Dr. Ronald Dijkman, University of Bern, Switzerland

PD Dr. Ronald Dijkman is a virologist and head of the Experimental Virology Group at the Institute for Infectious Diseases (IFIK), Faculty of Medicine, University of Bern, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD in 2011 from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he characterised novel human respiratory pathogens. After relocating to Switzerland in 2011, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on virus-host interactions, particularly emerging coronaviruses, such as MERS-CoV. In 2014, he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Virology and Immunology (IVI) to further study the biology of emerging respiratory viruses. In 2017, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Bern, and in 2019, he joined the IFIK at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Bern, where he also completed his habilitation. Since 2022, he has been appointed as a Lecturer at the IFIK and is a member of the Multidisciplinary Center for Infectious Diseases (MCID) microbiology cluster at the University of Bern. His research focuses on characterising the viral and host determinants underlying interspecies transmission, using physiologically relevant in vitro models of the respiratory epithelium from different host species for various (re-)emerging respiratory viruses.