This first session of the speaker series was hosted in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital Berlin. The session was devoted to discussing how surveillance efforts in the intertwined human, animal, and planetary health sectors can be aligned in the face of increasingly complex health risks. Professor Marion Koopmans, Head of the Erasmus University Medical Center’s Department of Viroscience, joined us as our keynote speaker. Professor Axel Pries, Dean of the Charité, gave welcoming remarks. Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, who leads the WHO Pandemic Hub, shared insights into how the WHO Pandemic Hub works and navigates the complexity of pandemics. Professor Ilona Kickbusch, Founder and Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland, guided us through the event as our moderator.
Speakers
Professor Marion Koopmans
Head of the Erasmus University Medical Center’s Department of Viroscience, Netherlands
Professor Koopmans, DVM PhD, is a world-leading researcher on the global impact of rapidly spreading zoonotic virus infections, with special emphasis on foodborne transmission. Her research focuses on unravelling the modes of transmission of viruses among animals and between animals and humans, and the use of pathogenic genomic information to unravel these pathways and to signal changes in transmission or disease impact. She is the co-Principal Investigator in the FP7 funded PREPARE project (www.prepare-europe.eu) aimed at building a pan-European operational network for rapid and large-scale European clinical research in response to infectious disease outbreaks with epidemic potential. She is the director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at Erasmus, and Scientific Director “Emerging infectious diseases” of the Netherlands Centre for One Health (www.ncoh.nl). Furthermore, she is a member of the One Health High-Level Expert Panel that advises the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Organisation for Animal Health, the United Nations Environment Programme and World Health Organization.
Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu
WHO Assistant Director-General for the Division of Health Emergency Intelligence and Surveillance Systems
Dr Ihekweazu leads the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, based in Berlin, Germany. Previously, Dr Ihekweazu was the first Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), which he led July 2016 to October 2021, building it from a small unit to a leading public health agency in Africa. Dr Ihekweazu is trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist and has over 25 years’ experience working in senior public health and leadership positions in national public health institutes including NCDC, South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases, the UK's Health Protection Agency, and Germany’s Robert Koch Institute. Dr Ihekweazu has led several short-term engagements for WHO, mainly building surveillance systems and responding to major infectious disease outbreaks.
Professor Ilona Kickbusch
Founder and Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland
Prof. Ilona Kickbusch is the Founder and Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland. She is a member of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, the WHO Council on the Economic of Health for All, Council Chair to the World Health Summit in Berlin and vice-president of the European Health Forum Gastein. She has been involved in German G7 and G20 activities relating to global health and the global health initiatives of the German EU presidency in 2020. She presently co-chairs the T7 2022 taskforce on global health. She chaired the international advisory board for the development of the German global health strategy and advised on the establishment of the WHO Hub on Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. She works on a continuous basis with EU presidencies on global health.