This Lunch Briefing will explore how contemporary conflicts pose unprecedented infectious disease threats. Drawing on his experience as a physician and an anthropologist involved in the response to the Ebola epidemics in West Africa in 2014-2015 and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2019, and in the treatment of the war wounded in Yemen in 2018, Professor Nguyen will examine the changing face of war, the consequences for infectious diseases and their unsuspected global health implications.

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is an HIV and emergency physician, as well as medical anthropologist. As both practitioner and researcher, he is concerned with the relationship between science, politics and practice in global health. He practices emergency medicine at the Jewish General Hospital in Montréal and has worked in acute care medicine in Paris and Mayotte as well as on humanitarian missions with Médecins sans Frontières. He currently holds an ERC Consolidator Grant (Research Chair) on the science and politics of “A World Without AIDS”, and heads a team of anthropologists researching the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. He is professor at the Graduate Institute and Clinical Professor in the École de santé publique de l’Université de Montréal, where he developed the PhD track in Global Health.