Annaliesa S. Anderson PhD, FAAM

Annaliesa Anderson, PhD, FAAM has over 20 years of pharmaceutical research experience and is currently the Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for Bacterial Research, within the Vaccine Research and Development Unit at Pfizer Inc. Her responsibilities include infectious disease vaccine research and development, surveillance, and assessment of the immunopathology of bacterial colonisation and disease. Dr Anderson’s experience includes leadership roles for bacterial vaccine programmes directed at the prevention of diseases due to Neisseria meningitidis, Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium difficile. In these roles, she has made substantial contributions to vaccine antigen discovery, preclinical proof of concept, clinical proof of concept, and recently the licensure of the N. meningitidis serogroup B vaccine Trumenba.

Prior to joining Pfizer, Dr Anderson worked at Merck Research Laboratories in Rahway, NJ, where she founded Merck’s prokaryotic bio-combinatorial engineering laboratory and initiated a bacterial vaccine programme at Merck in 2000. In 2007 Dr Anderson joined Wyeth in Pearl River, NY, to direct bacterial vaccine research efforts in the Early Phase Vaccine Programs group. With the acquisition of Wyeth by Pfizer in 2009, Dr Anderson and her team continued in their same role within the Vaccine Research and Development Unit. Dr Anderson earned her doctorate in Biological Sciences at the University of Warwick in the field of microbial ecology and then completed two post-doctoral fellowships.