Professor Gerald Misinzo
BVM, MSc. Mol. Bio, PhD
SACIDS Foundation for One Health,
Sokoine University of Agriculture
Gerald Misinzo is Professor of Virology at Sokoine University of Agriculture. From 2021 he has also been awarded the Oliver.R. Tambo Africa Research Chair for Viral Epidemics, by the South Africa National Research Foundation (NRF) and Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) in partnership with the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), the Oliver and Adelaide Tambo Foundation and the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
Professor Misinzo is a Leader of the World Bank-designated SACIDS Africa Center of Excellence for Infectious Diseases of Humans and Animals in East and Southern Africa (SACIDS-ACE). In 2018, Professor Misinzo was part of the team engaged with the transformation of the Southern African Center for Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS) into the SACIDS Foundation for One Health, an institute for infectious diseases on behalf of the wider SACIDS partner institutions. When SACIDS revamped its 5-year Strategic Research Programmes in 2022, Professor Misinzo was peer-elected to lead the Genomics and Metagenomics research programme. He has provided genomics expertise to national authorities and defined the molecular epidemiology of peste des petitis ruminants and African swine fever viruses in Tanzania and neighboring countries, and tracked the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is member of the (i) the peste des petits ruminants (PPR) Global Research and Expertise Network (PPR-GREN) for the global eradication PPR, and (ii) the Standing Group of Experts (SGE) on African swine fever of the Global Framework for the Progressive Control of Transboundary Animal Diseases (GF-TADs) for Africa.
