Professor Marion Koopmans is Director 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 Professor Koopmans' work. Professor Koopmans coordinates the EU funded consortium VEO, which develops a risk based innovative early warning surveillance in a One Health context, and is Deputy Coordinator of a recently awarded HERA funded network of centres of excellence for EID research preparedness. In 2021, Professor 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.
During the corona crisis in the Netherlands in 2020, Professor Koopmans was a member of the Outbreak Management Team that advised the national government on measures to stop the spread of SARS‐CoV‐2. This role brought her national prominence, making her partly a "beacon of reliability" but she also faced growing distrust from a vocal minority of opponents of the Dutch national government's corona policy.
Professor Koopmans is also a sought‐after speaker in the media (inter)nationally. Some examples of international media appearances include the Economist's Podcast (https://econ.st/3lLIK5d), Al Jazeera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spp2Cg‐jqoc) and BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001hx6s).
In 2022, her son, Mischa Huijsmans wrote the biography "Marion Koopmans, Virologist in a Changing World" with his mother.
Professor Koopmans has co‐authored more than 700 articles that have been cited more than 40,000 times.
The recent decades have shown an upward trend in the number and size of outbreaks, most often resulting from spillovers of animal viruses due to a complex set of factors called drivers. When considering disease emergence pathways, different sets of drivers influence the level of contact between humans and animals, with land use change as one of the most important ones. Drivers for spread include demographics and international travel and trade, and drivers increasing impact include socio-economic factors and demographics. Based on these principles, there is increasing interest in exploring the potential for developing strategies for monitoring changes in RISK of outbreaks, to guide targeted enhanced sampling strategies. I will present approaches and insights from the Versatile Emerging infectious disease Observatory (VEO) consortium, a H2020 funded consortium of data scientists, IT specialists and infectious disease experts, that is developing and testing tools for five disease emergence scenarios.
