Current Position
Team lead a.i Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers team, WHO Health Emergencies Programme.
Background
Anaïs joined WHO in 2011 and joined the Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers in 2017. Prior to joining WHO, she was a policy officer on emerging and re-emerging diseases for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Centre International de Recherche Médicale de Franceville (Gabon). She also worked for the National Council in Ethics on Human Research, Canada and for the French Embassy in Australia.
Experience
She contributed to the response of outbreaks either deployed in countries or remotely by coordinating technical expertise and operations. It includes Ebola disease (West Africa – Guinea, Sierra Leone 2014-2016; Democratic Republic of the Congo 2017-2022, Guinea 2021, Uganda 2022, 2025), MERS-CoV (Republic of Korea 2015), Zika virus (Americas 2016), yellow fever (Angola and DRC 2016), Marburg virus disease (Uganda 2017, Guinea 2021, Ghana 2022, Equatorial Guinea 2023, Tanzania 2023,2025, Rwanda 2024), Lassa fever (with a focus on Nigeria 2018-2025), Nipah virus infection (India, 2018), Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (with a focus on Iraq 2021-2025). Since 2024, she leads the VHF team that besides operational response, provides technical support to at-risk countries, develops and disseminates evidence-based guidance, tools and SOP and contributes to innovation and research activities. Since 2018, she focused on supporting countries to implement VHF survivor care programmes.
Expertise
Her academic interests include VHF control and response, public health, socio-cultural aspects of outbreaks, ethics, philosophy, law and political sciences. She contributed to a number of peer-reviewed articles related to VHF. She wrote her philosophy thesis on “The Declaration of Helsinki, 1964-2009: a barrier against exploitation of human beings in biomedical research?”. She also contributed to the development of a number of WHO guidance documents and training material all related to VHF or other epidemic-prone diseases.
Education
Anaïs holds a master’s degree in political sciences from Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Rennes, and a research master’s degree in Philosophy with a specialization on the ethical aspects of scientific research, from Université Paris XI and the Department of Ethics of the Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris. She also holds a master’s degree in public health with a focus on emerging diseases from the French National School of Public Health (EHESP).
