Dr Kim Lindblade is team lead for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Malaria Elimination Unit within the Global Malaria Programme where she is coordinating the E-2020 initiative of 21 countries with the potential to eliminate malaria by 2020 and managing the WHO Strategic Advisory Group on malaria eradication. Dr Lindblade has spent more than 20 years researching interventions and strategies to control and eliminate infectious diseases in resource-limited settings.

She served from 2014–2016 as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Influenza Program Director in Thailand and from 2011–2013 as the head of the Strategic and Applied Science Unit of the Malaria Branch at CDC. From 2004 to 2007, at the CDC office in Guatemala, Dr Lindblade led efforts to evaluate the elimination of onchocerciasis (river blindness) and then served from 2007–2010 as the chief of the CDC’s International Emerging Infections Program in Central America and Panama. From 1999–2004, Dr Lindblade was the chief of the Malaria Epidemiology Branch of the CDC research station in Kisumu, Kenya.