Professor Umberto D'Alessandro graduated in Medicine & Surgery from the University of Pisa, Italy, and then obtained both his MSc and PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, in 1990 and 1996 respectively. He worked as a clinician in Benin and Kenya. In 1990, he joined the MRC Unit The Gambia as clinical epidemiologist and carried out the evaluation of the Gambian National Program on insecticide-treated bed nets that showed the intervention decreased mortality among children by 25%. In 1996, he joined the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium, where he developed a research program around three themes: antimalarial treatment, including drug resistance, malaria prevention, and the P. vivax in vitro cycle, implemented in several malaria endemic countries, e.g. Uganda, Burkina Faso, Benin, Vietnam, Peru, etc. In 2011, he joined the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia (MRCG) as the leader of the Disease Control & Elimination Theme. In January 2014, he was appointed Director of the Unit and Professor of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research program on malaria is built around questions related to malaria elimination/eradication.