Presenters' biography
| Speaker 1 - Prof. Marion Koopmans: | ||
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 | Prof. Marion Koopmans is Professor of Public Health Virology of the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus Medical Centre in The Netherlands, the WHO collaborating centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, scientific director for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Netherlands, Centre for One Health NCOH and scientific director of the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Centre in Rotterdam/Delft The Netherlands. Her research focuses on emerging infections with special emphasis on unravelling pathways of disease emergence and spread at the human animal interface. Creating global networks to fight infectious diseases systematically and on a large scale is a common thread in Koopmans' work. Koopmans coordinates the EU funded consortium VEO, which develops a risk based innovative early warning surveillance in a One Health context, the consortium ReFINE, which studies emerging arbovirus risks in Europe and is co-coordinator of a recently awarded HERA funded network of centres of excellence for EID research preparedness. In 2021, Koopmans founded the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Centre PDPC, a research centre with a focus on the occurrence and prevention of pandemics and climate-related disasters, combining expertise from technical, bio-medical, environmental and social sciences. | |
| Speaker 2 - Dr. Bas Oude Munnink | ||
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Dr. Bas Oude Munnink is an assistant professor in the Viroscience department at the ErasmusMC and leading the pathogens genomics group. After his PhD on "the challanges of virus discovery in human fecal samples" at the AMC in Amsterdam he worked for one year as postdoc at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to obtain more bioinformatic knowledge. He is working on the monitoring and tracing of emerging arboviruses like Usutu Virus and West Nile Virus and other emerging viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and mpox using Nanopore sequencing. Next to that, he is working on creating an early warning system for emerging viral pathogens using a variation of different molecular assays and techniques. One example of this is using a specific capture assay to enrich immunogenic viruses using Illumina sequencing technologies. Next to that, he is exploring the use of metagenomic sequencing in clinical settings. | |
| Speaker 3 - Dr. David Nieuwenhuijse | ||
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| Dr. David Nieuwenhuijse is a PostDoc at the department of Viroscience. His interest is to build bioinformatic tools that link viral genome sequence based information to viral traits and viral communities to viral sources. Knowing these links, we can get a better insight into what kind of viruses are out there and which are potential pathogens that require additional investigation. Further, he wants to better map the relationships between viral genomes and the proteins they encode and study their evolution, assign traits, and predict the effect of mutations. To those ends he build bioinformatic tools, workflows, and databases to analyze, visualize and bring together multiple types of data always with a focus on biological interpretability. He has double master’s degree in biotechnology and bioinformatics and wrote my PhD thesis under supervision of Prof. Marion Koopmans on using metagenomic sequencing for viral surveillance in sewage samples and near-real-time genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in the Netherlands using the Nanopore sequencing platform. Over the years he developed an expertise in data wrangling, data visualization and software and workflow development using R and Python script. Working on metagenomic datasets and with viral experts at the Viroscience department he developed a broad foundational knowledge of a wide range of viruses. | |
| Speaker 4 - Dr. Hayley Cassidy | ||
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| Dr. Hayley Cassidy is a PostDoc at the department of Viroscience. Her work focuses on viral genomics, pathogen surveillance, and the application of next-generation sequencing technologies to emerging infectious diseases directly in clinical settings. Her research also aims to improve the detection, characterization, and monitoring of viral pathogens across human, animal, and environmental interfaces within a One Health framework. | |
| Speaker 5 - Dr. Hayley Cassidy | ||
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| Dr. Katja Siling is an epidemiologist in the STI team at ECDC, where she is responsible for surveillance activities for mpox and sexually transmitted infections across the EU/EEA. Prior to this role, she was in Epidemic intelligence team where she supported the detection and monitoring of emerging public health threats. Before joining ECDC, Katja worked in global public health, focusing on the monitoring and evaluation of health programmes in low- and middle-income settings. | |
| Speaker 6 - Dr. Priyanka Nannapaneni | ||
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| Dr. Priyanka Nannapaneni is a Scientific Officer in Bioinformatics and Molecular Epidemiology at ECDC. Her work focuses on supporting genomic surveillance and public health microbiology through bioinformatics pipelines, molecular epidemiology analyses, and the integration of genomic data into public health decision-making. She develops and implements bioinformatics workflows, supports genomic surveillance activities, and contributes to outbreak investigations and risk assessments. Her areas of interest include pathogen genomics, genomic surveillance implementation, bioinformatics infrastructure, and the application of sequencing data to improve public health responses. | |
