Alex Schmidt is Head of Vaccine Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute. Alex received his M.D./Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin and trained in pediatrics at Charité and The German Heart Center. He completed his postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases (LID) at NIAID, NIH, and then returned to Berlin for group leader & faculty positions in pediatrics. He re-joined LID from 2005 to 2011 for translational and clinical R&D, and then joined GSK Vaccines, where he led clinical vaccine development programs for dengue, RSV and influenza viruses. Alex joined Gates MRI in 2018 as the clinical lead for TB vaccine development.