As IVI’s third Director General, I am honored to lead a team of 220+ professionals representing over 25 nationalities, 39 countries, and WHO brought together by a common goal to advance science for impact and improve the health of people around the world.

IVI is a unique organization with a singular mission: to discover, develop, and deliver safe, effective, and affordable vaccines for global health. 

We are an international organization, chartered by the United Nations Development Programme and accountable to a Board of Trustees and Member States. We are also a research institute and Product Development Partnership (PDP) in practice, specializing in all aspects of the vaccine value chain, from laboratory research to vaccine development, epidemiology and surveillance, and vaccine effectiveness.

With headquarters in Seoul, Republic of Korea; a Europe Regional Office in Stockholm, Sweden; a Country Office in Austria; and Collaborating Centers in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Madagascar, our 40+ field programs span six continents and promote collaborative, sustainable partnership with governments, academic institutions, industry, philanthropy, and other global health agencies.

Through public-private partnerships, IVI is unique among PDPs, having led the development of two licensed vaccines for high-burden infectious diseases of poverty: 1) the world’s first low-cost oral cholera vaccine, technology-transferred to four companies with three products achieving WHO prequalification (PQ) and making up the global stockpile; 2) a new typhoid conjugate vaccine, approved for export in the Republic of Korea while undergoing application for WHO PQ.

To date, we are only one of two non-profit organizations supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to achieve WHO PQ for a vaccine. Learn more about our Cholera and Typhoid programs.

Our full vaccine research and development portfolio includes vaccines at all stages of pre-clinical and clinical development, prioritizing infectious diseases that disproportionately affect populations in low- and middle-income countries. IVI was founded to prevent and eliminate infectious diseases associated with poverty, and we remain steadfast to this mandate 25 years later.

The work toward a healthier world for everyone, everywhere continues—and we are grateful to do it with you.

Sincerely,