M. Antònia Mangues Bafalluy is a hospital pharmacist expert in clinical pharmacokinetics and drug evaluation. She holds a Pharmacy degree (University of Navarra, 1979, with Honors) and a PhD in Pharmacy (University of Barcelona, 1990). She specialized in Hospital Pharmacy (FIR) and trained at Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (Barcelona). She also completed advanced training in clinical pharmacy (University of Leeds) and health management (University of Barcelona). From 2000 to 2023, she served as Director of the Pharmacy Department at Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau. She is currently President of the Catalan Society of Health with a Sex and Gender Perspective and Chair of the Clinical Commission on Sex and Gender in Health at Hospital de Sant Pau. Her research areas include Clinical Pharmacy, Clinical Pharmacokinetics, and more recently sex- and gender-based research in health. Previously, she led Clinical Pharmacokinetics and residency training within the same institution. She has held multiple national and international advisory roles in hospital pharmacy, therapeutics, and health policy. Her research output includes 127 articles, 35 book chapters, 271 conference contributions, and supervision of 9 PhD theses.

Helena Soares is Principal Investigator at NOVA Medical School, where she leads the Human Immunobiology and Pathogenesis Laboratory. Trained in Pharmacy at the University of Coimbra, she completed her PhD work on dendritic cells in Ralph Steinman’s lab at The Rockefeller University, followed by an EMBO fellowship at the Pasteur Institute studying T cell biology. Since establishing her lab in 2015, she has advanced mechanistic studies of human immunity, made significant contributions to COVID 19 research, particularly vaccine responses and maternal fetal immunity, and discovered sex specific immune mechanisms underlying Long COVID. Helena is recognized as co coordinator of the EFIS Workgroup on Sex Differences in Immunity, serves on expert panels for ERC and other agencies. and collaborates broadly to promote translational research. She also develops advanced courses on precision medicine and sex differences in health and mentors clinician scientists. Her work has earned awards for vaccine awareness and strengthened global efforts to integrate sex as key variable in immunology.