EuroArbo 2027

Bio upcoming

Professor Marion P.G. Koopmans is a Dutch virologistand Professor Virology at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. She is internationally recognized for her work on emerging infectious diseases, particularly viruses that spread between animals and humans (zoonoses), including influenza viruses, coronaviruses, noroviruses, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19. She has led the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus MC up till June 2025 and serves as a scientific adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO). Her research focuses on understanding how new infectious diseases emerge, spread, and can be detected early through a One Health approach that integrates human, animal, and environmental health.

Major Projects and Research Initiative

• VEO (Versatile Emerging Infectious Disease Observatory) – Coordinator of a major European Union Horizon 2020 project developing forecasting, early-warning, and tracking systems for emerging infectious diseases using advanced surveillance and data science approaches.
• Pandemic & Disaster Preparedness Center (PDPC) – Founder and Scientific Director of a multidisciplinary center established in 2021 to improve preparedness for pandemics and climate-related disasters.
• Netherlands Centre for One Health (NCOH) – Scientific Director for Emerging Infectious Diseases, promoting collaborative research at the human–animal– environment interface.
• Outbreak Response Research – Contributed to investigations and responses involving avian influenza (H7N7), SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19, including research identifying dromedary camels as an important host in MERS- CoV transmission.

Professor Koopmans has authored or co-authored more than 950 of peer-reviewed scientific papers and has accumulated over 100,000 citations in the scientific literature.

Rosa’s team investigates how insect-transmitted plant DNA geminiviruses manipulate their hosts to replicate and spread, and how these interactions ultimately lead to disease.
Rosa obtained her PhD from the University of Málaga and, after a postdoctoral period at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK, she established her independent research group at the Shanghai Center for Plant Stress Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2021, the team moved to the University of Tübingen, Germany, where Rosa is a professor. Since August 2026, she is also director of the Department of Plant Virology at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne.

Bio upcoming

Professor Carla Saleh (Head of Viruses and RNAi Unit, Department of Virology, Institut Pasteur) is an internationally recognised virologist whose work has transformed understanding of antiviral immunity, host-pathogen interactions, and vector-borne disease biology. Her research established that insect immune systems do far more than resist infection: they integrate antiviral defence with physiological state, metabolic adaptation, stress responses, and tissue repair. She identified unexpected roles for transposons in antiviral immunity and homeostasis, and demonstrated that insects can transmit antiviral immune memory across generations. These discoveries have redefined established views of immunity and inheritance and opened new directions for understanding and controlling emerging and re-emerging viral diseases.
She is also a widely respected scientific leader with a strong record of conceiving and directing ambitious, multidisciplinary, international research programmes. At Institut Pasteur, she has built a globally visible programme in insect antiviral immunity while providing institutional leadership as Chair of the Department of Virology and Director of LabEx IBEID, a major research initiative in emerging infectious diseases.

Bio upcoming

Sumana Sanyal is a Professor of Molecular Pathology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. She completed her PhD at Cornell University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute, MIT. Before moving to Oxford she held a Croucher Foundation-sponsored Assistant Professorship at the HKU-Pasteur Research Pole, University of Hong Kong. Her group uses proteomics and cell biology to study how flaviviruses such as Dengue and Zika remodel host membranes and evade immune detection. Her research has been funded by the Croucher Foundation, UKRI and the Wellcome Trust.

Marnix has more than 20 years’ experience in antiviral drug discovery and development, spanning target identification, discovery virology, translational science and early clinical development up to phase 2 clinical proof of concept.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Biological Sciences at the University of Leuven (Belgium) in 2005 and joined Johnson & Johnson / Tibotec R&D, where over 20+ years he led teams of up to 100 scientists and delivered five clinical candidates across HIV, CMV, dengue, coronaviruses, flaviviruses and tuberculosis.
He led the discovery and development of mosnodenvir, a first-in-class, pan-serotype dengue antiviral advanced to Phase 2a clinical proof of concept; served as EFPIA lead of the EUR 75M IMI CARE coronavirus consortium; and led the BARDA coronavirus collaboration that identified the M protein as a new druggable target.
In April 2026 he co-founded 1ML Consultancy, advising pharma, biotech and international consortia on antiviral and vaccine R&D.
He is an author on 50+ peer-reviewed publications and received the 2019 ISAR William Prusoff Young Investigator Award.