IVI Marks 25 Years of Vaccinology Training With Global Three-City Course

The International Vaccine Institute is running its 25th International Vaccinology Course this week, a five-day program that has pulled together 200 vaccine professionals from 55 countries across three continents. The course is happening simultaneously in Seoul at Seoul National University Research Park, in Kigali at the University of Rwanda, and in Stockholm at Karolinska Institutet—a geographic spread that reflects how the field of vaccine development has become genuinely global.

The course began in 2000, making it one of Asia's oldest continuous vaccinology training programs. What started as a regional initiative has evolved into something larger: a coordinated effort to move knowledge and expertise across borders and disciplines. This year's theme, "Vaccines for a Connected World: A One Health Perspective," signals a shift in how the field thinks about its work. Rather than treating human disease in isolation, the course is built around the idea that human health, animal health, and environmental health are inseparable—a framework that has become urgent as infectious diseases move between species and across borders with increasing speed.

Jessica Cowden, IVI's deputy director general for Clinical, Assessment, Regulatory and Evaluation, leads the course. She describes its core strength as the ability to gather people with different kinds of expertise—immunologists, epidemiologists, communications specialists—around a single shared purpose: making vaccines work better and reach more people. The five-day program covers the full arc of vaccine work: the science behind them, how they're developed, how they're manufactured, how they're delivered to populations, and how their effectiveness is measured. Lectures are broadcast live across all three sites so participants in Seoul, Kigali, and Stockholm are learning from the same faculty at the same time, though each location also runs its own case studies and networking sessions tailored to regional contexts.

Participants will visit vaccine manufacturing facilities and research institutes as part of the program. The course also includes the IVI Vaccinology Fellowship, which provides financial support to researchers from low- and middle-income countries who show leadership potential in their own institutions and countries. This year, 30 fellows were selected across the three sites. Beyond the fellowship program, the course is supported by a network of governments and institutions: India, Thailand, and the Philippines are providing trainee scholarships through cooperation agreements with IVI. The East African Community is supporting 13 trainees in Kigali. The Gates Foundation, Moderna, Pfizer, Sanofi, and CEPI are among the organizations funding the program.

The deliberate choice to hold the course across three regions—one in Asia, one in Africa, one in Europe—reflects a recognition that vaccine workforce development cannot be concentrated in wealthy countries if the goal is to strengthen global health security. By bringing together emerging leaders from low- and middle-income countries alongside established experts, and by creating networks that span continents, the course is building infrastructure for the next generation of vaccine professionals. The One Health framework that anchors this year's program points toward a future where disease surveillance, immunization strategy, and pandemic preparedness are understood as interconnected challenges requiring integrated solutions. That work begins with people trained to see those connections.