Pr Isabella Eckerle is a medical doctor and clinical virologists with a board certificate in microbiology, virology and infectious disease epidemiology. She is associate professor and cohead of the Geneva Centre for Emerging Viral Disease, a joint institution of the HUG and Unige, and independent research group leader of the group “emerging viruses” affiliated with the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Geneva. Her research interests are emerging zoonotic viruses with a focus on coronaviruses since 2011, at that time in the Institute of Virology at the University Medical Centre of Bonn led by Prof. Christian Drosten. In 2017, she received her Venia legendi (“Habilitation”) at the Medical Faculty of the University Bonn for her work: “Epidemiology and risk assessment of tropical and zoonotic viruses”. Her research work focusses on in vitro studies on MERS-CoV, HCoV-229E and SARS-CoV-2 and the development of novel and innovative cell culture models to better understand emerging viruses in a reservoir host-specific context. Furthermore, she is working on the development and validation of novel diagnostics for emerging viruses. During the Covid.19 pandemic, the laboratory has become a WHO reference laboratory for Covid-19 testing and she was involved in multiple high-level activities as one of the few experts working in coronaviruses before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Her research group has contributed early knowledge on viral shedding, phenotypic assessment of virus variants such as immune escape properties, performance of molecular and rapid diagnostic tests and has collaborated with a large number of colleagues at the HUG, Unige, within Switzerland and internationally. She is part of the High-level European Expert group proposing a roadmap towards stabilization of the COVID-19 pandemic in the European Region, member of the joint ECDC/WHO Euro SARS-CoV-2 Virus Characterization Working Group, scientific advisory board for the WHO BioHub, Spiez Laboratory, Switzerland and expert on the panel on pandemic respiratory diseases at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Germany. She has more than 10 years working in diagnostics of human viruses and has authored and coauthored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles.

ORCID: 0000-0002-4850-7172
PubMed
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