ESOVE 2024

Tine Huyse works at the Royal Museum for Central Africa as a senior biologist. She previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leuven, the Tropical Institute of Medicine in Antwerp and the Natural History Museum in London. She is also the scientific commissioner of the zone ‘Landscapes and Biodiversity’ in the permanent exhibition of the museum.
Her research focuses on neglected tropical diseases with the aim to uncover the socio-ecological factors driving transmission dynamics. She takes an integrative approach centered around citizen science, where volunteers are involved both in research and public outreach and community mobilization.

Cyril Caminade, PhD is a climate scientist with skills in spatial epidemiology and biogeography. He has collaborated with biologists, statisticians, veterinarians, clinicians, climatologists, public health experts and data scientists to model the impact of climate variability and climate change on key vector-borne diseases.
Cyril also worked on assessing the risk posed by invasive vector species such as the Asian tiger mosquito or Ixodes ticks. Dr. Caminade is a multidisciplinary scientist with broad scientific interests and he has worked extensively on climate impacts on both human and animal health over the past 15 years.

Cindy Morris is a senior scientist and research director at the Plant Pathology research unit of INRAE’s center in Avignon, France where she has worked since 1989. Her research focuses on microbial ecology to elucidate how the adaptation of microorganisms to their habitats affects two seemingly conflicting impacts on the environment: their capacity to i) cause disease, and in particular newly emerging diseases and to ii) play beneficial roles in major environmental phenomena – the water cycle in particular. This research concerns primarily the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae but her team also studies a wide range of other bacterial and fungal pathogens of plants. Questions common to their models include the nature of non-agricultural habitats of pathogens and their role in disease outbreaks, and tracking pathways of long distance dissemination via the atmosphere and waterway.
Detail of her activities can be found on the website of a project she coordinates about modernizing surveillance for plant health (https://beyond.paca.hub.inrae.fr/) and on her blog about the interaction of microorganisms with atmospheric processes (https://bioice.wordpress.com/). This work has led her to be involved in fostering understanding and adoption of the concept of One Health.

In collaboration with Avignon University, she recently co-founded a new international graduate teaching and research program - IMPLANTEUS that opened in Sept 2020 (https://implanteus.univ-avignon.fr/en/) - that melds plant production and food processing with environmental sciences and human health. She also compose lyrics and performs songs about science and posts educational videos about plant health and atmospheric processes on her YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcaDNBCQ2nFaZ6NIJPSoMwg).

Fredros Okumu is a Professor of Vector Biology (Infectious Disease Ecology) at the University of Glasgow, School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine. He was formerly the Director of Science at Ifakara Health Institute, Tanzania (2016-2023). He is a public health researcher and a mosquito biologist working on improved approaches for control of vector-borne diseases. Fredros is also passionate about improving ecosystems for young researchers in Africa. He serves in various advisory groups including WHO Malaria Policy Advisory Group (MPAG) and the Gates Foundation’s Malaria Strategic Advisory Panel (MSAP).