Career Compass 2022

Dr Giri Shankar (MBE) is the Director for Health Protection at Public Health Wales (PHW), based in Cardiff, United Kingdom. He is responsible for the delivery of the health protection services across Wales, through the national public health institute for Wales.  

Dr Giri Shankar has 24 years of experience in the field of communicable disease andinfectious disease control and public health. His special interests are in field epidemiology, outbreak investigation, emergency preparedness, healthcare-associated infections, sexually transmitted infections, risk communications led behaviour change and research & evaluation. He obtained his undergraduate medical degree (MBBS) from Bangalore University, India followed by MD in Community Medicine, Diplomate of the National Board (DNB) in Social & Preventive Medicine. He then moved to the United Kingdom and obtained further higher specialist training in public health by completing a Master’s programme (MPH) at Birmingham University. He has been awarded the Fellowship of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal College of Physicians. 

During the pandemic, he was one of the Incident Directors for the COVID-19 response and contributed to the overall pandemic control strategy of the organisation and was also responsible for overseeing the response to the pandemic on a daily basis. He also provided advice to a range of senior civil servants and policy officials in Welsh Government, the Chief Medical Officer for Wales and through them to Welsh Ministers.  

Dr Giri Shankar is an expert member of the Welsh Technical Advisory Cell (TAC) that provides advice to Welsh Ministers on various aspects of pandemic control. His area of expertise is in control of communicable diseases, outbreak management, surveillance and field epidemiology and risk communication. He is also the named spokesperson for the organisation and provides regular briefings and interviews to local, national and international media houses.  

Jane Whelan is a medical epidemiologist and public health specialist originally from Ireland. She holds a medical degree from University College Dublin, working initially in clinical medicine in Ireland and New Zealand before specialising in Public Health Medicine in Ireland. She is an alumnus of EPIET cohort 2009 (RIVM, NL). On completing EPIET, Jane joined the Municipal Health Service in Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology from the Academic Medical Centre (University of Amsterdam) where her research focused on the use of surveillance data for the control of vaccine-preventable disease.  Her interest in vaccines led her to private industry where she worked as a senior epidemiologist for 7 years with Novartis and GSK Vaccines. Jane left industry in April 2021 to work independently, taking her first steps into the start-up world while rediscovering her roots in public health.

Kostas Danis is a medical epidemiologist. He trained as a medical doctor in Greece and obtained his master in Epidemiology in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK. He did EPIET in Ireland (cohort 8) in 2002, and competed a four-year specialization in occupational and public health medicine. He also holds a PhD in epidemiology and he is a published author in the area of public health. 

Kostas worked for many years in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and Central America with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and WHO, responding to public health and humanitarian crisis. He also worked as a regional epidemiologist in the UK, as the head of zoonoses and vectorborne diseases in the Greek Center for Disease Control and Prevention and as a senior epidemiologist in Public Health France. He was a scientific coordinator of EPIET for 6 years and he currently works at ECDC as scientific coordinator of MediPIET.