Paul Holmes works in a veterinary diagnostic pathology laboratory in Shropshire, England, part of a national network of APHA (Animal and Plant Health Agency) laboratories.  The work focuses on endemic and new and emerging diseases of wildlife and livestock.  After graduating from Liverpool vet school and working in practice, he obtained an MSc in Wild Animal Health from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Royal Veterinary College (RVC).  He now helps coordinate a partnership of enthusiastic British organisations that contribute to wildlife disease surveillance and investigation throughout GB. He has a particular interest in biodiversity and conservation.

Gábor Á. Czirják is a research scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) Berlin, Germany. After graduating in 2004 from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, Romania, he obtained his PhD in 2011 in the field of Veterinary Medicine & Ecology, Biodiversity and Evolution from the same university and from Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse, France. He joined the IZW as head of the wildlife immunology lab within the Department of Wildlife Diseases in 2010. His research interest covers several areas from the fields of eco-immunology, evolution of host-parasite interactions, conservation physiology and ecology of wildlife diseases. Over the years, he has been working with several taxonomic groups (reptiles, birds, mammals), but recently he focuses mainly on bats and carnivores. Member of the EWDA/WDA since 2004…between 2004-2008 was a student representative of Romania, and since 2016 responsible for the communication with Eastern European countries. 

Ignasi Marco has been working in the field of wildlife management, health and diseases since 1990. Ignasi graduated in Veterinary Sciences from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in 1989 and he did his PhD on capture and stress in wild ungulates in 1995. In 2002, he obtained a position as an Associate Professor. His research interest is conservation medicine, which includes the study of ecology and diseases of wildlife and its management. Over the years, Ignasi has worked on a variety of taxonomic groups, including several species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. Most of his work has been field-based in the Pyrenees, undertaking long-term studies with diseases of Pyrenean chamois. He currently lectures on wildlife diseases as part of veterinary degrees, MSc and PhD programs.

Đuro Huber graduated from veterinary medicine at the University of Zagreb in 1975, specialising in ecology (master’s degree) and wildlife parasitology (PhD in 1979). He became a member of the WDA in 1979/80 while working with a Fulbright grant at the Wild Animal Disease Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. He worked for 45 years at the Biology Department of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Zagreb, primarily teaching Zoology and Ecology, where he is now professor emeritus. He conducts studies of large carnivores (bear, wolf and lynx), whith research methods that include handling of free living (for radio-telemetry tracking), captive and dead animals for studies on ecology, morphology, physiology, health status, nutritional and genetic aspects; all applied to conservation and management. So far, Đuro has published 185 scientific papers.

Emmanuelle Gilot-Fromont is a veterinary epidemiologist and professor at VetAgro Sup, the veterinary school of Lyon, where she leads the expertise group Expertise Vétérinaire et Agronomique Animaux Sauvages (EVAAS). After graduating in 1992 from the Lyon veterinary school, she defended a PhD in eco-epidemiology in 1997. Her research activities are performed in the Biometry and Evolutionary Ecology (LBBE) lab, and are based on the long-term follow-up of free-living populations of ungulates. Her research interests include the transmission of pathogens in wildlife and at the domestic-wildlife interface, its management, as well as immunocompetence of wild species, its variations, determinants (chronic stress) and consequences on fitness and health. She is currently working mainly on the roe deer (immunocompetence and health senescence), and on the management of brucellosis in the Alpine ibex. She is an ECZM diplomate (Wildlife Population Health).

Katharina Seilern-Macpherson (née Seilern-Moy) works as Senior Wildlife Veterinarian and Postdoc Researcher at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society London, coordinating the Garden Wildlife Health project, which is a citizen science project aiming to monitor the health of, and investigating diseases and their impacts in, British wildlife by collating disease reports from the general public. She graduated from the Veterinary University Vienna in 2011, specialising in Conservation Medicine, and pursued her PhD on Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus infection at the University of Surrey and the Animal and Plant Health Agency in the UK. Katharina’s main interests lie in infectious and non-infectious diseases that pose threats to free-ranging wildlife populations, their pathologic and epidemiologic characteristics, the role of human-wildlife interactions in disease emergence and potential species declines, and collaborative approaches to disease mitigation. Working with young wildlife enthusiasts has always been close to her heart, and over the years, Katharina has regularly been involved with EWDA student workshops and similar activities.

Anna Meredith OBE is Professor of Zoological  and Conservation Medicine and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Keele University. Prior to this she was Head of Melbourne Veterinary School, and previously had a long career at the University of Edinburgh as veterinary clinician, teacher, and researcher. Anna is an ECZM Diplomate in Wildlife Population Health and RCVS Diplomate and Recognised Specialist in Zoological Medicine. She has recently served on the ECZM examination committee and is  long-time member of EWDA. She has been involved in a number of species reintroductions and translocations and  discovery of novel wildlife diseases such as leprosy in red squirrels in the UK, and her research interests lie at the interface of wildlife, human and environmental health.

Rosa Jolma is currently investigating the effects of climate change on the success of
parasite invasions and their impacts on host populations as part of her PhD in the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research (NIOZ) and Utrecht University. After graduating from University of Helsinki in 2009 she worked in exotic animal practice in Finland and as a zoo veterinarian in Armenia before doing her European College of Zoological Medicine (ECZM) specialisation in Wildlife Population Health in the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Royal Veterinary College (RVC). Her past research includes work on paramyxovirus dynamics in African fruit bats and Mycobacterium bovis diagnostics in European badgers (Meles meles). Rosa’s main research interest is how ecosystem stressors affect wildlife populations both directly and through their effects on host-parasite interactions. She is also committed to help the next generation of wildlife veterinarians get started on the field and for that she is also a member of the education committee of the ECZM.

Stephanie Gross is a research scientist at the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research (ITAW) at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Foundation. After graduating in 2003 from the Department of Veterinary Medicine, Freie Universität Berlin, she worked several years in practice and obtaining a doctorate. Before joining the ITAW she performed a one-year veterinary internship in a seal rehabilitation center in the Netherlands. Steph performed a PhD on antimicrobial resistance in aquatic wildlife and is an ECZM Diplomate in Wildlife Population Health. Her research focuses on the health and ecology of marine mammals based on life health assessments and necropsies. She is specifically interested in the occurrence of bacterial and viral pathogens in marine mammal populations, inter- and intraspecific interactions as well as effects of human activities on marine mammal health.