Keynote Speakers’ Bios
Professor Wanda Markotter, Co-Chair of One Health High Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP). Prof. Wanda Markotter is currently the Director of the Centre for Viral Zoonoses, Department of Medical Virology, Faculty of Health Sciences, at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Prof. Markotter is also the DSI-NRF South African Research Chair in “Infectious Diseases of Animals (Zoonoses)” and serves as Co-Chair for OHHLEP. She is a virologist with rich experience in transdisciplinary research on disease ecology in bat species in South Africa and other African countries. She has supervised dozens of graduate students and mentored several postdoctoral fellows and emerging researchers. In addition to having authored more than 70 scientific publications, as well as several book chapters, Prof. Markotter regularly contributes to public media forums. Her research is supported by multi-collaborative international viral surveillance programmes, including the Global Disease Detection Programme, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, General Director, Institut National pour la Recherche Biomédicale (INRB), Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Prof. Jean-Jacques Muyembe has a longstanding history investigating Ebola virus disease (EVD), beginning in 1976 when he first encountered the virus in patients at Yambuku Catholic Mission Hospital, DRC. In collaboration with INRB colleagues and the U.S. National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center, he led research in the design of one of the most promising treatments for EVD, mAb114, which has been successfully used to treat infected patients during recent EVD outbreaks. Prof. Muyembe’s highly impactful contributions are reflected by numerous prestigious awards, including his receipt of the Christophe Mérieux Prize and the Royal Society Africa Prize, the latter of which was bestowed upon him "for his seminary work on viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, generating the foundation of our understanding of the epidemiology, clinical manifestations and control of outbreaks of these viral infections". At the 2015 International Symposium on Filoviruses, he was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and in both 2018 and 2019, he was named one of Nature's “Ten people who mattered in science”. Prof. Muyembe was also awarded Japan’s Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize in 2019 and was subsequently included in Time's “100 Most Influential People of 2020”.
