
Surgeon of the University of Antioquia has been 35 years as teacher and researcher, a specialist in tropical diseases, doctor in Infectious diseases from the University of Granada, Spain. He is a Master in parasitology and a specialist from the University of Montpellier. He has studied medical entomology at the universities of Wisconsin and Notre Dame Director of PECET, multidisciplinary group with 28 projects ongoing research. Member of the Expert Panel of the World Health Organization in leishmaniasis and participation community. He has received multiple national and international awards.

Was graduated as an M.D. from the Complutense University, Madrid (1979), and received the diploma on Tropical Medicine & Parasitology in Hamburg, Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. before spending two years at Cambridge University. Recently, Dr. Alvar has been the head of the Leishmaniasis program at DNDi since 2013, and from 2018, he is Senior Scientific Adviser. Previously (2004 to 2012), he headed the Leishmaniasis Control Program at WHO-NTD, having launched an ambitious strategic plan in several countries. Prior to this, he was the Director of the National Centre of Tropical Medicine at the Institute of Health Carlos III (MoH), Madrid. He organized and chaired WorldLeish-6 in Toledo, Spain in 2017. He has published more than 200 papers in national and international journals, and has written a half dozen of books.



Bacteriologist and Clinical Laboratory. Master in Microbiology, and Doctor in Basic Biomedical Sciences with emphasis on Immunoparasitology. She has been Professor at the School of Medicine, University of Antioquia for 25 years and has been linked to the PECET group since she was an undergraduate student, working in research projects in leishmaniasis, mainly in the area of immunology, diagnosis and development of medicines, vaccines and medical devices. To date, it has 6 patents granted in the US and Colombia and others are under evaluation. In the last decade she has led the the Center for the development of products for tropical diseases and others of interest in public health – CIDEPRO where she is the development of medicines for tropical diseases and is currently the Executive Director.

