Eurosurveillance seminar: Changing urban environments and impact on infectious diseases epidemiology, surveillance, prevention and control

Dr Henriette de Valk is a medical epidemiologist at the French National Public Health Agency (Santé Publique France). As the head of the Foodborne, Vectorborne and Zoonotic Infections Unit she is in charge of surveillance, outbreak investigations and applied research. Dr de Valk is actively involved in European networking activities for surveillance of infectious diseases, as a national representative in supranational surveillance networks, as a member of the coordination group of the Vectorborne and Emerging Diseases network of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and as supervisor in the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training. She recently worked on guidelines for surveillance of emerging arboviruses, on the disease burden of foodborne intestinal infectious diseases and on whole genome sequencing for surveillance. She is serving on the national committee nominating the National Reference Centres (laboratories) for infectious agents in France and in Belgium. 

Dr de Valk graduated from the University of Leyden in the Netherlands, the London school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom and the Institut for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium and is an alumnus of The European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training. Prior to coming to the Santé Publique France she worked for the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in emergency relief programmes in Sudan, Uganda and Mali, for the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) in Cameroon and for the World Health Organization in Indonesia at the control programmes for diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory infections.

Florence Fournet is a senior scientist and research director at the Infectious Diseases and Vectors Ecology Genetics Evolution and Control research unit (MIVEGEC) of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) in Montpellier (France). Her research focuses on the relationships between environment and health in urban settings. She has been worked for a long time in West Africa on malaria and arboviral diseases. Since 2022, she has devoted her efforts to studying and mitigating the impacts of urban greening initiatives on vector-borne disease risks, with a special focus on Montpellier and Toulouse in the Occitanie region. She is committed to addressing the challenges posed by environmental change through interdisciplinary and intersectoral approaches.

Dr. Gerjon Ikink is Principal Expert Public Health Foresight and Determinants at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Here, he oversees the establishment of the ECDC Foresight Programme: a cross-cutting strategic programme to help the ECDC and its partners to become more anticipatory, proactive and resilient to future threats.

He has a wide experience working on the interface between science, policy and society – focusing on systems-level, forward-looking and interdisciplinary issues. He previously worked as scientific advisor in the government of the Netherlands, and with the EU’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors. Later, he worked as scientific policy officer at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (SANTE) and the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA). He started his career as a biomedical research scientist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital, has a PhD in Molecular Genetics and Personalised Medicine, and has been an active science communicator since his studies.