I am specialised in humanitarian health emergencies and try to bridge needs between operational humanitarian organisations active in the field and academia.

I am a field-epidemiologist and microbiologist (EPIET/EUPHEM) who is currently working with MSF(OCB) as the Director of the Operational Research Centre LuxOR. I hold a position as honorary Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the department of infectious disease epidemiology. I am also the current elected president of the European Alumni Network for Field-Epidemiology (EAN).

Since 2008 I have worked in the humanitarian context and over the years specialised in health emergencies and outbreaks mostly in low middle-income settings. A few examples of emergencies I worked on were the Ebola Outbreak in DRC(2020)/Guinea (2021), the Zika epidemic (2016) as well being the lead for operational research within the health Cluster Coordination of WHO during the Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh and the refugee crisis response in Greece. I lived and worked several years in Kenya and Tanzania working on targetted malaria control strategies.

I obtained my PhD. from the Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands but in very close collaboration with the colleagues at LSHTM. Between 2015-2017 I worked at Institute Pasteur in Paris in which I was part of the Global Outbreak Investigation Taskforce. Between 2017 – 2019 I worked at Imperial College London, department of infectious disease epidemiology where I worked on forming better links between actors in operational response and academia. I helped with the co-development of the R Epidemics Consortium (RECON) with the aim to advance data analyses for field-epidemiologist globally using opensource licences for the software used.

During the COVID-19 pandemic I started working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) initially tasked with the developement of a Ethical Review Board within the movement and subsequently as an advisor to the COVID-19 Crisis Team co-leading on the portfolios operational epidemiology, diagnostics, vaccine equity and occupational health. By the end of 2021 I gap-filled as the lead of Public Health and Surveillance in the disaster risk management unit of the Norwegian Red Cross in support of the wider Red Cross movement.

In formal and informal capacity I advice the WHO Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN/Research), the R&D Blueprint, ISARIC and TEPHINET.