María Carla Saleh is Full Professor at Institut Pasteur, where she directs the Viruses and RNAi unit within the department of Virology. She studies the antiviral response in insects and develops new vector control strategies to eliminate mosquito-borne diseases. During her postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco, USA, she discovered that RNA interference was the antiviral immune system of insects.

Félix Augusto Rey directs the Structural Virology unit of Institut Pasteur, France, where he studies the entry mechanisms of lipid-enveloped viruses into cells by using structural approaches. Previously, he has been junior group leader at the CNRS and was chair of Institut Pasteur's Virology department between 2004 and 2012. During his post-doctoral training at Harvard University, USA, he determined the first structure of a flavivirus envelope protein.