Marion Koopmans (1965), professor of virology at Erasmus MC, is the winner of the Top 100 Most Influential Women 2020 in the health category.
As a member of the national Outbreak Management Team, Koopmans became a corona-BN'er in the Netherlands within a few months. Whereas others had to deal with the outbreak of a highly contagious virus for the first time, the top virologist was also involved in the past in the control of Ebola and the Zikavirus. A world leader in research into the spread of viruses,' the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences calls her. In 2018 she was awarded the NWO Stevin premium of 2.5 million euros, the highest distinction in Dutch science. Koopmans had been working on the emergence of new viral diseases for much longer as a possible result of global warming and intensive livestock farming. And with that the question: aren't there just limits to growth? It wasn't nice to be proved right in this way,' she said in de Volkskrant. At the end of this year it was announced that she had been asked to join a team of international scientists who are going to investigate the origins of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. It is certain that the virus made the first people sick in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2019. But the exact source of the virus has never been clarified.
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