Professor Mark M. Rweyemamu BVSc, PhD, FRCVS mark.rweyemamu@sacids.org

Mark is the Executive Director of the SACIDS One Health Foundation, at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania, established under the SUA Charter and owned by SACIDS founding institutions.

He is a veterinarian and specialist in infectious diseases. He has worked and published on the major infectious diseases of animals, such as rinderpest and foot and mouth disease, that constrain food security and livelihoods. His current research interests focus on the application of One Health approaches to infectious diseases of humans and animals in the endemic settings of Africa.

He is a Visiting Professor at the College for Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania and a Visiting Professor at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. Formerly, he was Head of the Infectious Diseases Programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations at its Headquarters in Rome. From 1994 to 2002, he was the inaugural Head of the FAO special programme on infectious diseases, known as the Emergency Prevention System for Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases (EMPRES), which included the coordination of the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme (GREP). Before moving to FAO Headquarters, he had set up the Pan African Veterinary Vaccine Centre in Addis Ababa, on behalf of FAO and the Organisation of African Unity (now African Union).

He has worked in both governmental and industrial settings. In government: as Virologist and Chief Veterinary Research Officer for the Tanzanian Government and as Head of the Virus Diseases at the then East African Veterinary Research Organisation, Muguga, Kenya. In industry he has been the Director of Veterinary Vaccine Research for Pfizer International, the Head of FMD Vaccine Research for the Wellcome Foundation and the Technical Director for the AVIS College. He has undertaken and published extensively is on the major transboundary animal diseases. His current research interests focus on the application of One Health approaches to studying infectious diseases of humans and animals in the endemic settings of Africa.

He was a member of the EFSA Working Group on assessing the risk of Foot and Mouth Disease introduction into the EU from developing countries, and The Foresight study on Infectious Diseases – Preparing for the Future.  Until July 2017, he had been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of The Pirbright Institute, UK for 7 years. He is a Board of Trustee Member for GALVmed, a public-private partnership that focuses on supporting the development of biologicals and therapeutics for orphan diseases in developing countries and a Member of the Executive Board of CORDS, a one health focused global network that connects organizations for regional disease surveillance. Mark is a member of the One Health Platform International Supervisory Board and a member of the Epicore  (https://epicore.org/#/home)  Advisory Board of EndingPandemics.

SACIDS was formed in January 2008 as a One Health Virtual Centre that links academic and research institutions involved with infectious diseases of humans and animals in Southern Africa and East Africa. The mission of SACIDS is to harness innovation in science and technology to improve Africa’s capacity to detect, identify and monitor infectious diseases of humans, animals and their ecological interactions in order to better manage the epidemic risk posed by them. The SACIDS Theory of Change for global health security focuses on Community Level One Health Security, focusing on: (i) bacterial diseases with a focus on antimicrobial resistance and on Mycobacterial infections; (ii) emerging and vector-borne viral diseases: (iii) diseases of food security importance; (iv) cross-cutting One Health sciences, including disease surveillance, ecoHealth, health and food systems.