Barbara Wieland joins ILRI’s Animal Science for Sustainable Productivity team

Barbara Wieland joined the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) on 5 January 2015 as team leader herd health in the Animal Science for Sustainable Productivity (ASSP) program.

Wieland is a Swiss national who graduated as a veterinarian at the University of Bern.

She did her post-doctoral fellowship  in  the UK in a joint position with the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) and the Pirbright Institute where she worked on  African    swine fever in different countries. She later took over some teaching, which led to a lectureship in epidemiology at the RVC. Her research activities addressed surveillance and control of a variety of infectious diseases in different settings  in Europe,  Africa and Asia at herd, country and international level.

Before joining ILRI, Wieland was program manager for animal health at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in Mongolia where she managed a project that worked with the national veterinary service to reform the organization’s structure to set up a national Brucellosis control program and to establish an officially recognized Foot and Mouth disease freedom zone. She also provided veterinary input to other projects dealing with livestock related questions, such as developing a herd health extension component in a major rangeland management project.

Wieland’s overarching research interests included motivating farmers to control disease in their herds, working with smallholders to find ways to improve their livestock productivity, and applying risk assessment and disease modelling techniques to identify the best possible control options to inform stakeholders ranging from smallholders to policymakers.

She will be based in ILRI Ethiopia.