focuses on the host response to infection. She leads a computational group who integrate genetic, genomic and clinical data from large cohorts of patients with different infections to understand how genetics contributes to this heterogeneity. In addition, the Davenport group are interested in how in vivo perturbations that modulate the peripheral immune system (such as autoimmunity, pregnancy and drug treatment) influence this response. 

Dr Janet Victoria Diaz is a specialist in intensive care and pulmonary medicine with rich expertise in clinical medicine, medical education, guideline development, quality improvement; committed to promoting the delivery of high quality, safe and scalable clinical care to patients around the world during health emergencies.  For the past seven years, she has been working at the World Health Organization as Lead for Clinical Management and Operations team in the Health Emergencies Programme, and most recently the unit head for Safe and Scalable care.  In this role, she is leading the safe and scalable care to high threat, infectious disease pathogens and other health and humanitarian emergencies, as well as leading the global oxygen scale up initiative.  She strives to bring together global clinical and technical experts into a rapid, resilient and quality focused outbreak response. The unit focuses on developing evidence-based clinical guidance and tools, accelerating clinical research and innovation, hosts the WHO Clinical platform and provides clinical operational support during emergencies to member states.  She worked as a pulmonary critical care specialist for over 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, California USA.  

Luís Ferreira Moita, M.D., Ph.D., is the Chair of the Pathology discipline at the School of Medicine, University of Lisbon (Portugal), where he serves as the Executive Director of Medicine ULisboa for Health Clinical Research and Innovation (MUHCRI) and as the head of the Disease Mechanisms Laboratory in the same institute. He previously led independent laboratories at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Oeiras, Portugal, 2014-2024) and Instituto de Medicina Molecular (Lisboa, Portugal, 2006-2014). He did post-doctoral work with Nir Hacohen at the Whitehead Institute, and Mass. General Hospital (Boston, USA, 2002-2005). He completed his PhD at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg, Germany, 1998-2002) under the supervision of Fotis Kafatos, and graduated from medical school at the University of Lisbon (1997). The central goals of his laboratory are to understand how stress responses modulate organismal homeostasis and how that knowledge can be harnessed for therapeutic applications. 

Prof Alison Holmes, OBE., FMedSci., is Professor of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College and the David Price Evans Chair of Infectious Diseases & Global Health at the University of Liverpool and is the inaugural Director of the Fleming Initiative. In 2025 she became Co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on AMR. She leads a large international, multidisciplinary infectious disease research programme on the improved management and prevention of infections, particularly focusing on the optimising of antimicrobial use and addressing AMR through the integration of microbiology, bioengineering and social sciences, and the development and application of innovative approaches and technologies for improved use of data, improved representation, intelligent diagnostics, and precision medicine. 

Dr Arthur Kwizera is an Associate Professor of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at Makerere University College of Health Sciences and a staff intensivist at Mulago National Referral Hospital. He is a clinician-scientist working at the intersection of sepsis care, acute respiratory failure, and critical care systems strengthening in low-resource settings.

He has served on global panels for the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC), the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA), and, in the past, the USAID Technical Advisory Group on oxygen therapy.

At the national level, he has been a key member of Uganda’s COVID-19 response, contributing to ICU and Oxygen capacity building in various roles.

His research work focuses on frugal, effective models of critical care delivery in resource-limited settings, including pioneering Africa’s first community critical care initiative as well as creating/supporting an African Critical Trials platform.

Dr Lamontagne holds a Master’s degree in pharmacology and another in health research methodology. He was recruited as a critical care specialist and clinician-scientist by the Université de Sherbrooke and the Centre de recherche du CHU de Sherbrooke in 2010. He has received peer-reviewed funds from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Santé, the National Institute for Health Research, and the Lotte & John Hecht Memorial Foundation. His research activities include clinical trials of resuscitation interventions (65 Trial – PMID 32049269, LOVIT Trial – PMID 31915072), knowledge syntheses, and trustworthy guidelines on influenza, Ebola, COVID-19, and other sepsis-related topics. Dr. Lamontagne currently co-leads the Critical Care Comparative Effectiveness Platform(e) d’Évaluation Clinique Comparée en soins Critiques (CEPEC), which evaluates supportive care interventions that are used routinely in ICUs, and the Canadian Clinical Research Network (CCRN), which provides real-time information on the content and progress of the health research portfolio in Canada.

Professor and Head of Division of Infectious Diseases and HIV Medicine at University of Cape Town. Working on antimicrobial resistance at the intersection of clinical, research, and international policy domains.

Damien is a research fellow at the Fleming Initiative and an honorary infectious diseases consultant at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. His PhD examined the use of time-series machine learning and continuous biosensing in acute febrile illnesses, within low- and middle-income country settings. Current research interests include the application of clinical data and rapid diagnostics in optimising acute infection states in the context of antimicrobial resistance, particularly within the maternal-neonatal interface.

Dr Adrienne Randolph is a pediatric critical care physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Anaesthesia and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She founded the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigator’s (PALISI) Network in 2002 that now has over 90 pediatric sites internationally. Her areas of expertise are pediatric sepsis, acute lung injury, and severe respiratory infections in children. Dr. Randolph has over 250 publications and has coauthored multiple sepsis guidelines and consensus definitions for children. She is the immediate past Chair of the International Sepsis Forum. She also directs the multicenter NIH-funded Pediatric Intensive Care Influenza Network (PICFLU) and the CDC-funded Overcoming COVID-19 Network, both of which are focused on optimizing prevention and treatment of life-threatening viral respiratory complications in children.

Otavio Ranzani, MD MSc(Epi) PhD is a clinician-scientist. He completed his training in Critical Care in São Paulo, Brazil (with periods in Spain and Italy) followed by formal training in Epidemiology at the London School. Otavio is the group leader of the DataHealth Lab at the Sant Pau Research Institute in Barcelona. 

Dr Priscilla Rupali’s research efforts focus on combating antimicrobial resistance and improving treatment protocols for tropical diseases, and she actively collaborates with international organizations to enhance public health initiatives. She possesses extensive research experience in infectious diseases, actively participating in several international projects. She was involved in the Global Brain Infections Study, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and the Neurological Diseases in COVID-19 Patients project, supported by GECO. She leads the Genomic Signature for Typhoid Fever initiative funded by the Gates Foundation, along with various projects backed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Department of Health Research (DHR). 

Tom van der Poll is Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Department of Medicine in the Amsterdam University Medical Centre. Van der Poll is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. His research focuses on pneumonia and sepsis, particularly on pathogenesis, the host response, immunotherapy and biomarkers. He published >1000 articles on this topic. He is the former chair of the International Sepsis Forum and was a member of international committee that established the new sepsis definitions (JAMA 2016). He was elected as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and as member of Academia Europaea in 2023.