Maria Van Kerkhove


Maria DeJoseph Van Kerkhove is an American infectious disease epidemiologist. With a background in high-threat pathogens, Van Kerkhove specializes in emerging infectious diseases and is based in the Health Emergencies Program at the World Health Organization. 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. 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. 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

From 2006 to 2008, Van Kerkhove was an epidemiologist at the Institut Pasteur de Cambodia. She was the Head of the Outbreak Investigation Task Force there, conducting field research into surrounding zoonoses, respiratory viruses and emerging/re-emerging viruses such as Ebola and Marburg. She specialized in field research to gather data on the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1, with a focus on transmission risk from poultry to humans.
From 2009 to 2015, Van Kerkhove worked at Imperial College London as a senior research fellow in Medical Research Council Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling. She specialized in Ebola, influenza, meningitis, MERS-CoV, and yellow fever. In April 2009, she began working as a technical consultant to the World Health Organization 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.
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. 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. Van Kerkhove spent two weeks in China to better understand the COVID-19 outbreak 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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