Maria DeJoseph Van Kerkhove (born February 20, 1977) is an American infectious disease epidemiologist. With a background in high-threat pathogens, Van Kerkhove specializes in emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and is based in the

Health Emergencies Program The World Health Organization Health Emergencies Programme was established on 1 July 2016 by Director-General Margaret Chan at the request of the World Health Assembly. History Due to the slow response to the 2014-2015 Ebola virus epidemic in ...

at the World Health Organization (WHO). She is the technical lead of COVID-19 response and the head of emerging diseases and zoonosis unit at WHO.

Early life and education

Van Kerkhove was born Maria Rosanne DeJoseph in

New Hartford, New York New Hartford is a Administrative divisions of New York#Town, town in Oneida County, New York, United States. As of the United States Census, 2010, 2010 census, the town population was 22,166. The name of New Hartford was provided by a settler fam ...

. In 1999, she received a B.S. in biological sciences from Cornell University. In 2000, she received an M.S. in epidemiology from

Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford University School of Medicine is the medical school of Stanford University and is located in Stanford, California. It traces its roots to the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific, founded in San Francisco in 1858. This ...

. In 2009, she earned a Ph.D. in infectious disease epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she wrote her thesis on the avian flu in Cambodia.

Career

Van Kerkhove began her research career while an undergraduate student at Cornell University. She worked as a research assistant with

Eloy Rodriguez Eloy Rodriguez (born January 7, 1947) is an American biochemist. He is the James Perkins Professor of Environmental Studies at Cornell University. He was born in Edinburg, Texas. Collaborating with primatologist Richard Wrangham, Rodriguez intr ...

studying the medical plants of the Amazon. As a masters student, she continued as a research assistant at Stanford University Medical School. From 2000 to 2005, Van Kerkhove was a senior epidemiologist at

Exponent Exponentiation is a mathematical operation, written as , involving two numbers, the '' base'' and the ''exponent'' or ''power'' , and pronounced as " (raised) to the (power of) ". When is a positive integer, exponentiation corresponds to re ...

's health sciences practice in New York City. After this, she worked as an epidemiologist at the

Institut Pasteur The Pasteur Institute (french: Institut Pasteur) is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, who invented pasteurization and vaccines fo ...

de Cambodia from 2006 to 2008, while conducting field studies on H5N1 for her Ph.D. Van Kerkhove was a senior research fellow in the Medical Research Council Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College London from 2009 to 2015. She specialized in Ebola, Marburg,

influenza Influenza, commonly known as "the flu", is an infectious disease caused by influenza viruses. Symptoms range from mild to severe and often include fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pain, headache, coughing, and fatigue. These symptoms ...

meningitis Meningitis is acute or chronic inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, collectively called the meninges. The most common symptoms are fever, headache, and neck stiffness. Other symptoms include confusion or ...

, MERS-CoV, and yellow fever. In April 2009, she began working as a technical consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO) in its Global Capacities, Alert and Response Cluster. In 2013, she was a technical consultant for WHO as a member of the MERS-CoV task force. From 2015 to 2017, Van Kerkhove was the head of the Outbreak Investigation Task Force at the Institut Pasteur’s Center for Global Health, conducting field research into surrounding zoonoses, respiratory viruses and emerging/re-emerging viruses such as Zika, MERS-CoV,

Ebola Ebola, also known as Ebola virus disease (EVD) and Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF), is a viral hemorrhagic fever in humans and other primates, caused by ebolaviruses. Symptoms typically start anywhere between two days and three weeks after becom ...

and Marburg. She specialized in field research to gather data on the highly

pathogenic In biology, a pathogen ( el, πάθος, "suffering", "passion" and , "producer of") in the oldest and broadest sense, is any organism or agent that can produce disease. A pathogen may also be referred to as an infectious agent, or simply a germ ...

avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI/H5N1), with a focus on transmission risk from poultry to humans. Van Kerkhove has been an honorary lecturer at Imperial College London since 2015. She has been Scientist, Technical Lead MERS-CoV at WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, since March 2017. She is currently the head of the Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit in the WHO Health Emergencies Programme. She also serves as the COVID-19 technical and health operations lead. As part of her work with WHO, Van Kerkhove appears in regular press conferences by WHO regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Van Kerkhove has provided answers to common questions about the

pandemic A pandemic () is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. A widespread endemic (epidemiology), endemic disease wi ...

. Van Kerkhove spent two weeks in China in February 2020 to better understand the COVID-19 pandemic and to understand how China was trying to control the virus.

Personal life

Van Kerkhove lives in Geneva, Switzerland, with her husband Neil and two sons.

Selected works and publications

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References

External links