Annemarie Rebel appointed business unit manager WBVR

The executive board is pleased that Annemarie Rebel will assume this position within Wageningen Bioveterinary Research to continue working on protecting animal health and human health through diagnostics and research that focuses on controlling diseases and infections transmitted between humans and animals.

‘The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call. Human and animal health are interconnected’, Rebel clarifies. ‘We must be prepared for possible future pandemics. To this end, we must invest in healthy animals and robust systems to prevent outbreaks, if possible, and in early detection and mitigation should they occur. Only thus can we prevent society and the economy from becoming disrupted in the way we have recently witnessed. Wageningen Bioveterinary Research is at the core of these crucial challenges. I am proud to have been offered the opportunity to lead this great research institute and, in doing so, contribute to human and animal health and resilience. The combination with my position as a special professor of healthy and resilient livestock enables me to identify many opportunities for new initiatives and collaboration in research.’

Background

Annemarie Rebel obtained her PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam on the human health topic of ‘Relapse of bladder cancer’. She went on to study metastases of prostate cancer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (USA). Within WUR’s Animal Sciences Group, she has held various positions. Currently, she heads the Animal Welfare and Health department Wageningen Livestock Research. Rebel also plays a leading role as scientific director of smart and healthy farming in the Netherlands Centre for One Health (NCOH), of which WUR is a partner. In 2020 she was appointed special professor of Healthy and Resilient Livestock. With this chair that falls within the Adaptation Physiology Group, she studies animals’ resilience and how it may be influenced and increased.