AITVM-STVM 2024

Francis is a senior epidemiologist with expertise in transdisciplinary One Health approaches in research, emergency preparedness and response to public health events, and health policy evaluation. He has over ten years’ experience in field epidemiology, clinical nursing as well as the design, implementation and evaluation of empirical scientific research. Francis is leading research projects that focus on strengthening health and food systems to address priority health issues affecting human, animal, and ecosystem health. In the implementation of his projects, Francis works collaboratively with policy makers, practitioners, and scientists in the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Switzerland and the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d’Ivoire. Francis is currently a postdoctoral scientist at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Institute of International Animal Health/One Health.

S. Marcus recently completed his PhD studies at the Department of Veterinary Tropical Diseases, University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research is mainly focused on the tick-borne hemoparasitic diseases, specifically anaplasmosis in South Africa, employing comparative genomics and molecular methods. He identified complex Anaplasma marginale infections, driven by co-infection and superinfection with distinct A. marginale strains, in cattle at a wildlife-livestock interface. He further identified four known and 13 novel Anaplasma 16S rRNA sequences circulating in wildlife samples using high sequencing throughput technology with potential for transmission to livestock and human, which may serve as a source of cross-reaction in the current detection assays. He is further working on techniques for the isolation of Anaplasma DNA directly from a carrier animals/host and on projects focusing on zoonotic infections transmitted from wildlife reservoir species to humans and/or domestic animals at the human/livestock/wildlife interface in rural South Africa. S. Marcus is currently a Microbiology and Biomedical Sciences lecturer at the University of South Africa (UNISA), South Africa.