PhD Defence Pauline de Best

Written by OneHealthPact on April 17, 2025. Posted in News.

On Wednesday the 14th of May Pauline de Best, one of our 26 PhD’s will defend her PhD thesis titled:‘Knowledge to Practice, translation of scientific outputs to preparedness and response for mosquito-borne viruses‘ at Erasmus MC.

Four key insights of the thesis of Pauline:

🦟“Understanding people’s perceptions and knowledge is key to predicting and improving prevention behaviours for emerging mosquito-borne diseases in Europe. The MosquitoWise questionnaire that we developed and validated, helped us assess this in the Netherlands and Spain.”

🦟 “Preparedness and response for mosquito-borne viruses requires knowledge integration between ‘One Health’ stakeholders, our research showed local and environmental stakeholders are currently insufficiently connected to achieve this.”

🦟 “Multidisciplinary collaborations between institutes enable data and sample sharing across sectors, improving early detection and rapid response opportunities for emerging infectious diseases.”

🦟 “Integrated monitoring and research activities across species provided a more complete outbreak picture for West Nile virus (WNV) in 2020-2023. Sampling activities in birds, mosquitoes and chickens, can help detect early warning signals of WNV, highlighting the value of combining research and routine monitoring to strengthen preparedness.”