Dr. Anne S. De Groot

Vaccine innovator Dr. Anne S. De Groot’s accomplishments, studies and publications are vast. She has several titles at several organizations. But for the founder, CEO and chief scientific officer of Providence’s EpiVax Inc., two skills on her LinkedIn profile summarize her best: “Connecting the dots” and “Seeing beyond the horizon.”

De Groot does both of these things in developing tools for the design of protective therapeutic proteins and vaccines from genomic sequences – and in educating others.

Her ability to connect the dots, for instance, bridged a gap between fashion, culture and health. Collaborating with design expert Eliza Squibb, she won a $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The funding was for an unusual project: using textiles to communicate the connection between HPV and cervical cancer with women in Mali. Textiles are often used in the West African country to communicate, so why not health information?

Founder of the GAIA Vaccine Foundation in Providence – which got the Gates grant – De Groot is a medical director at Clinica Esperanza, director at the Institute for Immunology and Infomatics at the University of Rhode Island, and has worked on preliminary Ebola vaccine studies with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

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Her ability to see beyond the horizon got her named a national “influencer” – along with Gates – by industry group VaccineNation. De Groot’s recognition and research will resonate for decades to come, as will the impacts of her work. •

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