Dr Fee Zimmermann

Fee Zimmermann is a veterinarian specialized in outbreak investigations in the One Health context. As a PhD student at Robert Koch Institute, Berlin, she studied the novel Anthrax causing pathogen Bacillus cereus biovar anthracis, which is responsible for deaths in numerous wildlife species in West and Central Africa (Hoffmann & Zimmermann, Nature 2017). During this time, she was part of an interdisciplinary mission to Guinea investigating the origin of the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic. From 2016 to 2022, Fee Zimmermann worked at the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology (IMB) in Munich in the Department of Medical Bio-Reconnaissance & Verification. Here she was responsible for veterinary diagnostics in the rapidly deployable laboratory for the worldwide investigation of unusual disease outbreaks and suspected use of biological weapons. Her responsibilities also included developing field diagnostic assays, as well as leading a project to promote biosecurity in the Sahel. In 2022, Fee Zimmermann assumed leadership of the One Health Surveillance unit at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Greifswald, Germany. Her passion is to bring people from different scientific fields together and to bring state-of-the-art methods into the field.