Dr David Wood
From January 2006, as Coordinator of the Quality, Safety and Standards Team of the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr David Wood has been responsible for all aspects of regulatory support provided by WHO to countries and other United Nations agencies relating to vaccines and other biological medicines. He has overall responsibility for the vaccines pre-qualification scheme and is the WHO representative on the Board of the International Association for Biologics.
Dr Wood qualified with a PhD in Virology in 1984 from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
He initially worked in diagnostic virology in Manchester, and then transferred in 1988 to the Division of Virology at the United Kingdom National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) with responsibility for batch release, standardization and research on poliovirus vaccines, hepatitis A and yellow fever vaccines. While at the NIBSC he became heavily involved in collaborative activities with WHO in the areas of quality assurance and safety of biologicals and polio eradication.
In 2001, Dr Wood transferred to WHO to continue working on quality assurance and safety issues with the polio eradication team. His responsibilities included coordinating the research agenda for the development of post-certification polio immunization policy and the standardization of virus vaccines.
In 2003, he assumed overall responsibility for all WHO biological standardization activities. He is Secretary to the WHO Expert Committee on Biological Standardization (ECBS), the work of which relates to vaccines, blood products and biological therapeutics.