Jacques Godfroid was born in Belgium in 1957. In 1981 he got a DVM degree from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Liège, Belgium. He further got a Master degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Brussels, Belgium and a PhD in Veterinary Science at the University of Namur, Belgium. After having worked for 3 years in West Africa at the International School of Veterinary Medicine in Dakar, Senegal, he went back to Belgium and worked at the Veterinary Institute in Brussels on brucellosis and mycobacterial infections in livestock and wildlife for 14 years. He was elected member of the task force of the European Union on bovine brucellosis (expert) and sheep and goat brucellosis (chairman) from 2000 to 2004.

In 2004, he moved to South Africa where he was appointed Professor in Microbiology to fill the Alexander Forbes Chair in Wildlife Diseases of at the Department of Veterinary Tropical Diseases (DVTD), Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria. He worked mainly with bovine tuberculosis in South African Conservation Areas as well as with brucellosis in terrestrial and marine mammals.

In January 2008 he moved to Norway, where he was appointed Professor in Microbiology and Head of the Section for Arctic Veterinary Medicine at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science in Tromsø. In January 2014, the section has been transferred to UiT - the Arctic University of Norway. Since 2009, he is an extraordinary Professor at the DVTD, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa.

His research interest has always been on zoonotic brucellosis and mycobacterial infections (mainly bovine tuberculosis) at the livestock/wildlife/human interface “from the Arctic to the Antarctic”. Brucellosis is a neglected zoonosis of concern for poor rural communities in Africa as well as for first nation people in the Arctic. His research group has recently developed a brucellosis infection model in fish (Atlantic cod) to study the impact of higher water temperatures on the immune responses of fish again intracellular bacterial pathogens..

He has been supervisor/co-supervisor of 9 PhD and 9MSc students and has collaborated to 11 international funded projects. He is author or co-author of 141 peer reviewed publications in international scientific journals (Hirsch Index ISI Web of Science, August 2019: 33) and wrote 9 chapters on brucellosis in veterinary, wildlife and ecology textbooks. He has participated and presented oral communications to more than 60 international conferences.